25-point Website Usability Checklist I've been thinking a lot lately about my process. Experience is a powerful thing, but it's rare that we really sit down and try to map out what we know. A while back, as part of my 5-point Website Clinic, I developed a 25-point website usability checklist - a way to create some method out of my madness and make sure that I don't forget anything critical when I'm working with a new client. Even though it's part of one of my paid offerings, I've decided to share this checklist. A few disclaimers: First, I don't claim this list is comprehensive or unique. Jakob Nielsen has a great 113-point checklist in his book, Homepage Usability, for example. Basic Overview The list is split into 4 roughly equal sections, (I) Accessibility, (II) Identity, (III) Navigation, and (IV) Content. Section I. This section contains not only traditional accessibility issues, but anything that might keep a visitor from being able to access the information on a website. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Section II. 7. 8. 9. 10.
100 Ways To Develop Your Mind This weeks Sunday Siesta has been postponed as I have been working all weekend on this article. It’s my longest article ever at over 4500 words but I think it was worth the time and the effort. I have been resisting doing this post for a while now. I was originally inspired to do this by Dragos Roua who wrote a great post 100 Ways to Live a Better Life and who was inspired by Mike King in this great post 100 Ways To Be A Better Leader who was inspired by Armen Shirvanian: 100 Ways to Show Boldness who was inspired by the maniac who started it all Luciano Passuello and his post Tackling Any Issue With A List Of 100 So here I am with 100 Ways to Develop Your Mind 1. If there’s one thing that will change your thoughts quicker than anything else, it’s facing your fears. 2. A lot of people have difficulty in standing up for themselves. 3. It’s great to be silent for just a little while. 4. 5. 6. 7. Building self discipline is a great way to take control of your mind and your thoughts. 8. 9. 10.
How to Perform the World's Greatest SEO Audit The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Now that tax season is over, it's once again safe to say my favorite A-word... audit! That's right. My name is Steve, and I'm an SEO audit junkie. Like any good junkie, I've read every audit-related article; I've written thousands of lines of audit-related code, and I've performed audits for friends, clients, and pretty much everyone else I know with a website. All of this research and experience has helped me create an insanely thorough SEO audit process. This is designed to be a comprehensive guide for performing a technical SEO audit. SEO Audit Preparation When performing an audit, most people want to dive right into the analysis. A thorough audit requires at least a little planning to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Crawl Before You Walk Before we can diagnose problems with the site, we have to know exactly what we're dealing with. Crawling Tools
100 Incredible Lectures from the World's Top Scientists Posted on Thursday June 18, 2009 by Staff Writers By Sarah Russel Unless you’re enrolled at one of the best online colleges or are an elite member of the science and engineering inner circle, you’re probably left out of most of the exciting research explored by the world’s greatest scientists. But thanks to the Internet and the generosity of many universities and online colleges, you’ve now got access to the cutting edge theories and projects that are changing the world in this list below. If you’re looking for even more amazing lectures, check out our updated list for 2012 with more talks from great minds. General Let the world’s top scientists explain exactly how they do their job when you listen to these lectures. Science and Engineering From materials science to the study of thermodynamics, learn more about the science of engineering here. WTC Lecture – collapse of WTC Buildings: Steven E. Biology and Medicine Chemistry Physics and Astronomy Earth and Environment Technology Science and Business
Twitter Search, Monitoring, & Analytics | Topsy.com With iOS 9, Search lets you look for content from the web, your contacts, apps, nearby places, and more. Powered by Siri, Search offers suggestions and updates results as you type. There are two ways to use Search on your iOS device. Quick Search Drag down from the middle of the Home screen and type what you're looking for. Siri Suggestions Drag right from the Home screen to show Search and get Siri Suggestions. Get Siri Suggestions Siri Suggestions include apps and contacts that you might be interested in. You can use Siri Suggestions with iPhone 5 and later, iPad Pro, iPad (4th generation) and later, iPad mini (2nd generation) and later, and iPod touch (6th generation). Change search settings Go to Settings > General > Spotlight Search. From here, you can turn Siri Suggestions on or off and choose which apps to include in your searches. If you don’t want Siri or Spotlight to suggest nearby locations, go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services. Last Modified:
WeWantToLearn.net | Diploma Studio 10 at Westminster University School of Architecture and the Built Environment About rel="canonical" - Webmaster Tools Help This article describes how you can use canonical URLs to improve link and ranking signals for content available through multiple URL structures or via syndication. In the world of content management and online shopping systems, it's common for the same content to be accessed through multiple URLs. With content syndication, it's also easy for content to be distributed to different URLs and domains entirely. While these systems make it more convenient to develop and distribute content, they cause some challenges when people use search engines to reach your page. Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. To address these issues, we recommend you define a canonical URL for content (or equivalent content) available through multiple URLs. While we encourage you to use any of these methods, none of them are required. Don't use the robots.txt file for canonicalization purposes. Set your preferred domain
Find Your Site's Biggest Technical Flaws in 60 Minutes The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. I've deliberately put myself in some hot water to demonstrate how I would do a technical SEO site audit in 1 hour to look for quick fixes, (and I've actually timed myself just to make it harder). For the pros out there, here's a look into a fellow SEO 's workflow; for the aspiring, here's a base set of checks you can do quickly. I've got some lovely volunteers who have kindly allowed me to audit their sites to show you what can be done in as little as 60 minutes. I'm specifically going to look for crawling, indexing and potential Panda threatening issues like: Architecture (unnecessary redirection, orphaned pages, nofollow) Indexing & Crawling (canonical, noindex, follow, nofollow, redirects, robots.txt, server errors) Duplicate content & On page SEO (repeated text, pagination, parameter based, dupe/missing titles, h1s, etc..) Let's meet our volunteers!
Technical Site Audit Checklist The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. We all want to deliver actionable site audits, but doing the research can be a bit overwhelming if you don’t have a process in place to systematically go through a site. I have created a site audit checklist that will walk you through how to do a site audit. This will work for most sites - in many cases you will need to customize the checklist a bit as some aspects won't be relevant or are unable to be changed. Make sure to look at really important pages (high priority landing pages, pages with a lot of links, pages flagged by crawl tools, or pages that the client has specifically asked for help with) in addition to the template pages. At the end of your audit, don’t write a document that says what’s wrong with the website. Quick Overview Check indexed pages Search for the brand and branded terms Check Google’s cache for key pages Is the content showing up?
Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps The announcement from Yahoo!, Live & Google that they will be supporting a new "canonical url tag" to help webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is, in my opinion, the biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps. It's rare that we cover search engine announcements or "news items" here on SEOmoz, as this blog is devoted more towards tactics than breaking headlines, but this certainly demands attention and requires quick education. To help new and experienced SEOs better understand this tag, I've created the following Q+A (please feel free to print, email & share with developers, webmasters and others who need to quickly ramp up on this issue): How Does it Operate? The tag is part of the HTML header on a web page, the same section you'd find the Title attribute and Meta Description tag. This would tell Yahoo! The Canonical URL tag attribute is similar in many ways to a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective. from Yahoo! p.s.
How Bing Uses CTR in Ranking, and more with Duane Forrester Key Interview Points Let me start you with the big ones up front. This interview had two startling parts to it. These were: The huge weight placed by Bing on user interaction with the search results as a ranking factor. This was fascinating stuff. (Duane): “You need to remember that the search engine sees everything across the web on every layer and as a whole, all at the same time. Interview Transcript Eric Enge: Duane, you are now running the Bing Webmaster program at Microsoft but you were formerly a SEO. Duane Forrester: It's like being a kid in a candy store. Eric Enge: What perspective would you share with SEOs who are still on the outside? Duane Forrester: People need to wrap their heads around the fact that things are changing. It's a way for us to reach out directly to people who control websites and give them all kinds of data that we are willing to share it with them, but they need to take action. My perennial example is it's the eBay school of selling. Duane Forrester: Yes.
Google Sitemap Generator for Windows :: GSiteCrawler Google Analytics Now Tracks Page Load Speed The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Improving site speed is crucially important, Craig at Distilled recently wrote a phenomenal post site speed for dummies which really breaks down WHY improving site speed is a high ROI activity and there was a great Youmoz post recently published which explains HOW to improve page load speed: Optimizing Page Speed - Actionable Tips For SEOs and Web Developers. So understandably when Google Analytics released a new feature that lets you track your pages load speed right within their interface I got crazy excited. This is huge news and I think is another big win for Google pushing people to create faster websites. It was so exciting I really couldn't contain myself when I heard the news - here's my tweet stream: SEOmoz Data And here's the summary stats for the same time period: Why this is important Supporting Resources Yikes, looks like something went wrong.
Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev” Webmaster level: Intermediate to Advanced Much like rel=”canonical” acts a strong hint for duplicate content, you can now use the HTML link elements rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to indicate the relationship between component URLs in a paginated series. Throughout the web, a paginated series of content may take many shapes—it can be an article divided into several component pages, or a product category with items spread across several pages, or a forum thread divided into a sequence of URLs. Now, if you choose to include rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup on the component pages within a series, you’re giving Google a strong hint that you’d like us to: Consolidate indexing properties, such as links, from the component pages/URLs to the series as a whole (i.e., links should not remain dispersed between page-1.html, page-2.html, etc., but be grouped with the sequence).Send users to the most relevant page/URL—typically the first page of the series. Outlining your options A few points to mention: