What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability In an effort to differentiate themselves from competitors, many SEO/SEM firms come up with interesting unique selling propositions (USPs). Some SEO/SEM firms emphasize search engine advertising and create quite useful tools to help manage PPC campaigns. Some SEO firms specialize in training, again creating tools that help newbie and experienced SEO professionals optimize existing web pages. For the past two to three years, I have been watching SEO/SEM firms increasingly focus on the user, specifically offering website usability services. Although I laud the evolution of SEO/SEM firms to increasingly focus on the user, I admit that I find some of their conclusions and methodologies rather troubling. Website usability and user-friendly design are certainly great terms to use during the sales process. Rather than give my personal opinion, for this two-part article, I decided to ask some of my well-known colleagues about the usability industry’s opinion of search engine optimization.
The Top 10 Web Applications For Web Designers In 2009 | Web Desi Web Apps are hitting the internet by storm. There are so many around on the internet, running on many different frameworks. I have compiled a list of the top 10 web apps for web designers in 2009. They are ranked descending, so its saving the best until last. Remember that this is WebDesignDev’s opinion about what apps are the top 10. Enjoy the list and let me know what you think of our number one. #10 PX to EM When first making a new CSS stylesheet, you may want to use this tool to set your master text size. #9 Type Tester TypeTester Allows you to test many different fonts against each other. #8 Icon Finder IconFinder ranked number 8 in our list, because its one of the most, or the most helpful icon search engine around. #7 Freckle Freckle is a very neat time tracking web app for your clients and for yourself. #6 Carbon Made CarbonMade lets freelancers show off their work to others. #5 Kuler Adobe Kuler is one of the best color applications around. #4 Mail Chimp #3 Twitter #2 Crazy Egg
Main Page - Social Patterns 10 Firefox Addons for SEO Every Webmaster Should Have | Best Des Firefox, currently in version 3.5.3, is a free yet highly secure search engine from Mozilla. It works on Windows, Linux and Mac and is attested by its many users, including me, to be very user-friendly. What is more interesting about this search engine is that, you can customize it to fit your unique requirements through additional themes and addons. Here, we are going to list the best 10 recommended Firefox SEO addon that you can use with your Firefox browser to make your link building and search engine optimization life simpler when searching, browsing and comparing. If you don’t already have Firefox installed, go grab it! 01- SEO for Firefox SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results. 02 – SEO Quake SEO Quake works almost the same way as the first Firefox SEO addon but with a few twists.
Link Building Has Changed When I first started in SEO, link acquisition was almost always a manual process. I'd search the engines for links that pointed to the competition, find relevant directories and link lists, email relevant sites and beg, borrow or bribe (aka buy advertising) to get a link. I tried reciprocal link building (and did some pretty dumb stuff). Then, as I got more intertwined in the SEO community, I found vendors who built large networks of sites, spammed blogs/forums/guestbooks and ran text link sales operations. I leveraged these services to help clients rank better, almost always with great success. Then I met Matt Cutts, found out more about Google's webspam team, saw penalties and their impact (remember Florida?) Over time, I got smarter. As our clientele and foci changed, we changed again. I figured a visual history might make for a compelling view: Now, link building is changing again. As marketers, we have to evolve or be left behind by those who can better adapt.
SEO & PPC budgets set to double by 2014 Good news for those of us in the SEO industry as new figures from Forrester predict spend will increase steadily over the next 5 years. The chart below shows the predicted increase in spend for the US – it’s fair to assume the UK market will follow the same trends. According to the report interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend in 2014 as marketers shift dollars away from traditional media and toward search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing. This cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies, a publisher awakening, and a new identity for Yahoo! Although the figures are pleasing it’s hard to see how PPC spend can increase much further in developed markets. SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. Via Marketing Pilgrim
Nine Brilliant Websites To Make Your Lives Easier @ SmashingApps Don't Forget to participate in a contest where you can win an amazing e-Commerce template from TemplateMonster. This is one of the very best list of its kind where you can find the simplest online web designer’s web apps that are developed for designers and may be very helpful for you as well when you want to get your work done or just for fun. I hope web designers will like this list, but you can also use them and will love them whether you are an office worker, a manager, a supervisor, a student, a home user, etc. Most of them are not very well-known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features. This is the list of Nine Brilliant Tools To Make Your Lives Easier. You are welcome to share more Useful web apps that will be helpful for web designers and our readers/viewers may like. Notable Are you stuck sharing feedback in text documents and email? Quicken Online Bidsketch Bidsketch is an application that lets you create, track, customize, and design beautiful proposals. Verb
Prioritize Your Social Media Efforts There aren’t enough hours in the day for all the chores that social media puts in front of us. The best writing I’ve found on how to manage your time in social media is via Amber Naslund’s social media time management series. Her efforts in crafting this should become a little ebook that you hand around to everyone. If you skipped over that link, go back, click it to open a new tab/window, and then read it when you’re done with this (or skip mine and read Amber’s- it’s that good). If you’re still with me, here’s what I want to say on the matter. These are written from a marketer’s perspective. Prioritize Your Social Media Efforts First, the Foundations Without the following, there’s no point doing social media and social networking for business. Goals first – If you don’t stick to your goals, there’s no reason to put any time into social media, period. In Order Of Value In Explaining This to The Leadership If you’re a small business, then you get to make all the decisions. Your Take
20 Essential Tweaks and Tips Every Firefox User Should Know | Ma Firefox may be your default browser, but that doesn’t mean you really use it to its full potential. Mozilla’s browser is a big threat to Microsoft not because it’s fast and full of unique features, but because it’s also extremely customizable. Add-ons, style scripts, and hidden preferences let you personalize your Firefox experience to meet your tastes and needs. Sure, you may know about hidden easter eggs like the about:robots page, but we’re going show you the 20 most essential tips, tricks, and tweaks to this super browser. Undo Closed Tabs and Windows This is actually a feature that has been around since before Firefox 3, but we’re often surprised by how many people don’t know about it. Speed Up Browsing Firefox 3.5 is fast at loading pages, but its operational speed can get bogged down by overloading extensions. Set network.http.max-connections to 96 – This sets the total number of HTTP connections Firefox can make to a web server. Use Gmail as Your Default Mail Application
The Secret to Ranking at the Search Engines (that's really no se How I despise those awful, cheesy pages promoting the "secrets" of search engine optimization. How I loathe the slick salesman pictured in fuzzy, 1980's-style photography promising you "the hidden tactics SEOs don't wan't you to know." When most search folks think of the "ultimate secret" in SEO," they probably think about one of these: Keywords in the Title Tag Spiderable Links & Content Anchor Text in Links Links from Quality Websites Those are all good pieces of advice, and important to high rankings, but even the last one (links from quality websites) doesn't convey the most important part of successful ranking campaigns. Simple? Let's walk through a brief history of search engines to see how this happened: No, Hotbot Monster, back in the early days, you really weren't. All of this algorithmic evolution means that sites wishing to rank at the top of the engines must have high quality, naturally given, topically relevant links. Why are these Linkerati so powerful?