Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Search In Pics: David Beckham At Google, Google’s Moscow Office & Bing Bar

  In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more…

Have you ever been looking for something but didn’t know where to find it? If that something is online, then your search is over (or just about to begin). The following are 40 advanced and alternative search engines that you can use to find just about anything on the Internet. Use them to follow discussions about your industry, monitor your online reputation, and much more!

General Search

To start off our search adventure, let’s look at some general search engines beyond the top three…

When you run a corporate blog sometimes it’s difficult to come up with interesting topics on a regular basis. In the past I’ve spoken about a few options like creating a series, how to posts and evergreen content. In this article I’d like to tackle another option, blogging to your existing customers, and turning them into return/repeat customers.

If you are selling products or services, chances are you good you probably have 10 – 20 questions your customers ask about how to use products, correctly, better or more effectively…

Controlling who is able to view a post is a simple task once the system is established. Limiting access to certain users has several applications, such as enabling a design studio to distribute artwork to its various clients, or enabling a small school to arrange for homework to be posted online using a cheap and easy solution.

The easiest method to get this system working is to make the recipients of the information “subscribers” (since they need not be able to post) and the distributors of information “authors” (since they should only be able to edit their own posts)…

The US Court of Appeals has ruled that the ECPA, an American law, protects the data of non-USA citizens when their data is stored on servers in the USA.

Suzlon Case

Korean firm, Suzlon Energy Ltd, wanted Microsoft to disclose email

…

Managing a blog with a single author can be time-consuming enough, but adding in multiple authors can exponentially increase the amount of time and effort it takes to manage.

There’s editorial workflow, scheduling, and author management to consider, among other things.

Below are fifteen plugins that can make managing your multi-author blog a lot easier.

They include editorial workflow plugins, scheduling and calendar plugins, and plugins that will benefit your authors or make it easier to communicate with them…

CSS is a beautiful language but it can also be frustrating at times. Certain CSS solutions don’t work on certain browsers (cough Internet Explorer cough) and much of your time can be spent debugging code.

Thankfully there are lots of great CSS snippets available online that fix common problems and design issues. In this article we have listed 30 CSS snippets that we think you will find very useful…

Kicking off our new weekly feature Infographic Friday are our friends at Invesp Consulting, who have compiled some interesting stats and trends on social networking from around the globe.

Why does this matter to ecommerce?

We have become a social networking culture, and this behavior is permeating every area of our lives. Even solo activities like using search engines is becoming socialized, as is shopping, travel, education and even work…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Major Entertainment Groups Accuse Google, Bing Of Directing Users To Illegal Content

  Several major UK entertainment industry groups are accusing Google and Bing of directing searchers to illegal content, and have proposed a “Code of Practice” for how search engines can better encourage consumers to locate legal content on the web…

Apparently 22 member states wasted a huge amount of resources signing the ACTA treaty.
If the current version had in some way been publicized previously they might have had a vague chance of it not causing a multinational revolt across Europe.

The internet population already know how to mobilize… they are SOPA trained. It is easy to slip something past novices who are timid.

The internet is now full of battle veterans confident in their ability to use the skills they have learned and the power of their voice to take on governments…

(Originally posted on the Google+ Platform Blog, cross posted on the Webmaster Central Blog)

When we launched Google+ pages in November, we also released Google+ badges to promote your Google+ presence right on your site. Starting today in developer preview (and soon available to all your users), we’re adding more options for integrating the Google+ badge into your website. You can configure a badge with a width that fits your site design and choose a version that works better on darker sites…

Having content that goes viral can seem like the luck of the draw, but there are a number of steps you can take to improve your odds. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will show you a few things you can do to increase your chances of having that well crafted content spread through the internet like a wildfire. Thanks for watching and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans…

Has an improvement in how Google understands the layout of pages, and understands and classifies different elements found on page had an impact on the titles and snippets that we see in search results? Google may classify queries to decide what to show for those page titles and snippets in search results, but it’s [...]…

In a recent KISSmetrics post entitled Can Product Videos Increase Conversion Rates?, Sherice Jacobs explains why video marketing has finally come of age, and why video is an essential selling tool for any business. One of the more popular video formats these days are explanatory videos, or explainer videos.

Explainer videos are typically 60-90 second videos explaining how your company works and what sets you apart from the competition (your unique selling proposition, or USP)…

Googlers are the types who never really leave the classroom. Guest speakers come to campus to give talks on subjects ranging from fiction to physics. Diverse groups of people work together to understand and solve big problems while groups of Googlers engage in passionate debate in our cafeterias. Given this environment, it’s no surprise how highly we value our external work in education. We have a growing number of successful education programs from primary school through to university, as well as a suite of free and open tools that reach families and classrooms around the world…

I first noticed this yesterday where every search for “storage + city” returned a 3-pack result regardless of the city that was searched (ie storage Toronto, storage Detroit, storage Miami etc etc etc ). This was true even on international searches like storage Paris, Fr.This change apparently occurred about two weeks ago and despite doing a range of searches both logged in and not, the ”storage + city” never returned a Blended Result nor a Pack other than the 3-Pack…

Here is the audio if you’d prefer to listen

Eric: All right, this is Eric over here at SEO Book and today I’m fortunate enough to be joined by Taylor Pratt and Jon Henshaw from Raven SEO Tools, thanks for joining us today guys.

Taylor Pratt: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Jon Henshaw: Yeah, good to see ya!

Eric: All right, so we just have some questions here that I think our readers will appreciate and some of our members have been interested to know about as well…

We’re taking bird’s eye view to a whole new level with the latest version of Google Earth, released today. With Google Earth 6.2, we’re bringing you the most beautiful Google Earth yet, with more seamless imagery and a new search interface. Additionally, we’ve introduced a feature that enables you to share an image from within Google Earth, so you can now simply and easily share your virtual adventures with family and friends on Google+…

For most companies using Google Analytics, reporting on website traffic and performance for a few web properties is a straightforward task. However, if your company manages hundreds of web properties, delivering useful and timely reports can become a significant challenge. For many, the only apparent solution is to manually export analytics data for each web property, then combine and compare that data to answer relevant business questions…

More and more people are falling in love with Valentine’s Day. According to a recent survey by ORC International, Valentine’s Day is now the number two gift giving holiday, right behind Christmas, with 88% of Americans saying they plan on giving a present to their loved ones. This should be great news for businesses, but marketers still have trouble making a love connection with consumers based on charts that look more like dated EKG readings than real-time insights into the heart of the consumer…

UX practitioners, both consultants and in house, sometimes conduct research. Be it usability testing or user research with a generative goal, research requires planning. To make sure product managers, developers, marketers and executives (let’s call them stakeholders) act on UX research results, planning must be crystal clear, collaborative, fast and digestible…

I use Clicky for most of my day-to-day tracking and analysis, only using Google Analytics for the harder analyses. One of the things Clicky can do most wonderfully is track outbound clicks. There’s an issue however when you start routing your affiliate links through a script or on-site redirect. I redirect mine through /out/ here on yoast.com, but not all of the /out/ links need to be tracked. Let me show you how I do track the ones I need to track…

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

The title of this post may come across a little contentious, however I hope by the end of it you understand where I am coming from.

Over the years, I have been privileged enough to work with some large businesses that can afford to throw big budgets at online marketing…

Great websites always seem to combine great design with great code. Since building a website is a pretty simple task you find many people learn HTML and CSS and figure that if they can learn that then they can design any website they want. While technically they can you will often find that there are some key mistakes they make because they don’t wish to take the time to actually learn about design…

Using illustration in web design has become quite trendy these days. People love to see beautifully designed illustration based websites because they stand out from the rest. Not only because of the beautiful illustrative art work and carefully crafted web designs but also because of the perfect balance struck between these two important components.

Today, we want to dig into some creative ways you can work beautiful illustrations into your web design projects…

Not long ago, owning content meant holding a physical item – either you had a disc in hand, or you didn’t. Distribution and storage may have changed dramatically with digital formats, but ownership was still mostly defined by the files you had on your local device. Remember how iTunes reminded you to back up often or risk losing everything? The entitlement or right to consume content has always been rooted in possession of the content itself…

Google’s upcoming privacy policy overhaul addresses two themes:

1. Providing users with more intuitive functionality across Google properties (Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.), and
2. Providing advertisers with more relevant targeting options across Google properties.

The key distinction here is “across Google properties.”
While the most privacy-conscious users may be concerned with the changes, for advertisers there is nothing but upside…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google Revamps Submit Content Page

  Google has updated their URL submission tool page and redesigned their Submit Your Content page. The old URL which was at google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url/ now returns a page not found (404) error…

In October, we made Google Webmaster Tools available to all users in Google Analytics, allowing everyone to surface Google search data in new Search Engine Optimization reports. Starting today, Webmaster Tools will update how they calculate data to make it better match expectations about what a search engine ranking really means.

Based on their research, the answer to the question “What is your rank in search results?” is the first position of a link to your site…