The country selector. It’s there when you create an account for a new Web service, check out of an e-commerce store or sign up for a conference. The normal design? A drop-down list with all of the available countries.
However, when conducting a large session of user testing on check-out usability (which we wrote about here on Smashing Magazine back in April 2011), we consistently found usability issues with the massive country selector drop-downs…
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.
Howdy, Mozzers. This is Russ Jones (@rjonesx) from Virante, Inc. I recently spoke at the Search Exchange conference in Charlotte, NC on the topic of programmatic, automated SEO solutions and realized that it could probably be more valuable in front of a larger audience…
For many online retailers, the holiday email season is already underway. But it’s not to late to check if your holiday emails are naughty or nice. Before you hit send, make sure you’re maximizing your opportunity by answering the following questions:
1. Do all your holiday emails have a clear call to action?
“Seasons Greetings” may give customers the warm fuzzies, but unless there’s some action for your recipient to take, you send your email in vain…
Welcome to aimClear’s stunning new home, 9 West Superior Street. Located at the crossroads of Duluth, Minnesota, Superior Street and Lake Avenue in the very heart of our city. Read on for a look at the historical background of our new digs, and a sneak peek inside…
From 1884 until 1932, this magnificent Romanesque style building, designed by renowned architects Oliver Traphagen and George Wirth, was home to the legendary Silverstein & Bondy Department Store…
The following is a sponsored post for Karsa Monitor.
As you probably know, competitive price monitoring is vital for i-retailers nowadays. It is quite hard to be successful in e-commerce without being familiar with your competitors behaviour. I am saying “behaviour” on purpose, because you need to know more than just your competitors product prices, the issues are more complex than that…
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…
Well kids, it’s that time of year again! When hardcore search rockstars and beloved tech nerds from every walk of the online marketing industry flock to America’s playground and gear up for a week of keynotes, in-depth sessions, discussion panels, mad-crazy networking events, and a little R&R along the Strip. Yes, it’s time for a true obligatory-must-attend conference: PubCon Vegas, baby…
For Halloween this year I asked people on Google+ what I should be for Halloween, and someone suggested going as the blackhat stick man from xkcd. You know, this guy:
That sounded like a good challenge. I finished the costume and taped a video, but unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to get the video to the quality level that I wanted. (I’m in the middle of trimming the video, but if the video says that it’s 2:19 long, you can skip about 20 seconds in…
I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.
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…
Greetings, guys and ghouls. Halloween is just around the corner, and I don’t know about you, but here at aimClear we love a good scare. Any seasoned search marketer will tell you that in our industry, there’s blood-curdling terrors and freak-shows to behold… if you know where to look. From downright dreadful habits of search conference speakers to positively hair-raising social media faux pas, the petrifying threat of intra-community bloodshed… sometimes it’s like we’re one bucket of pig’s blood short of a B-rated horror flick…
Over the past decade, I’ve been part of many reviews of websites, both in-person, as a consultant (prior to 2009) and at many events. I’ve found that much of the time, the reviews themselves lack structure (particularly those that happen "on the fly" during a conference panel or informal sit-down). Thankfully, during my recent face-off with Distilled’s Will Critchlow in London, I had an excuse to noodle on that and work up some ideas…
This time last year, we were tailgating with the USC marching band at the EDUCAUSE conference—an annual gathering of the higher-education IT community. Last week, with more than 15 million people now actively using Google Apps for Education, we ventured to Philadelphia for a few jam-packed days at EDUCAUSE 2011. Our time in the city of brotherly love included a booth with 30+ Googlers and a woodsy backdrop for our fireside chat series; meeting with hundreds of CIOs from universities using and considering Google Apps for Education; a party at the Academy of Natural Sciences; and of course liberty and the lifelong pursuit of the Philly cheesesteak…
Today I was speaking about link-building at the Searchlove conference. This conference has rapidly become the best SEO conference in the calendar and the quality of tips and information is always excellent. This year was even better than last year.
My slides from the event are below – any questions email me patrick @branded3.com. Please note that these slides have been edited slightly…
The following is a sponsored post for SEO Peace.
For today’s post we’re going to be talking to Sunita Biddu of SEO Peace , Hi Sunita for my readers who don’t know you can you tell us a little about yourself and your company.
Glad to be talking to you, Michael. Back in 2003 when I finished my post graduation with Biotechnology, I wasn’t even closer to the thoughts of this SEO industry…
I made a Portal turret for my Halloween pumpkin! I was trying to think of things to carve: vampire Android? R2-D2? Zoidberg? Then I thought: I could do a character from Portal 2! I was going to carve something like GLaDOS or Wheatley, but then I realized that a portal turret would be perfect:
To make the glowing red eye, I punched a small hole in the pumpkin, taped an LED to a battery, and pushed the LED from the center of the pumpkin through the small hole…
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…
When it comes to the often-overlooked art of internal website optimization, too many people stick with the standard methods such as being mindful of keyword use within content and relevant tags.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with those techniques; they certainly won’t hurt unless you overdo them. However, there are yet other ways to improve your website’s internal optimization that take nearly no maintenance or additional thought, and which can provide a nice boost to your SERP rankings over a couple of weeks…
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
In the early 1900′s, department store merchant John Wanamaker didn’t have access to web analytics to be able to calculate an ROI on various marketing activities like we do today. While data-driven decisions are better than none, data can be dangerous.
At an ecommerce conference last week, one of the speakers gave some data analysis advice that I’ve heard over and over from countless sources…
A year and a half ago, we released completely new document, spreadsheet and drawing editors. Google Docs has been picking up speed ever since with more than 60 new features and millions of new users. Today we’re rounding out the suite by previewing a new version of presentations with faster collaboration and more features.
A collaborative approach
Presentations are made to be shared—whether it’s presenting your thesis to your professors or inspiring colleagues at a conference…
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…
We’re rolling out the welcome wagon to two of our newest employees, Erica Sendros and Megan Lichty. These crazy-talented ladies have joined our ranks of online marketers as associate account managers. We hope you’ll join us in extending them a warm welcome, and allow us to introduce them to you.Those of you on the conference scene may recognize Erica Sendros from her live coverage of SES San Francisco…
We love traveling the globe to speak at hallmark online marketing conferences, but sometime’s there’s nothing like kickin’ it in your own backyard with industry pals from around the world. For us, that means a trip down to the Twin Cities for MIMA Summit 2011, the largest annual marketing and technology conference in the Midwest.
This year marks the 10th Anniversary of MIMA, and with a wealth of engaging tracks from content and storytelling to UX and Design, it’s sure to be an awesome event…
The following is a sponsored post for SerpIQ.
For today’s post we’re going to be talking to Pasha Stewart and Darrin Demchuk of SerpIQ, Hi Pasha and Darrin, for my readers who don’t know you can you tell us a little about yourselves and experience in the world of internet marketing.
Pasha: Thanks Michael, I’ve been doing internet marketing since 2004, SEO since 2005…
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…
FITC is hosting a conference called Screens 2011 dedicated to mobile development. The event takes place in Toronto between Nov 14-15th, 2011. It is a 2 full day of presentations covering iOS, Android, HTML5 (jQuery Mobile, HP/WebOS, AIR, FLEX, Windows Phone) as well as marketing and business of apps. I have two conference tickets to [...]
Advertise here with BSA
…
Via Eric Ward’s newsletter, I found out that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently testified (PDF) before Congress about claims that Google is anti-competitive. Amongst his remarks are some truly amusing statements for anyone that knows Google and/or the current state of the web. Other things were less amusing and more amazing in what they revealed.
Some of my favourite selections, and their translations:
Eric: “Microsoft’s Bing launched in June 2009 and has grown so rapidly that some commentators have speculated that it could overtake Google as early as 2012…
Topics:
announcementsjQuerymobilepresentationsThemeRoller
At this fall’s jQuery Conference in Boston, MA, Filament Group’s Todd Parker and Scott Jehl presented the jQuery Mobile Framework keynote. The session covered the current state of the project, an overview of the releases since the first alpha last fall, direction for how best to make use of the framework today, and some upcoming tools such as a new ThemeRoller (video preview), and download builder…
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…
I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.
Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.
BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the internet’s oldest directory.
Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed!
Directory Journal – Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
Link Building – Backlink Build offers 45 PR5+ Backlinks for $295…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com
