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.
Intelligence: What are the most productive ways to spend time on the Internet 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
5 Secrets To Better Employee Engagement Employee engagement--chances are you’ve heard of it before. With today’s war for talent and an entire new generation of digital natives moving into the workplace, employee engagement is a serious concern on the corporate agenda of every major company. So then why does a recent Gallup poll find that only 13% of employees are engaged at work? A strong corporate culture is more indispensable today than ever before. CEOs have always known their brand is a driver of customer acquisition, loyalty, and business growth. Here are five simple ways business leaders can harness their company’s brand to further their employee engagement goals. 1. Aligning company goals with employees and being transparent about yearly plans is a mainstay of every leadership role. For example: Create media for your brand published from the future. The glass manufacturer Corning Inc. launched a video series entitled “A Day Made of Glass” that gives employees a peek into a glass-savvy world. 2. 3. 4. 5.
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:
Academic Earth | Online Courses | Academic Video Lectures IoT_Ecosystem Popular Today in Business: All Popular Articles The Internet of Things is more than just Glasses, smartphones and smartwatches. It’s more than just smart cars and cities and other “things” that are connected or understood by today’s usage models. By 2020, it is predicted that the entire Internet of Things will have a market value of $8.89 trillion. There are many factors that enable this value to be reached. Research firm, IDC, expects a globally installed base of IoT will reach around 212 billion things by the end of 2020, including 30.1 billion installed connected autonomous things. With this many zeros and connected things being predicted by smart people and forward-thinking companies, it’s enough to make a skeptic out of anyone to think that many computing devices and trillions of dollars of market value will be generated in the next six years. It would be easy, maybe even lazy, for us to think the smartphone will be at the heart of the Internet of Things.
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
WeWantToLearn.net | Diploma Studio 10 at Westminster University School of Architecture and the Built Environment 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.