You may have seen the flash content slider over at MLB, Louis Lazaris shared a very nice tutorial on recreating this content slider using jQuery and CSS3.
This CSS3 content slider supports:
- Auto-hide thumbnails
- Navigation controls to view specific slide along-with next / previous button controls
GoingUp! is a combination of Free Web Analytics & SEO Tools. GoingUp! integrates popular analytics & SEO tools in one easy-to-use interface to see how your website is performing from all points-of-view. With an AJAX-rich interface, you can check your website’s performance and rank.
Going-Up’s modern, Web 2.0 Dashboard allows you to manage multiple sites and see at-a-glance stats of your entire network of sites.
Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness! That’s where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.
For optimizing a website in means of SEO, you may have to deal with many manual tasks like submiting to search engines, checking the keyword density of pages, searching for any missing alt tags & more.
Web CEO, one of the most popular softwares in this area, lets you manage the SEO-side of unlimited number of websites with a very informative interface.
Web CEO comes with a lots of featured free edition & much more featured paid editions.
I’ve been using Web CEO for a long time and one of the best features of it is the advices after analyzing pages. Rather than just telling the problems, Web CEO informs you about how to solve them in a detailed way.
Some Web CEO features:
- Submit websites to search engines
- Analyze a website’s position in search engines for any keyword
- Keyword Mining from competitor’s pages
- Advice for General Search Engine Compliance
- Analyzing Link Popularity (Number of Links to Your Website)
- Analyzing Backward Links vs. Competition
- Reporting
Website: http://www.webceo.com
SEO Quake
SEO Quake is another Firefox add-on that you’ll probably want to download. With SEO Quake you can optimize your site by gaining tons of information about other pages that are ranking well.
After downloading and installing the add-on, run a Google search for the primary search phrase that you are targeting. Under each of the listings you’ll see addition information provided by SEO Quake, such as the PR and Alexa ranking of the page, plus the number of pages indexed from that URL and the number of inbound links (you can customize a lot of this data to meet your needs).
If you are looking to gain new inbound links to your site, you can find one of your competitors that has a high number of inbound links (you’ll probably want to use the data coming from Yahoo for this) and click on that number, which will open up the page displaying all of those inbound links. This will give you a list of sites that may be interested in also linking to you.
SEO Quake also has plenty of options, including the ability to save data in a CSV file. One thing to be aware of is that SEO Quake will slow down your load time when you’re surfing, but you can easily de-activate it when it is not in use.
Download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036
SEO for Firefox
As Most of you are aware, SEO for Firefox is one of the hottest things in SEO at this moment. Using this time saving tool, you can get any amount of information gleamed from the data made from the SEO toolbar, it’s a highly recommended Firefox extension for anyone in search marketing (and according to the site, over 50,000 people are using it).
What was once considered as impossible is now a very real probability. Yes, your website can be indexed in Google’s database within a week’s time after it goes live! How are you supposed to do this?
Google said that you should not bother to submit your website to them. They will find your website, and once they do, they’ll index your web pages. The reason behind this is quite simple. Google uses links to hop from one website to another. If they arrive at a page that is unfamiliar to their database, they will index it… and thus is the method by which your very own website can be a part of their database.
The problem is, there are literally billions of web pages out there. Even with the mechanical precision by which it operates, it will take weeks, if not months, before Google can stumble upon your website for proper indexing. The trick is in expediting this process. And how are you supposed to do that?
Let’s put it this way. If only one website is linking to yours, Google has to crawl through that site before it could discover yours. 1 in 1,000,000,000 is not a favorable ratio. But what if you have 1,000 websites linking to yours? Alas! Your website would have better chances of getting indexed fast!
An effective web design is one in which your users are able to find information quickly and in a logical fashion.
Do they visit the content you want them to visit? Are they looking in the right places of your web page? Are you able to keep your user’s attention, or do they just leave quickly?
It’s not just about the content either. If your design loads slowly – or if moving from one section to another takes a long time – it affects the user’s experience.
These things can be the make-or-break factors between a user clicking on a link to find more information, or the back button to find it elsewhere.
Some things to consider:
- Are important information being seen by the user?
- Are the navigation and action items intuitive?
- Is the user being directed to sections in a logical manner?
- Does the web page load quickly enough to not turn away the user?
If you’re interested in analyzing and optimizing your page layout – here’s some extremely useful tools that you can use to help.
1. ClickHeat
ClickHeat is an open source visual tool for showing “hot” and “cold” zones of a web page. It allows you to see which spots users click on most, and which spots are being ignored.
It’s very easy to implement on your website, you only have to include an external JavaScript file.
Download: Clickheat on SourceForge.net.
2. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg offers a myriad of analytical tools to help you visualize what visitors are doing.
Features include: Confetti - allowing you to see what people are clicking on based on certain factors such as their operating system and where they came from, Overlay – providing you with tons of data about particular links, and Report sharing – enabling you to share the data with team members and clients.
The free version only allows 4 pages to be tracked – so use your top landing pages to get the most data.
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