You don’t want to put a lot of time and money into your site only to lose your visitors.

Here’s a great source for usability - Prioritizing Web Usability.

Custom Print Council

The Custom Publishing Council (CPC) is the leading association for the custom publishing industry in the United States, and is focused on promoting the growth and vitality of this dynamic marketing discipline.

Marketers across the country, the media and other interested constituencies rely on the Custom Publishing Council as the authoritative source of industry news, data and trends, information on the effectiveness of custom publishing, and referrals to the top custom publishers in North America.

Canonical issues: www vs. non-www.

If you work hands on your server with htaccess file and such this could be useful. If you are looking to redirect yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com in an SEO friendly way, this is helpful.

There is some debate about it. This sheds some light on canonical issues

301 redirect an entire site.

I used a bit of code on the above page to redirect blog.nickfromneptune.com to www.nickfromneptune.com. Of course this was after migrating the contents of the blog domain to the main domain.

I think the blog domain has served it’s purpose. Everything is going to live on the proper domain now. At least for the time being.

The content from the page I mentioned above that was useful for my 301 redirect purposes is below.

Redirecting entire sites with 301

The 301 directive is quite powerful. You can redirect not just single files but entire sites, for example when changing domain names e.g.

redirect 301 / http://www.you.com/

The first “/” indicates that everything from the top level of the site down should be redirected. As long as you are using the same paths and filenames, then this option is a very simple way to perform site redirection in the situation where you have only changed your domain name.

If the site redirection doesn’t work for you, check to ensure you have the trailing “/” on the destination URL. You may also like to try some of the other suggestions in our basic tutorial on the apache mod_rewrite module.

SEO tools pop up all over the place. Here is one I’m trying out recently. So far, so good.

Competition Dominator

With the increase in competition daily on the internet - you need all the help you can get. Competition Dominator is the world’s first desktop based competition analysis tool that will scope and map your markets and all the competitors in them on the three major search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN.

It works with keyword lists generated from a variety of possible sources, including Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker and Keywords Analyzer. You can import any text file of keywords from any source you choose.

Competition Dominator will then go to work and tell you exactly who you need to worry about and who to leave alone - it will even tell you which keywords your competitors are using on the pay per click search engines at AdWords, Yahoo and MSN and graph their ad performance for all their ads and keywords over time.

Here’s a Google site map for WordPress. It looks like you can update your sitemap with a single click.

Here’s another link for many other Google sitemap related items.

Find if your site has any dead links.

A good source for how to do a 301 redirect.

What is 301 redirect?

301 redirect is the best method to preserve your current
search engine rankings when redirecting web pages or a web
site. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”.
After the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is
noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new
location or file name. You implement the 301 redirect by
creating a .htaccess file.

How soon until mobile search becomes more significant to designers?

See what your site looks like in on a cell phone or three.

This is what happens when you finish grad school and there is no surf in New Jersey. A tragic surfing claymation is born.