1. Invest In General Directories:
   Directory links are authority links, and can be foundational to a link building campaign. Submit to the following directories in order of importance: DMOZ, free; Yahoo Directory, $299 annually; Best of the Web, $99.95 annually; Business.com, $299 annually; GoGuides, $69.95; and JoeAnt, $39.99. Though many people have minimized the value of directories they are still solid links from authority sites.
2. Submit to Niche Directories:
   Niche directories are a source of authority links that are more tailored to your niche, and thus making them very valuable links. Try search “your keyword phrase directory” and see whats available in your niche.
3. Create Social Media Profiles:
   Social media profiles can quickly show up in SERPs for your keywords making them very valuable. While most social media site do not pass on page rank they are nevertheless valuable marketing tools to drive visitors to your site.
4. SERP Link Building:
   Pages that rank well for specific keywords are some of the most important links you can get. Search your keyword phrases and look for ways to get a link. Some things to consider do they have a submission process, can you guest blog for them, comment on their site, ask them for a link.
5. Write Authority Articles and Market Them:
   Using the Google Keyword Tool research what people are looking for in your area of expertise then write an authority article on that subject. Next look for places to submit the article to. Consider Squidoo, Ezinearticles.com, articlesbase.com, and helium.com. Don’t forget to broadcast the article to all your followers in the social media realm.
6. Submit Press Releases
   Submitting press releases remains one of the quickest ways to gain links quickly. Writing a successful press release requires some planning. Don’t just write about your product or service, but what about your product, or service, or you is newsworthy. Find a newsworthy angle make sure it is polished, spellchecked, etc, and submit it to services like: PRWeb, BusinessWire or PRleap.com.
7. Submit to Dofollow Social Bookmarking Sites
   There are still alot of social bookmarking sites that provide dofollow links. We at the Masters use http://socialmarker.com so sign up for all the services on it, and it allows you to submit your posts one after another.
8. Become a Guest Blogger:
   Looking for high PR links craft some well written post, and contact high traffic, high PR blogs in your niche, and pitch your post. This will do two things first it will gain you visibility on an authority site giving you street credit, and traffic. Secondly it will gain you links on high PR blogs in your niche.
9. Share Your Insights Through Commenting:
   Share insightful comments is useful on a variety of levels. First of all if its a dofollow comment you will get a good link from that site. In addition to that though a well worded comment can build relationships with other bloggers, and drive traffic to your site which will eventually lead to more links.
10. Contribute Something Useful
    Contribute something useful to the internet community, and they will bless you with links. Write a Joomla or WordPress plugin and submit it to the plugin directories. Write an extremely useful boilerplate template for instance a sample seo proposal and give it away to sites that have templates. Design a free template for WordPress or other platforms, and put your link in the footer.

While it is difficult to get multiple first page results for your organization you can give potential visitors multiple ways to find your site by leveraging these directories SEO abilities.

1. Search Engine Locals- Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have local services to help consumers find the regional xyz store, organization, etc. These results frequently show up first in SERP’s so register an information rich profile at each service, and dominate.

2. Yellowpages.com- Yellow page listings are as plentiful as those infamous yellow books themselves.

3. LinkedIn- Linked in is a social network for business networking and Linkedin profiles also frequently shows up in regional search results.

4. Merchant Circle- Merchant Circle is a directory of local businesses, and their profiles are quickly indexed, and often rank quite well.

5. Service Magic- Servicemagic.com is a paid directory of service industry professionals. While it does cost money they can get you ranked well in local searches.

6. Yelp.com- Yelp.com is a local business directory that allows local people to review area businesses. These pages do very well in regional SEO.

7. Superpages.com- Superpages.com is another yellowpages type services that ranks well particularly in Bing and Yahoo.

8. Kudzu.com- Kudzu.com is a directory for businesses that specializes in regional search their basic profile is free.

9. CitySearch.com- Citysearch is a city by city overview of businesses, events, etc. Does cost money but great SEO results.

10. Local.com- Local.com is a small business directory that ranks well in SERP’s.

Bonus- Localtype.com has an extensive listing of local directories check it out here.

While directories are not as beneficial as they used to be they are still a good foundation for link building campaigns. Below is list of the top 10 SEO friendly directories that pass on PageRank to your site, thereby increasing your PR.

1. Librarians’ Internet Index (PR9)- A very high-quality free link, but very difficult to get. Websites must go through a thorough review and must contain alot of informative content.

2. DMOZ (PR8)- The Open Directory Project is a great authority link and its free. Unfortunately it can take up to a year to be indexed depending on the editor for the category you are submitting to. Don’t keep resubmitting your site, it only puts you at the end of the line.

3. Yahoo Directory (PR8)- Another great authority link if your site is not commercial inclusion is free but can be slow. Commercial listings are $299 a year.

4. Business.com (PR7)- Great link for business sites submission cost $299 a year make sure to get the standard listing not the PPC which is a redirected link.

5. Best of the Web (PR7)- Free link for non-commercial sites. Otherwise its $69.95 a year or $199.95 for a permanent link. Many of BOTW’s category pages have high Google Page Rank without that many outgoing links making this a solid backlink.

6. JoeAnt.com (PR6)- $39.99 one-time fee, free for editors guaranteed review within two business days.

7. The Hot VS. Not Directory (PR6)- High Page rank directory $60 for a year $200 for a permanent link.

8. Directory World (PR5)- Professional web directory for 24.95 annually.

9. GoGuides (PR5)- Websites are instantly included $69.95 per site.

10. Rubber Stamped (PR4)- Solid link from an up and coming directory $29.95 one time review fee.

With guest posting you can achieve large amounts of traffic, and links, without too much effort. But the question is, how can you maximize the great potential of guest posting, I’ve written up a list of guidelines, hopefully these can guide you in the process.

1. Guest post on the right Blogs
This is an essential guideline. If your blog is about hot dogs and sausages, don’t write on an animal lovers site. Find sites similar to yours, that have a similar audience. If you don’t know what sites those are, then ask your readers what other blogs they read. For me, in the SEO blog niche, there are dozens of great sites at my disposal. So I could not write a post a month that will generate a steady stream of traffic for a couple years. By guest posting on like minded blogs, and for like minded readers, your chances of having them like your site are greatly increased. I’ve found some of my favorite sites through guest posts that their owners did, so it definitely works. And keep in mind, shoot for the highest. Try and write on the most popular site you can, what’s the worst that could happen? You can always try for lower sites, but if you aim high, then maybe you’ll get a lucky break with a popular blog, and this will help the article be a lot more successful. If they reject your article, you can always send it to another blogger.

2. Make it an Original Post
If you are going to write a guest post, make it a new post. This is a huge chance for your site, especially if you’re doing it on a popular site. Not only are you advertising your site to all of that site’s readers, you are also advertising to that blog’s author. If they like it, then they will probably add links to your posts in the future. I’ve seen a lot of guest posts, that people already wrote on their blogs, and then reposted on another persons site. That is a very bad thing to do for a few reasons, mainly because you are cheating that blog owner, and also you are hurting both of your blogs. This is considered duplicate content, and so both of your sites will be penalized. That’s not really fair to hurt the nice guy who gave you the opportunity of writing on his site, is it? No, so be fair to him and to his readers, write a new post. *For most bloggers this is a requirement anyway.*

3. Make it a Quality Post
Take the time to make it a good article. Don’t write about the first thing that pops in your head, but take a couple days formulating your ideas and putting it together. Remember, this is a big signpost pointing back to your site, so make it as big, and cool, informational, and enticing as you can. The goal is to get people to click through to your site, so make them want to click through. It only helps them. Write a good semi-long post. Two to three paragraphs are not long enough for a guest post.

4. Make it Enticing
There are several tricks that will help your post be noticed. First, use pictures. Everybody loves when they can see what you’re talking about. Second, use bold and italicized for the important points, because these really help them stand out. Third, use lists and numbers. Make a title like, Top Three ways to… or 25 tips on… Everybody likes these types of articles (mostly because they are lazy). And finally, be as bulleted as you can. Nobody wants to read a five page blog post that should have really been a one page article. But if you can write a five page article that is to the point, and that tells people what they need to hear, then you have a winner article.

5. Guest post a lot!
Whether you are starting a new blog, or have been running one for a while, set up guest posts opportunities. Start emailing the bloggers you read, ask them if they are open to it. Most likely they will be willing, but only if you give them a really good article. Set it up so that you can do one guest post a week. Commenting is considered one of the top ways to grow a site organically. I believe that Guest posting can be just as good, if not better. It’s faster, and more people will see it and it will be on there forever – all bonuses that comments don’t give. Now don’t get me wrong, they are both great strategies, so hopefully you will be able to implement both of them.

6. Give them a reason to come back to your site
I would not recommend putting a link back to your site if you don’t already have great content on your site for those who click through to read once they get there. If I read a pretty awesome guest post, I would assume that the author was a pretty decent writer, and probably has articles that are just as good on his own site. If I get there and find our differently, I will be very disappointed. And so will your readers if you don’t have anything to give them.

7. Link to the Guest Post from Your Blog
If a blogger is going to be nice enough to let you write on his blog, then at least give the guy a link. Write a short post about how you just wrote a guest post on some site, and tell your readers to check it out. This helps both you and the other blogger our, because the blogger gets some visits on his site, and you get more publicity for your article. Also, if it was a good, successful article that helps the blogger out, then most likely he’ll be open to letting you guest post again.

8. Put Keywords in the Post
Find out what the keywords are for the blog your writing on, and add them subtly in your post. However, don’t keyword spam! This is just another way to make you more valued as a guest poster. You help everybody out, and everybody likes that. Don’t just rave about how good your site is, nobody likes that. If you help everybody out, then everybody will like you better.

9. Add a Paragraph at the end Thanking the Blog Owner
Swallow your pride, and write a few sentences thanking the owner for letting you post. Don’t over do it, but thank him in a few words. If you don’t want do this in the actual post, maybe you can do it on your blog. In that post I told you about earlier. The one that you were supposed to write to link to your guest post. C’mon, you didn’t forget already, did you?

10. Set up your Site in Preparation
Most likely, you will receive a sudden flood of traffic. So make sure you have two things in place. First, set up a big RSS subscribe button, so that you’ll get more readers from this increased traffic. Second, make sure you have one of your top posts as the one they read. The best strategy, is probably to write a brand new post the day your guest post gets put up. That way you have fresh content for everybody. Make sure you have a very informational post, because that is going to be your way to make the new readers stay. You have one chance to get them to come back, don’t blow it!

Bonus! Consider setting up WP Super Cache if you guest blogged on a very popular site, because you will see a spike in traffic. The last thing you want just when you are seeing a rapid influx of traffic is for your server to go down due to bandwidth limitations or anything like that.

So there you have it.

Community Discussion

Did we miss anything? What are your guidelines for guest posting? Have you ever guest posted? Sound off in the comments with any and all experience. (or lack thereof )

These are 10 of the top SEO tools the we use everyday on clients websites to get maximum results from our search engine marketing campaigns.

1. Compete Site Analytics- Compete gives you accurate data of monthly unique visitors to a website. This is extremely useful for competitive analysis of competitors, and also sizing up a prospective clients site for an SEO proposal. We have found it to be very accurate when we compare with Google analytics, or AWstats.

2. Google analytics- Every serious SEO or webmaster needs to be running Google free analytics software on their sites. The point of SEO is not rankings, or page rank its visitors! Stop guessing and start making statistically informed SEO decisions so that your effort can go into the things that are paying off.

3. SEOQuake Toolbar- This Firefox plugin is one of my favorite SEO tools at a glance I can see a site Page Rank, backlinks, Alexa ranking, domain age, and keyword density. The best part is it’s free.

4. Multiple Datacenter Search- Honestly Google does so much in the way of personalized search, geolocation, etc. that it can be hard to get the straight dope on where your ranking. The multiple datacenter search will show you search results for multiple google data centers so you can get a better feel for your rankings.

5. Wordtracker Firefox Plugin- If your like me you love Firefox for all the great extensions! One such extension is the Wordtracker Firefox Plugin you can see search volumes for search phrases on the fly without leaving your current page. Not as accurate as Google but great for naming Blog posts and making quick keyword decisions.

6. Google Keywords- The best overall free keyword research tool in my opinion. You can quickly be given hundreds of keyword suggesstions by entering keyword phrases, or by entering yours or competitors web address. This tool will show you monthly search volumes for each key word or phrase, and all suggested keywords can be exported to csv.

7. 301 Redirect Checker- 301 are useful for two reasons first so that search engines don’t see http://yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com as two sites. Also if a page moves the page rank can be reassigned to the new page through a 301 redirect. Make sure 301 redirects are set up correctly with this tool.

8. Yahoo Siteexplorer- Google notoriously under reports backlinks, and only gives you a sampling. With site explorer you can see what backlinks you have, and even better you can see competitors backlinks, and use those sites in your link building efforts. The best part is that it will export to a tab separated values file that can used in Excel.

9. XML Sitemap Generator- XML sitemaps are important to get your pages quickly indexed in a few minutes this tool will index your site up to 500 pages, and generate an xml sitemap. Be sure and sign up with Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center to tell these services the location of your sitemap.

10. Google Position Checker- With this tool you can see what position you rank in Google for a particular keyword up to the first 1,000 results.

Bonus! Backlink Builder- This tool searches your submitted keywords for sites that accept links directories etc.

Many of us have found Joomla to be one of the best options for building websites quickly and easily for a variety of industries. This is because it’s ease of use, has many plugins, and its scalability has earned great applause. Unfortunately, Joomla is a little backward SEO wise, and makes it difficult for your content to rank well. Never fear, we have listed here 10 great plugins we have used on clients sites and seen great results. So make 2010 a year of SEO zen with your Joomla website. Please keep in mind that these plugins are somewhat exclusive, while some can be combined, others cannot. Proceed with caution.

1. RS SEO- This great component does a number of invaluable SEO tasks including: crawl your website and index all the pages, modify the Meta Keywords, Meta description and Title on the fly, grade each page for SEO effectiveness, create Google and Yahoo! sitemaps, constantly monitor your competitors and compare them to you, monitor important keyword positions, and set permanent redirects for old links.

2. iJoomla SEO- Another great full featured component with a plethora of SEO features including: position of keywords in Google, use of h1, h2, h3 tags instead of contentheading tag, individual metatag control per page, automatic linking based on keyword, 301 redirects, ability to add nofollows to links (or leave dofollow, if you prefer), and image seo optimization.

3. SEF Service Map 2 (with PingBack system)- This component creates a complete XML sitemap of your site which it then uses to actively report (ping) new or modified items to Google, Yahoo, and other services. (Pinging is one of the tools that makes WordPress so AWESOME for SEO!) Thanks to that, indexing robots (spiders) will visit your site much more often and the site can index itself without your further activity. Make sure to sign up with Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center to tell these services the location of your sitemap.

4. sh404SEF This component adds search engine friendly url’s to Joomla but is much more robust than the built in SEF. sh404SEF lets you create unlimited short URLs for any page, remove duplicate URLs, customize the page title and page description, automatically emphasize all your article titles with “Heading tags,” spam and hacker management, and IP blocking. It also works with or without .htaccess support.

5. Joomla 1.5 SEO Patch- This patch solves the issues in regards of the settings within the html head section of your Joomla pages. The patch allows you to gain fully control over the META and title settings in the http header settings in Joomla 1.5 generated pages.

6. SEO Canonicalisation Plugin- SEO Canonicalisation is a system plugin for Joomla! 1.5 that enables site ‘canonicalisation’, which means that when a user hits your site from another domain than your preferred (for example, www.website.com instead of website.com), Joomla! will redirect the user to the appropriate hostname. Previously this would have to be accomplished by adding a .htaccess rewrite rule to handle the redirect.

7. SEOSimple- This simple Joomla 1.5 plugin takes the starting chunk of text from the page content and applies that as the value for the meta description tag in the page head. Search engines often use a Web page’s meta description in the SERPs, and as such it is important that these meta descriptions have relevant text related to the page content.

8. J!Redirect301- This extension works just as it sounds. The plugin 301 redirects your domains to one domain so that only one version of your site is indexed and also can be used to redirect individual pages to a new a page so search engine results are not lost.

9. Website Name- This Joomla 1.5 plugin displays the Website name in the page title. This is useful for SEO purposes, because it shows relationship between pages of your site. You can choose to display it before or after the Content Title.

10. GD SEO Verify- This nifty little plugin makes verifying your sites at Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center much easier on the backend of Joomla.

Of course, there are others available, but as the title suggests, these are the top. What plugins do you use? Do you see some that we left off the list? Sound off below.

Please take note, some SEO plugins can conflict and give you duplicate information, which is not good. So please, pick your favorites and stick with them. (Those that WILL conflict will be noted in their description.)

We all know that “Content is King,” but if your content can’t be found, it won’t be a help to anyone. But be honest with yourself, do you really want to spend hours on end on SEO? Don’t worry – you won’t have to if just let these plugins go to work for you while you focus on the main thing, and that’s content.

1. The Thesis Theme- Yah, yah, yah I know it’s not a plugin, but if your serious about SEO you’ll look into the Thesis Theme. The Masters have run head to head testing against other WordPress themes, and Joomla sites in the several niches, and there is absolutely no comparison. All other factors being equal, Thesis will trounce a basic WordPress or Joomla installation when it comes to SEO. The secret is how it divides the code related to content, and design so search engines see clean, indexable code.

2. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a XML sitemap for Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com which allows to index your posts faster my favorite part is the fact that it pings each service when new content is added. This is a definite must have for those serious about SEO make sure to sign up with Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center to tell these services the location of your sitemap.

3. HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you granular control over meta-data, such as tags, titles, descriptions, etc. You can also use this to add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages for various analytics software. Headspace automatically suggests tags for your posts and allows you to create custom titles and descriptions that can improve your page ranking and indexability. (This WILL conflict with All in One SEOd and Meta Robots.)

4. Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but if not done correctly you risk losing that pages status in search results.  The Redirection plugin saves you time and headaches with 301 redirects, it captures a log of 404 errors so you can work on correcting them, and sets up an RSS feed for errors.

5. All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins of all time for WordPress, this plugin SEO swiss army knife from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more. If your running Thesis this may be a little redundant as it handles alot of the same features. (This WILL conflict with Meta Robots and Headspace.)

6. Automatic SEO Links – Ever looked up from Wikipedia and realize you’ve been reading for like an hour that is because of their thorough interlinking between articles. Interlinking has two benefits it will spread link juice deeper into your site, and also it will make your site more sticky as users more easily can find key content. Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, and choose if it should be “nofollow” or not.  One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t look like your just spamming.

7. SEO Slugs – Using your entire post title as the slug for an article can make web addresses to long and throw useless keywords into the mix .  The SEO Slugs plugin strips out all of the common, unnecessary words from the permalink to save you time.

8. Nofollow Case by Case – Because of the democratic nature of the web thanks to Google every vote (backlink) from other pages moves you up the ranks. Because of this system the Masters are big fans of DoFollow comments – it’s the blogospheres version of kissing babies. Take care of people and they will take care of you. This plugin removes the “nofollow” attribute from your comments, allowing you to share some linkluv which will encourage commenting. It can also nofollow specific comments on a case by case basis. (Hence the name.)

9. SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings – Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree.  In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

10. SEO Friendly Images – I have found many essential sites while using images search. Images can be an untapped source of traffic as people search for images on your niche, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

11. Meta Robots WordPress plugin – A quick, and easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page of your choice on your blog.  You can use it to make a variety of links nofollows such as: front page links, search pages, author and dated archives,  your login page. (This WILL conflict with AIO and Headspace.)

12. SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you must have duplicate content on your site for some reason, SEO No Duplicate allows you to select which version of a post the search engines should index while ignoring the others.

13. SEO Blogroll – If you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank?  With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

14. SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page.  This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

15. SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Tag clouds can be a unique way for website visitors to visualize your blogs theme unfortunately they are notoriously unreadable by search engines. The SEO tag cloud widget changes all that, your tag cloud will be converted to SEO friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

Bonus! Permalinks Moved Permanently This plugin is great for if you ever change the permalink structure of your blog. If a 404 is detected, it will take the last part of the post slug, and search your current posts for that same slug. If it finds a match, it will do a 301 redirect from the old link to the new. We used to use a custom permalink structure, /%category%/%postname%/, for our blog here but decided to remove the %category% part. I found that we were getting more 404′s than before (using Redirection) and we needed a way to get this done more effectively. Permalinks moved Permanently did what we needed. (Don added this. I tried to get him to stick with just 15, but NOOOOO. So this ones for free. lol)

One more thing, this list was inspired by Nick over at SiteSketch101. Check him out if your looking for how to blog.

Exposure
If you’re looking to grow your business, you can use these tools to enhance your traditional marketing efforts. Just mention your Facebook or Twitter accounts in a direct mail, and gain more prospects as well as their information. Additionally, having social media pages for your company, especially on LinkedIn, oftentimes improves your search engine rankings.

Learn About Your Customer
Just as important as reaching your customer is learning about them. Social media tools allow you to learn what your customers like and dislike. These are important insights into their wants/needs and can help you develop your marketing plan. Also, it can give your customers a voice, and a chance to interact with you and ask questions before you end up losing them as a customer. We all know that the cheapest customer to acquire is the one you already have.

Monitor Your Reputation
Along with learning how your target market thinks, it’s important to learn what people think about your business. Through social media you can read what people are saying about your company and can handle possible damaging situations in a timely matter.

Free Publicity
Social media is the new press release. Marketing professionals have always advised business owners to work with their local media to get some free publicity. Now you can generate your own at no cost. However, social media sites take time and effort and can be addictive. So think strategically about how you want to use each of the tools, before diving in. You will save yourself a lot of time by making sure you do it right the first time.

Before you jump into social media, think strategy before technology. There are so many companies that set up a page, not knowing exactly what to do, and after it hasn’t been touched in a month it reflects poorly on their company. Take a look at what your competition is doing locally. Look at the trends in your industry. Social media is a give and take relationship anyway. You have to participate in the conversation and give people a reason to be interested in you before you can expect to get anything out of social media.

In January of 2009, you may have read the goals that the previous owner had for MastersofSEO for last year. Here it is one year later. How did it go you ask? Let’s review.

Goals.

500 Subscribers Fail

200 Newsletter subscribers/Email Subscribers Fail

2000 Comments Pass – although many were spam and all are gone now. Gonna start from scratch.

250 Posts Fail

200 Visitors a day (according to Google Analytics) Pass

PR2 Pass – at a PR3 now.

First Page Ranking for How to Blog Fail – although we did make first page, as high as the 5th spot.

Make enough money to buy this. With all the cool additions I need 3,703.95$ It doesn’t cost that much anymore. Fail

Run a Blog Contest Pass

Release my first E-Book combining my traffic generation and SEO knowledge Fail

Develop further my Blogging Relationships Pass

Post Every One or Two Days Fail

Get a better Blog Template Pass

Develop some form of consistency in my posting, commenting, researching… Fass/Pail

Get an Alexa ranking of under 100K Fail – At 170K now.

Get a Technorati Ranking of under 25K Don’t even want to talk about it.

Well – 70% of the goals were a failure. But they didn’t have to be – they were good goals, and the content here should have generated that. It just couldn’t pull it off. That’s where Will and I come in. We are that secret sauce that was missing. (At least we are trying to be.) We want to really launch this site, and are working hard to achieve that end.

Soon, you will be seeing a goal list for 2010 with some high hoping goals set before us, but we are up to the challenge. Are you up to staying with us?

Good news! Google Analytics is reporting that your SEO efforts are working and the result is traffic and alot of it. The bad news is your websites bounce rate. Analytics measures your bounce rate by determining the number of users that visit a landing page and don’t click any other links. The truth is you may have masterful SEO and fantastic content, but if users are not engaging your site your wasting your time. According to Jacob Neilsen, web usability guru, most visitors don’t scroll below the fold, and you only have a few seconds to engage your visitor.

There was a golden day in the internet where large flashy ads and bright colors was all you needed to get people to click. These day however due to overuse of ads web surfers are practically unaware of banners, called “banner blindness”. To further compound problems the average visitor is in a hurry and at best they will just scan a page and bounce if it’s not engaging. The solution to these problems is good usability and design. Some large corporations pay six figures for these kind of studies, but there is a wealth of info online below I have listed 20 treasure troves of usability goodness.

1. Jacob Neilsen Web Usability Guru
2. Great Usability site made by the National Cancer Institute
3. Information and resources for key issues related to usability in website and software design.
4. 786 links about web usability
5. The web site of John S. Rhodes well-known usability and user experience guru.
6. Usability Testing Software
7. 10 Useful Usability Finding and Guidlines
8. 15 Valuable Usability PDFs You’ve Never Heard Of
9. 15 Important Research Findings You Should Know
10. 10 Additional Research Findings You Should Know
11. Introduction To Good Usability
12. 11 Striking Findings From an Eye-Tracking Study
13. 25 Incredibly Useful Usability Cheat Sheets And Checklists
14. 10 Usability Findings To Increase Sales And Customer Loyalty
15. Web form design guidelines: an eye-tracking study
16. Great blog on Usability
17. Portfolio Usability and Design Study
18. Web form Usability Design Study
19. Blog Design and Usability Study
20. Typography Study