Datadial, UK: A London Based Digital Web Agency

iCrossing UK

Voltier Creative, USA

Sebcreation, France

Union Room, UK

RICG, USA

alt design, UK

fluidcreativity, UK

Three and a half years ago I’ve published a very popular list post called the 15 best SEO Company Website Designs. I had to remove some of them over the years for a variety of reasons. It took me over 18 months to find even the 15 originally.

Luckily the days of bad SEO website designs are gone for good.

No more keyword stuffed, text only sites created by SEO practicioners who have never learned the design basics. These days SEO companies and other SEO service providers sport excellent web design that both appeals to users and converts them to buyers.

By now I have collected ten times as many that is 150+ outstanding websites from the SEO industry and beyond.

In order not to overwhelm you with a huge list of 150+ random designs I sorted them accordingly to similar attributes, Today I focus on Search Engine Optimization firms using a dark background.

How did I select the sites? You need to offer at least one or more organic SEO services to be added to my list but your agency can focus on marketing or we design by and large. So SEO company does not mean SEO only. Also you don’t need to be a company as long as you offer some SEO services, you can be a freelancer as well. I focused on the actual web design. It doesn’t mean that these are best for SEO purposes or rank best in Google.

Being on this list means that you have an great looking usable website.

Are you searching for a SEO company I approve of both web design and SEO wise? The first two: SEO.com and Datadial have been evaluated by myself. SEO.com is a partner of mine while Datadial has an entry in my SEO directory where I collect the SEO firms I trust most.

Related posts:

1. Some of the Best SEO Company Website Designs
2. The Anatomy of an SEO 2.0 Web Directory of the Highest Quality
3. 7 Services of SEO 2.0 Companies – Submit Your Site Now!

1. Some of the Best SEO Company Website Designs
2. The Anatomy of an SEO 2.0 Web Directory of the Highest Quality
3. 7 Services of SEO 2.0 Companies – Submit Your Site Now!

SEO for non-profits is by now a popular concept as I found out doing a little research on Google.

Some of the best industry names come up. There are several resources and examples that might be a good start if you’re from a non-profit and are looking for SEO services. Some consultants and companies even offer discounts or special offers for non-profits, but that’s not all, just check my list:

• Get your non-profit PPC campaign financed by Google: The Google Grants Program: Click Here For Charity
• The Charity SEO Book is a comprehensive SEO guide for non-profits by Aaron Wall, one of the most renowned SEO specialist (full disclosure: I am an affiliate of his site)
• SEO at Grassroots.org “a nonprofit organization that brings emerging technologies to communities across the world”: The Nonprofit SEO Guide
• seononprofit.com offers a free fundraising guide [PDF link] for beginners
• Mary Pierce describes SEO for the Non-Profit Organization
• Michael Stein has a similar focus in his non-profit technology blog: Organic Non-profit SEO
• apogee results outlines the SEO friendly information architecture for a non-profit site
• Virginia Nussey of Bruce Clay Inc. highlights a water related non-profit SEO project and its objectives she works on
• SEO.com, one of my favorite SEO companies (full disclosure: I recently joined their affiliate program) encourages engagement for non-profits in the SEO industry

So you see: SEO is not evil as people who hate SEO assume. Those people offend me even without checking out my site or knowing who I am. I already optimized websites about eco homes or solar energy. Currently I work for a big bike manufacturer selling 50k affordable bicycles a year.

First published September 17th, 2007. Last updated (complete overhaul, removed 6 links, added 5 new ones) October 15th, 2010.

Related posts:

1. SEO Activism: Detox Campaign by Greenpeace
2. The New SEO – Search Engine Organization!
3. The Best 10 Green Blogs

1. SEO Activism: Detox Campaign by Greenpeace
2. The New SEO – Search Engine Organization!
3. The Best 10 Green Blogs

Construction Worker by Saad Akhtar

Recently it dawned on me what the biggest roadblock to my financial success is. I started my freelance career as a worker and I’ve remained one ever since. I sensed it in the past as well but the realization came only recently when I was able to put it in words.

Roughly 10 years ago I got a great web agency job during the new economy boom. It was a well paid and it was easy. I got paid by the hour and after work I still had enough time for sports, partying or whatever. Then the tide changed and the new economy broke down within a few weeks. I kept my job for a while but soon enough someone who was cheaper has replaced myself. He was a nice guy and I even showed him everything before it became apparent that he’d replace me.

In a way I was lucky. The company went bankrupt a year later in spite of the lay offs. The management has been replaced as well but they were just cold blooded capitalists. They were all about cutting costs no matter what happened with the people. So soon enough nobody cared for the company anymore, the employees cared only for themselves and even fought each other not to get laid off first.

Long story short I was quite happy to leave early after I overcame the humiliation and feelings of failure. I was trying to find a new job for a while but wasn’t really serious about it. I didn’t want to live through all that again.

In a company where you’re just an employee it doesn’t matter who you are or what you like doing.

At the end of the day only the money you earn matters. So you have to do things you hate, sit all day in a crowded room (aka office) with people you often despise and your boss or employer decides about your fate. I’ve described this as wage slavery in the past and I haven’t changed my mind since. Wage slavery hasn’t been abolished along slavery although the Abolitionists meant to end both kinds of slavery.

Today you can abolish wage slavery yourself. The most common and often easiest way to do so is to try to freelance. Of course freelancing is not easy but once you’re established it’s OK. There is one problem though with freelancing. Freelancing, at least done the way I did it, is not really the end of wage slavery. It’s just a different, more subtle way of wage slavery as long as you remain a wage slave in your head. To simplify the matters and to make this article less provocative I’d like to call the wage slave “worker” as everybody else does.

Even as a freelancer you remain a worker. You become “your own boss” as the saying goes. This is “truer” than you think. As your own boss you are the person who has to exploit you.

You have to force yourself to wake up early, to work hard and to work long hours, after all you get paid by the hour, just like a worker. You have only a finite number of hours to sell so you can make your clients pay more but “the invisible hand” of the market will slap you once you become too expensive.

The problem is your mindset. It’s the mindset of the worker from the nineteenth century. Someone who toils al day and is still dirty and hungry. Think about it: We’re in 2010, automation is not just about the manufacturing process. With computers and the Internet you can automate almost everything. At least you have tools to make everything easier.

As a worker you are serving the tools not the other way around. You have to keep them running like the assembly line in the factory.

It’s not the tools that assist you, you assist the tools. For web designers Photoshop is the assembly line. For bloggers WordPress is the assembly line. For SEO people Google Analytics is the assembly line.

Now let’s compare it to the entrepreneur. I don’t mean the already rich lazy capitalist living off the fortune made in the distant past. Imagine an entrepreneur like yourself. Somebody who has no money yet to multiply by itself. S/he has a different mindset.

An entrepreneur has an idea. S/he then invests time to put in practice. S/he may borrow money but let’s assume s/he does not for the sake of simplicity of understanding. This person won’t get paid from the start in many cases. So an entrepreneur has to invest time and work without being paid at first or not much. Then later the entrepreneur expects that the investment will pay off. The investment pays off once the product the entrepreneur has developed get sold.

The product can’t be time of the entrepreneur. Remember, a worker would sell time but not the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur strives to sell something, be it a product or service that is scalable and can be automated. Today we can automate production with ease.

Any digital product can be reproduced endlessly without a major effort.

Even services can be automated to some extent as repetitive tasks do not have to be performed over and over, think of templates etc.

To become an entrepreneur you have to to think like one. Your mindset is more important than having capital. A worker would spend the money after a while and stay a worker. An entrepreneur would invest it. You don’t have to read Marx (I never had) to know that today we, the workers, own the means of production. The desk, the computer, even pencil and paper are all means of production. In the West everybody can afford a desk, a computer or pencil and paper.

Most of us stay workers, even as freelancers. We keep our assembly lines going and we tend our tools, we care for our Photoshop, our WordPress, our Google. We buy new versions of Photoshop, we keep on updating and securing our WordPress, we hug our search engine the cute Google monster.

It’s the entrepreneurs behind Photoshop, WordPress and Google who make the money off your work.

They don’t force anybody like the capitalists of the nineteenth century. We’re just too dumb to earn money like they do. They automate, they scale, they sell self replicating products and services but not time. You can’t fight them like the workers did hundred years ago. You have to join them and I don’t mean working for them as your employers.

Change your mind. Become an entrepreneur like them. You don’t need capital, you don’t even need workers. You mainly need a different mindset. The means of production are already yours. So I ask you again, like I asked myself these days: Hey Freelancer, are you a worker or an entrepreneur?

Related posts:

1. 20 Ways to Survive as a Freelancer Working on the Web
2. SEO 2.0 Services 3.5$/h
3. Why Social Media are Like Slavery and SMO Equals Abolitionism

1. 20 Ways to Survive as a Freelancer Working on the Web
2. SEO 2.0 Services 3.5$/h
3. Why Social Media are Like Slavery and SMO Equals Abolitionism

Photographers and other visual artists have a magnificent tool to show off their work these days, the Internet. Everybody loves great photos and artworks so they spread basically by themselves.

Still there is a big difference between being successful on the Web as a photographer or visual artist and having your images scattered randomly over the Web. Image SEO is a great tool to decide yourself which way your work gets on the Web.

Most good images get stolen and used without your permission

to generate ad revenue for the content thieves while you not only earn nothing financially but don’t getting any publicity either due to lack of proper credits.

The best way to become successful is to

use your images as free advertising

for your name while earning money with professional services or premium products, selling your images for print purposes for instance. Today I want to focus on the ways of promoting your work over the Web to get links and publicity while at the same time curbing image theft of your works.

Add your email address to your Flickr profile, the same applies to Deviant Art. I often want to seek permission for use of images but do not find a way to contact the photographer or artist. Where there is no way to ask or buy people will just take images without permission or ignore you. I do the latter and search for other images instead. Also add “more at youraddress.com” links below each of your images on Flickr.

Do not use LinkedIn as the only way to contact you, only premium members can send you images. So people relying solely on LinkedIn to get messages will get just get a tiny part of them. Unless you don’t care provide an email address or at least some form address like formspring.me

Use Behance and similar portfolio community sites and make sure to use you real name plus, again, add your email and homepage address there.

Add your URL or name to images. Add a text layer in Photoshop or using another tool saying something like youraddress.com or copyright by youraddress.com People who steal images tend to add their URLs so in the best case scenario you make sure that people understand the image is yours by saying something like your name, photography.

Submit your images to image bookmarking sites and socialize with like minded users there. In case you don’t submit them others will, without your permission and proper credits at worst. So make sure you are the first and foremost who submits them with the proper source.

Cut out the middleman e.g. Getty Images. Why? I’ve contacted Getty Images a week ago to seek permission to publish an image and I didn’t get a response beyond an automated “we get back to you” reply. Also their prices are so high that only mainstream media can afford them so by selling there you actually make sure that you don’t sell many images. Retain ownership of your images and decide on a case to case basis how much to charge.

Use TinEye to find out who uses and steals your images. TinEye is a “reverse image search engine” that allows you to search for an image just by uploading it or linking it. So you don’t use keywords but only the image itself.

Use StumbleUpon and Tumblr etc. to spread your images yourself, reprimand users who steal your images. StumbleUpon and Tumblr are notorious for wide spread image theft. Most people who submit your images don’t care for copyright on earn money by stealing them and showing them along their ads. Especially StumbleUpon is full of stolen images to rip off photographers and artists.

Use a CC license to control the use of your images. Creative Commons licenses are not about giving away your copyrights, they are about deciding yourself what copyrights you grant others. This is far better than letting people steal your images. Let the people use the images with your permission and you get plenty of links, especially with those licenses requiring attribution.

Build your own homepage and display your images there. While many photographers aren’t web designers or can not afford expensive web design there are many services where you can set up a homepage easily. Some of them are even specialized on image content. Without a homepage you will always depend on third parties like Flickr, Behance etc. Flickr might ban you or delete your images. Many images simply get censored because they show parts of the human body. So Flickr etc. are good to spread the word but not to represent you.

Don’t let Google Images steal your images. Use a so called frame breaker script to ensure Google Image search users are routed to your site and do no stay on the Google page that frames you.

Apply basic image SEO best practices on site to make people find your images on your website.

Update: Use image specific link building techniques.

These simple and often quite obvious measures will already provide you with plenty of links and publicity. It takes time to use all these tools. Even adding your URL to your images can be quite tedious but you also can automate it. Some people ma not call these techniques image SEO at all but at the end of the day it is.

In the age of social media SEO is about findability, digital asset optimization wherever your assets are and off site optimization does not mean only link building.

That’s SEO 2.0

Related posts:

1. Image Bookmarking Sites for Daily Inspiration
2. Attention! SEO 2.0 Was Spreading Malware Yesterday
3. The 10 Simplest Website Tweaks for Designers to Get More Clients

1. Image Bookmarking Sites for Daily Inspiration
2. Attention! SEO 2.0 Was Spreading Malware Yesterday
3. The 10 Simplest Website Tweaks for Designers to Get More Clients

CC: Stealth by Johnson Camerface.

A WordPress plugin that removes posts from the RSS feed is what I’ve been searching for for a while now. I thought it would be an advanced RSS manipulation feature but it’s far simpler than that. I’ve found Stealth Publish.

Some of you already noticed as I used it without reading the manual first and the post appeared in the feed anyways. The solution Stealth Publish offers is simply adding a custom field in WordPress (you can do it below each post in your new post dialog).

OK, I wouldn’t write as much about Stealth if not for the countless possibilities it offers in spite or even due to its simplicity. So what are the possible uses? Let me propose 7 of them. So check out the 7 Stealth Publish for WordPress Uses to consider.

Stealth publish excludes a post from the RSS feed and also the home page of your blog. This allows you to easily add

1. A non-blog section to your blog. This might be anything that is neither blog nor static WordPress “page”. It might be a directory, glossary, FAQ etc.
2. A section in a different language. This is very important for multi-lingual bloggers like myself
3. A “mullet” kind of link bait article only designed to attract social media users, for instance the horny and ignorant Digg mob
4. A post geared towards Google users but annoying or redundant for your regular readers and subscribers
5. A post that is simply not good enough for the frontpage or the feed following an editorial decision, newspapers never feature everything on the fp
6. A content theft test to find out whether your pages get copied via RSS or via scraper bots
7. An affiliate post, content exchange or advertising page you don’t want your true fans to bother with unless they really want it

Of course the Stealth Publish is still limited, the “stealth” posts seem to appear in comments and recent posts so they are not hidden completely. Take this into account when you post the Britney Spears naked stuff. I might look into the code to add some more options. My time is very limited though. Still there are other ways of making posts appear only partly in the WordPress system.

With this code you can solely remove posts from the frontpage.

Also there are ways of RSS manipulation to exclude whole categories from the RSS feed. So it’s just a little help to think out of the WordPres box. You can do more with WordPres without much hassle than you imagined.

Of course I wouldn’t write as much about plugin testing if it wasn’t for a purpose. I’ve been planning to add a SEO directory to SEO 2.0 and now I’m on the way. It will be basically a very high quality “part of the blog without directory plugins” kind of directory. Now you will probably think:

Aren’t directories SEO 1.0, dead and spammy?

Well, not mine. You know me. That’s another post though. Stay tuned.

Related posts:

1. SEO 2.0 Basics: WordPress URL Design
2. The Only 7 WordPress Plugins Business Bloggers Need
3. Saturday Night Fever for WordPress Theme Customization: How to Simplify

1. SEO 2.0 Basics: WordPress URL Design
2. The Only 7 WordPress Plugins Business Bloggers Need
3. Saturday Night Fever for WordPress Theme Customization: How to Simplify

While on Digg the ignorance of interest groups rules and StumbleUpon tends to lowest common denominator e.g. “funny images”,

social bookmarking really reflects popularity and quality of particular content.

There is even better social bookmarking out there, it’s (social) image bookmarking. It works even better as you don’t even have to visit the site the image stems from in case you’re busy.

So I present to you these image bookmarking sites for daily inspiration:

FFFFOUND!
The best image bookmarking is probably FFFFOUND! due to its limited access to friends and friends of friends of the founders. This way they ensure high quality if the images. It’s very graphic design oriented so you’ll find lots of self promoting designers and photographers with their works. It’s OK as most of it is of good quality but sometimes I get annoyed by the prevalence of ads for Nike shoes and the likes.

Dropular
Dropular collects high quality images and it’s as good as FFFFOUND! but has a smaller community. This means less images as well. So you won’t find inspiration here 10 times a day but maybe just twice in 24h. It will be certainly inspiring though. They manage to select really the most striking images out there. Plus there is not as much NSFW stuff that diverts your attention.

vi.sualize.us
As with Typeish, vi.sualize.us combines features of those above but has a higher number of images. While Typeish is very limited in its functionality vi.sualize.us is more complex and feature rich.

we heart it
With we heart it it’s difficult to find things that set it apart from the others above. It makes explicit images of babes “unsafe” by default so that you can visit it at work too. Girl and woman are among the most popular tags. It’s similar to vi.sualize.us.

pichaus
pichaus is a very minimalistic image bookmarking site. It has high quality images but the Adsense banner ads on top and at the bottom are quite annoying.

imgfave
imgfave is clearly the dark horse here. I didn’t know it unil now, I just found it via Google. It’s in the top 10 for the phrase image bookmarking. It’s based on the same microblogging software as Identi.ca but it’s more image bookmarking nonetheless. It looks quite similar to FFFFOUND! but the Verdana headline looks pretty ugly so it seems it’s a very alpha version as they didn’t even have the time to create a decent looking graphic or headline for their own name. It looks promising nonetheless.

Some people may criticize that it’s content theft due to copyrighted images being displayed on those sites. Maybe. In many cases I’ve seen images preserved by FFFFOUND! in that the original was off line by the time I found it there. So the public has access to an image archive in its truest sense.

SEO 2.0 is about optimization of all kind of media for Universal Search, social media and beyond.

Appealing to image bookmarking sites is a must use for all people doing something visual.

Don’t do it like “fun bloggers” aka the real content thieves or self promoting graphic designers who exploit these services. SEO 2.0 is based on legitimate usage of social media.

My SEO 2.0 blog is hugely successful on Google Image search, I get more visitors via my image searches than via text based search.

Of course more people are interested in visual content than a niche topic which is also limited to written language, even English.

Next time I will teach you how to appeal to image searchers and what to do with this “useless traffic”.

Indeed I’m so popular on Google Image search that I am thinking about partnering with artists, photographers and graphic designers to provide illustration in exchange for lots of publicity. Want to get found with your images? Let me use them on the SEO 2.0 blog.

Last updated: November 12th, 2010.

Related posts:

1. Image SEO for Photographers and Other Visual Artists
2. The 10 Simplest Website Tweaks for Designers to Get More Clients
3. SEO 2.0 Basics: Images or Finding Stock Photos

1. Image SEO for Photographers and Other Visual Artists
2. The 10 Simplest Website Tweaks for Designers to Get More Clients
3. SEO 2.0 Basics: Images or Finding Stock Photos

Image: Brick Obama by ~emeph

Immediately after Barack Obama has been sworn in as the new president of the United States

the Whitehouse.gov website has been relaunched.

Some of the most important aspects of this change are:

• It has a blog
• It’s valid “XHTML 1.0 Transitional”
• It’s robots.txt file is one line long
• It uses the by now industry standard jQuery JavaScript library
• It has a Spanish version
• It focuses on public good, just read the notice on gifts below the contact form

Besides that we recognize some common sense best practices like

• Very content rich
• Clean URLs and directory structure “/agenda/civil_rights/”
• user and search engine optimized HTML titles like “civil rights”

Of course there are some drawbacks here too

• Some too small font sizes, especially in the menu at the bottom
• The homepage is more than 1 megabyte in size, mostly due to scripts and images
• No direct social media connection
• No 302 URL redirection of old documents, they result in a 404 not found error

Nonetheless we clearly recognize that change has come to WhiteHouse.gov, when will it come to your website?

Technology is at the forefront of change, use it accordingly, in a SEO 2.0 manner like Obama does, or get left behind.

Related posts:

1. 7 Reasons Why Obama’s Website Has Many More Visitors Than McCain’s
2. 10 Google Operators for Advanced Search I Use Daily (and You Should Too)
3. 7 SEO 2.0 Methods Obama Used to Score on the Web

1. 7 Reasons Why Obama’s Website Has Many More Visitors Than McCain’s
2. 10 Google Operators for Advanced Search I Use Daily (and You Should Too)
3. 7 SEO 2.0 Methods Obama Used to Score on the Web

Ignore this by Reeuwijk. The main message of many designers’ websites.

Are you a graphic, industrial or web designer? Do you want your website to look good? Do you ignore, hate or forget SEO and usability? Well, I can help.

Designers often do not implement the simplest website tweaks and do not employ the easiest marketing methods that can drastically improve your performance in Google and bring you more clients.

Here are the 10 simplest website tweaks for designers, 2 of them actually off site.

1. Change your page title from your name or portfolio to what/where/who or in other words [offer city - name], example: “Graphic Design Atlanta – John Doe”, use descriptive titles for each page
2. Use CSS or image replacement like sIFR, Flir and typeface.js for navigation, headlines and links instead of pure Flash or images
3. Rename your navigation links from works, portfolio etc. to web design, print design, logo design etc. Use your name instead of about me
4. Do not display solely one image per page, nobody clicks 10 times. Make lists of 10 images per page and create a page for each image. Forget thumbs, clients who can’t afford broadband probably can’t afford design too.
5. Display your content right away, don’t make me think or click (no “enter” pages, navigation only homepages), every links costs you visitors
6. Display contact information right away and every page, a form is best, a phone number, email and IM at least
7. Display your name and/or URL on your images so that when they get redistributed the still advertise for you, best example Glennz
8. Join a community like Behance to share your work and to to spread the word
9. Submit your well designed site to CSS galleries (or mixed ones if you’re into Flash)
10. Start a blog and link out to all your friends and people you admire for their work

Stop ignoring SEO and usability both of which are two sides of the same coin. Design is not about fancy graphics it’s about findable and usable interfaces.

You want more of this? Check out my posts on URL design, CSS SEO tricks and findability crimes this post is a follow up to.

Related posts:

1. Image SEO for Photographers and Other Visual Artists
2. The 10 Worst Findability Crimes Committed by Web Designers & Developers
3. The Best Flash SEO Tutorials

1. Image SEO for Photographers and Other Visual Artists
2. The 10 Worst Findability Crimes Committed by Web Designers & Developers
3. The Best Flash SEO Tutorials

Usability expert at work? CC: Bela donna by hypertypos.

Today, November 13th, is World Usability Day. I’m not really involved in it in spite of being really interested in

• usability
• user-centered design
• findability.

With my soon 12 years of online publishing experience I’m still more of a DIY guy who learns everything himself by trial and error. I rarely go to conferences and the likes.

So being both keen on usability and an industry outsider I have a unique view point on usability.

In fact I can’t ignore my impression today that many usability experts commit basic usability mistakes on the Web.

Here are the 7 usability mistakes usability experts commit:

No images
Imagine a magazine cover without an image. Images of women have proved most successful at selling magazines of all kinds. Usability experts seem to hate women, they never display any on their pages. Don’t they want the people to actually use their sites? Websites need eye-catchers like magazines do. Use striking pictures.

Too much text
Usability websites tend to look like they’ve been built in 1995 when people still browsed without images. Not only that, they really focus on text. So in spite of the fact that the text is split up in small chunks you see huge loads of text on usability sites. It’s just too much. People do not read long texts on the Web, not even divided ones. Also strictly text based pages are not attractive enough to retain quick to leave users, especially from social media.

Too large text
Usability experts love large fonts. I do too but not for the sake of them but for readability. Too large fonts aren’t readable as well. The eye can’t discern many too large letters at once so you are forced to look closely and strain your eyes.

Too much white space
I love white space for my eyes to rest on the Web and I use it myself excessively. It’s partly due to the fact that I’m not a designer myself though so I cant style it in a way that makes sense other than white. Usability experts tend to make sites all white on purpose. Excessive white space has at least two major disadvantages. An all white page appears empty. It’s too bright on the screen.

No or “sad” colors
While I guess usability experts want you not to hurt your eyes on the Web which is a noble gesture they seem to assume we’re all babies or something. Usability experts rarely use fresh, striking and bright colors. You don’t have to make your text red, but an occasional red element on your page does not hurt! Otherwise try a nice green or blue!

Boring interfaces
Why is everybody buying and using the iPhone lately? It’s not just a usable interface it has a sleek and sexy interface! Why are most leading usability websites that boring? Don’t they have designers working for them too? Or is it because they hate women so hey don’t want to be sexy?

Ugly headlines
Have you ever seen a huge bold Verdana headline on Windows? It’s clumsy and it’s ugly and it’s usability headline font #1. You barely can distinguish the letters due to their sheer thickness. Usability sites Useit.com (Jakob Nielsen himself!), Usabilityfirst.com and even Upassoc.org use them, the latter in white where they’re even more difficult to read on the Web.

Just visit the sites that rank in the top 10 for usability. The World Usability Day site is not as bad as most of them but

only a few usability sites manage to be attractive.

What’s the use of usability if your site is so ugly that nobody visits it or stays there?

More articles by myself on usability:

1. For Design, Usability and SEO Simplicity Is Key
2. Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes
3. 10 Usability Sins that Make me Bounce and Never Come Back
4. The 7 Simplest Ways To Lower Your Bounce Rate and Get More Conversions
5. 50+ Must Read Web Design for ROI, Usability and SEO Articles | SEOptimise
6. 7 Must Read Design + Usability + SEO Articles
7. 5 More Design + Usability + SEO Articles: The Clean Dozen
8. Findability, New and Better SEO? Experts Disagree; 12+ Findability Resources

Related posts:

1. Usability Experts Still Fail Themselves on World Usability Day 2010
2. 5 More Design + Usability + SEO Articles: The Clean Dozen
3. Findability, New and Better SEO? Experts Disagree; 12+ Findability Resources

1. Usability Experts Still Fail Themselves on World Usability Day 2010
2. 5 More Design + Usability + SEO Articles: The Clean Dozen
3. Findability, New and Better SEO? Experts Disagree; 12+ Findability Resources

Besides using such obvious Firefox add-ons and toolbars like those for StumbleUpon, Delicious and Browzmi (the StumbleUpon, Twitter & Mixx combination on steroids) what does a holistic SEO 2.0 aficionado like Tad Chef use daily or very often? Here are the top 10 Firefox extensions for search, website optimization and SEO I use:

googlebar
The original googlebar for Firefox without the call mothership function thus not to mix up with the Google toolbar

Customize Google
Allows me to nuke all that unnecessary and distracting Google Ads in search results among a plethora of other options.

Search Status
This one makes me see who kills which links by nofollow attribute and to take a look at Penis-length, sorry PageRank of sites etc.

SEOpen
This toolbar is just basically a set of short cuts to online tools but nonetheless very useful.

Rank Checker
Aaron Wall’s Rank Checker helps me obsessing about rankings in Google when I feel like SEO 1.0

SeoQuake
This extension is both a toolbar and a search results enhancement. I use mainly the latter for SEO research determining who my competition is and how strong

Linkdiagnosis
One of the best backlink checkers on the planet, especially due to its design gets even better with the extension.

Social Media for Firefox
You can quickly check how popular a web page is in the most popular social media.

CSSViewer
For SEO and website optimization indispensable but also very useful for average web development tasks.

Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool
Take a look at the bare naked website as if you’re blind or a search engine bot, maginificent for all 3 design, usability and SEO.

Any other suggestions? I recently disabled or uninstalled more than half of my Firefox extensions due to them slowing or breaking my Firefox installation so please suggest only the best of the best.

Related posts:

1. How to Use StumbleUpon Without the Toolbar
2. Speed Up Firefox the No Bullshit Way
3. Best SEO Website Design: SEO Companies Using Dark Backgrounds

1. How to Use StumbleUpon Without the Toolbar
2. Speed Up Firefox the No Bullshit Way
3. Best SEO Website Design: SEO Companies Using Dark Backgrounds