SEO Moz offers a familiar promise to potential users: a suite of tools that will check a website for errors and possible search engine optimizations, as well as another set of keyword/phrase tools.  Many packages offer either error checking/content analysis or the keyword research tools, but few offer effective tools that handle both types of tasks.  Does SEO Moz deliver, or does it simply serve up too many promises to actually have any hope of meeting them?

Before Getting Started

Before we answer this question and delve into the features that SEO Moz does have to offer, it is worth noting that SEO Moz has a LOT to offer.  In fact, it can be a little intimidating to use at first because it actually includes a lot of tools.  This is a mixed blessing because there are a lot of tools to learn.  On the other side, SEO Moz’s individual tools are cleanly laid out and are fairly intuitive.  This makes SEO Moz easy to start using, but it would not be an understatement to say that it could take one a long time to become an SEO Moz guru.

The Tools of the SEO Trade

Without a doubt, SEO Moz has some very effective tools.  It does not really matter what one needs an SEO package to do, SEO Moz almost certainly has a tool to handle that need.    SEO Moz includes tools that not only handle the traditional keyword analysis/competitor tracking, but also a unique tool called the Keyword Difficulty Tool.  The Keyword Difficulty Tool is a unique idea that takes a lot of data and distills it into the answer of a single question: is this keyword/phrase worth trying to rank for?  This is an impressive tool in and of itself, but there are times when the data available on the Internet is misleading; in fact, many have made a lot of money with nothing but a little foresight required to arrive first on any particular keyword scene.

While the Keyword Difficulty Tool is certainly a unique and useful tool (most of the time), SEO Moz still has more to offer.  Once a site is up, it needs to have a sitemap and pages filled with meta-tags.  Anyone who has spent any amount of time studying SEO knows the value of meta-tags, and SEO Moz also knows the value and offers some tools that are not dissimilar from the competition.  Tools that evaluate meta-data and/or content are fairly common, so we will not cover them in detail other than to say that SEO Moz can automatically point out everything from glaring errors and omissions to providing useful hints and tips on a per page, whole site, or selected page basis.

SEO Moz also includes a full suite of tracking and reporting tools, most of which are incredibly flexible.  One of our first thoughts upon looking at the reporting aspect of SEO Moz was that it was obvious that people who like reports work at SEO Moz.  It would be impossible to create such concise yet elegant reports unless one were to have a fetish for reports and data.  While we are not sure just who it is over at SEO Moz that has a ‘thing’ for reports, we do appreciate their amazing attention to detail.

How Much Would You Buy Time For?

One of the most interesting aspects of SEO Moz is how much time it saves.  Want to see all of the page ranking information on a single page?  SEO Moz can do it, and that can save one time checking several different tools that individually manage Yahoo!, Google, Bing, and other search engines.  Examples such of this are found throughout SEO Moz’s user interface, and the entire package honestly feels as if it was written by people with a design doctrine that was equal parts engineering for efficiency and no-time-to-waste-Corporate-America.  That is not a bad thing, it means that the no-nonsense interface generate answers to questions in significantly less time than almost any other tool that we could name off the top of our heads.

This brings up a good question: how much is your time worth?  If you need to look at only one or two tools at a time, then SEO Moz might not have much value.  If you need to look at many different data sources in one legible format, then it is difficult to argue against the value of a package that puts everything in one place.

So, how much does SEO Moz cost?  There are three plans to choose from: PRO Basic, PRO Plus, and PRO Elite.  All plans include all of the tools, but are primarily differentiated by the number of Linkscape reports and tracked ranking.  For example, the PRO Basic plan offers 50 tracked rankings per month and 20 Linkscape reports for $79 versus the 100 tracked rankings and 50 Linkscape reports of the PRO Plus package that costs $129 per month.  The PRO Elite package costs $229 per month, but offers up a stunning 300 tracked rankings and 500 Liinkscape reports.  While some of these fees might seem a bit high, there is no substitute for SEO Moz’s ability to buy time with its incredible array of well-laid out tools.

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I got into CSS-based design sometime around 2002-2003 and have wasted literally hundreds of hours of my life dealing with various CSS and browser-compatibility issues. Back then we had far fewer tools at our disposal so the process of testing was a lot more tedious. Over the past 5 years I’ve picked up some tips and tricks that have made my job 100 times easier.

So without further adieu I’d like to share some of these tips:

1. On any given div, if you specify a width, do NOT specify padding or margins (and vice versa). Specify padding and margins on the elements contained in that div instead. Ex: leftcolumn {width:200px} lefcolumn p {padding:10px;width:20px;}
2. Use Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar together. In Firebug, use the inspect button to see element names, styles, and inheritances. Then use Wed Developer’s CSS > Edit CSS panel to change the properties in real time. If anyone wants I can probably make a video screencast and show you some examples of what I mean.
3. Don’t obsess about validation or having perfect code. I know some coding Nazis might hang me for this one, but if you need to stick a clearing div here or use a IE6 hack for a specific issue there, do it. I used to have CSS OCD once too, it’s ok. But if I can save myself an hour of tearing my hair out trying to fix one small issue just in the name of perfect semantic markup – it’s not worth it (especially if your users will never notice or know about it). Life is short. Don’t spend it obsessing about CSS.

If I had known these things earlier, I would probably have saved a lot of hours – literally hundreds – over the years. Those are probably my top 3 that have made the biggest difference in my coding career. Bonus: I also like using * {padding:0;margin:0} at the top of my CSS sheets to clear everything out, then specify margins and padding explicitly for divs and classes. Bonus #2: Faux columns can also be a lifesaver.

For more helpful tips, check out these posts:

• Some basic but still very relevant CSS tips
• 10 CSS tips you may not have known about
• 70 expert ideas for better CSS coding

Feel free to share any of your own time saving CSS tips in the comments.

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Does your site have a favicon? You know, that little 16 x 16 icon that appears next to the address in your browser? Recently it’s become even more important as many feed readers and aggregators are using it to identify websites.

There are already a ton of favicon makers out there – but we recently created Faviconr – a simple favicon maker that’s really easy to use (and easy to remember).

Faviconr will create a favicon for you from any jpg, gif, or png file. I recommend a square image, under 150k, saved as a transparent 24-bit png as the source file.

If your site does not yet have a custom favicon, create one using Faviconr – it only takes a minute or two.

To kick off the launch – this week only – I’m offering to create a custom favicon for your site (your colors & design) and send it to you, free of charge. If interested comment or email me your website address. (A link in return is appreciated, but not certainly not required).

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4/9/2008 Update: AirDig is Now Open to the Public.

If you’ve followed this blog for any amount of time, you may have seen our posts about finding cheap flights. After putting together the list of sites that we’ve always had success with, we realized that there was no good tool or search engine out there that would let you search ALL the sites we liked through a single interface.

There are 5-10 websites that we’re always found good results with and each one would require you to enter in airports and dates individually, which takes a lot more time. There are a few sites out there (like Booking Buddy) that do offer a centralized search of other sites, but 1. they open up in new windows and 2. their “recommended sites” are seemingly biased to what’s more profitable to them (higher commissions) rather than what might be better for you, the traveler.

So since there was no search tool out there that would do everything we wanted it to do, we created AirDig.com.

It lets you search all the most popular flight search engines in one place, on one page. You can take notes as you search, and they’re automatically saved for you. It’s the best way to ensure you’re getting the best possible deal on airfare.

The site is currently in private beta, so we’re giving this blog’s readers our first batch of invites. If you want to be one of the first people to test drive this new Super Flight Search, drop us an email or a comment and we’ll send you an invitation to sign up.

P.S. We’re giving away the first 300 invites.

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Remember July of 2005 when you heard that Hollywood is getting ready to produce a movie version of Transformers? And then you searched around and found a Transformers fan site with articles, pictures, and forums all about Transformers toys? Remember when you bought that website for $600 and made that author’s day?

How does it feel to be making so much money with Auction Ads, Amazon affiliate links, and adSense right now – two years later – when your little site that you bought and maintained is ranking for so many terms and pulling in so much traffic?

Oh, wait – you didn’t actually do that? Well, you “almost” made a ton of money online, you almost repeated that process over and over again and built your million dollar empire. And you’re almost kickin’ it in the Carribean right now.

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Sean Connery’s classic line:

The question is – are you going to be the “keyboard jockey” who whines about what you don’t have – or are you going to go out there, against all odds, and build something great?

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Did you know you can make your pages automatically printer-friendly by creating a simple print-specific style sheet?

Most websites out there only use one stylesheet and either specify them for all media or just the screen. Many times when visitors print out pages, the formatting goes awry and lots of useless information ends up wasting people’s ink and paper.

Yesterday I went to print out Darren’s fireworks photo tutorial. Since the stylesheet is specified only for the screen, the printer defaults to a barely-styled 16 pages of text and photos, with the site’s navigational elements taking up the entire first sheet of paper.

Since I have the web developer toolbar installed I was able to quickly create my own stylesheet and get the meat of the article down to 3 printed pages. But assuming 99% of your audience won’t be doing this, you should help them out by specifying a print stylesheet that excludes extraneous elements (like page navigation) and makes the best use of printed space.

1. If you’re designing a new site or don’t mind tweaking your current templates, create a new class and call it “noprint”. Then add this new class to all the elements you don’t want printed. For example

<div id="header" class="noprint">

The nice thing about Cascading Style Sheets is the “cascading” part which lets you stick this to the end of any existing class specification in your template. For example

<ul class="boxy wider noprint">

I would recommend excluding navigation, footers, ad units, (maybe even comments) and anything else not central to the “meat” of the post. Once you add that class to all the elements you don’t want printed, create a new stylesheet called print.css and add this to it:

.noprint {display:none;}

You can also add any other styling options, such as a smaller font size, to maximize the use of printed space.

body {background: white;font-size: 12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman", Times, serif}

Then in your head tag, specify your existing stylesheet for the screen

<link href="/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" />

and add the new stylesheet for printing right below

<link href="/print.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" />

Voila! Now your visitors will be happier and you can save the earth one printed sheet of paper at a time. For more on print stylesheets, check out A List Apart or this great print-css compilation from Smashing Magazine.

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“Express yourself” is the slogan for Microsoft’s newest (currently in alpha) development project called Microsoft Popfly.

It seems very appropriate since it reminds me of a certain conversation from a certain movie, where a corporate type used that same line.

Microsoft is the new Chotchkie’s. But if they really wanted to express themselves, they should have at least 37 ducks on the home page, or at least 15. C’mon Microsoft, I thought I remembered you saying that you wanted to express yourself.

(Kidding aside though, I hope I can get in invite since Popfly looks like a promising way to get into developing Facebook widgets.)

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If someone was to ask me what I think they should focus on to take advantage of the opportunities web 2.0/3.0 may offer, I’d say:

learn about all the widget platforms and how to develop and create widgets

and you should start with Netvibes UWA (universal API), Vista, and (just recently) Facebook’s API. Learn thir API’s and how to create widgets/gadgets for them.

One of the most difficult parts of creating a new online presence or website is getting enough attention and getting enough people to see it. For all the success stories out there, there are far more failures and companies that could not get enough traction to survive or build enough volume to matter.

Creating widgets for pre-existing platforms is a really good way to tap into existing user bases. If you create a widget people like, you can enjoy the benefits of going viral within a specific network or userbase, without having to build that userbase yourself.

This morning’s Facebook API announcement is huge. That’s a killer opportunity If I’ve ever seen one. If you’re looking for what others have created, check out Facebook Application Ratings, and Nick’s All Facebook site.

Check out widgipedia and widgetbox, learn the differences between browser widgets and desktop widgets, and dive in. Web 3.0 is all about widgets. If you can get a head start on that, you’ll be doing well in 2008.

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Forbes seems to have discovered the very cutting edge of web unusability. Check out the following page:

In Pictures: Google + Apple = ?

I saw this in my Gmail (as a web clip) and clicked through to find the most ridiculous concept in web browsing: an auto-refreshing slideshow that consists of entire-page reloads every 15 seconds with no user input.

Instead of having the decency to split a normal article up into 4 parts (like the New York Times does to inflate their pageview count), they split this slideshow up into 9 “slides”. Each slide is its very own bloated page with a new photo, a few blocks of text, and a whole lot of ads.

Forbes assumes they know your optimal reading spead better than you do and refreshes to the next slide every 15,000 milliseconds. Often times a page and its ads actually take longer to load than the refresh interval so you get to play a fun little game of “try to catch the first sentence”.

The slideshow controls are tiny and get lost in the visual cacophony of the page, but you better learn where they are because your browser’s “Stop” function doesn’t actually work to stop these pages from reloading every 15 seconds.

Since I’ve started writing this piece, the site has reloaded over 20 times and has eaten up over 10MB worth of bandwidth (according to firebug).

Now some of you astute readers might be asking, “wait, 20 times? Didn’t you say there were only 9 slides?” You see Forbes assumes that you liked the ride so much that it doesn’t just stop at the end of the current slideshow – it just keeps going with any other stories it has in the ‘ole merrygoround – The Web Celeb 25 (27 slides worth), Hottest Cellphones 2006, and on and on until you are driven completely insane, your computer crashes, or Forbes run out of ads (the least likely scenario).

After a little while I noticed that there is a 1-page version of this story that you can click to. So I did. And I got this page:

The page was mocking my previous agony by telling me that “The worst is yet to come!”. After this page was done advertising to me it replaced the slideshow-from-hell version of the article with the find-the-actual-article version of the article.

The Hyperion man throws a blackberry in your face and if you happen to find the tiny [close x] button, he turns into a ghost and keeps walking around his ad staring at you while he drinks his coffee. Taunting you. It’s really quite surreal.

I’m just so amazed that a website for such a known brand could be so ridiculously out of touch with any basic concept of usability? Who the hell is responsible for this monstrosity? How can the old-paper dinosaurs expect to compete on the new web with something like this? And why the hell is this page still under their domain? (Yes, I have to put a link condom on it).

So for all the reasons above, Forbes.com wins the first (and last) annual “World Wide Web’s Worst Usability Award” presented by AU Interactive. Steve, you can email me to find out where to pick up the prize.

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