smart bookmarks are WAY better!

I see a lot of posts talking about 'the best' SEO tools; hell, even we've done a few. But time and time again I keep noticing that people forget the absolute best tool out there:

Unparalleled in its potential, smart bookmarking provides massive functionality, the likes of which can only be approached by an army of browser plug-ins. And all you need to know is some simple search query strings, and if you're feeling fancy some javascript.

Here are a few ways that smart bookmarks can rock your world:

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Who is watching you?

Who's against video surveillance?

When you walk in to a store, there's a good chance you are being video taped. We accept that stores will have "security cameras".

Many of us, including me, would consider that to be an encroachment on, if not an invasion of, our privacy—if we were even aware of being taped at all. They record our likeness (even on bad hair days) purchased items and those we merely looked at, the time and duration of visit and the people we were with.

Generally, the purpose of walking into a store is to make or consider making a purchase, to the direct financial benefit of the store owner. The personal benefit of increased security that video surveillance affords us exists. However, to amount to much, it needs to be ubiquitous.

Some of us, including me, would consider a level of surveillance to be a reasonable balance between security and privacy. Before you hasten to disagree, answer this question:

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The last February roundup

We have a strange one for you guys this week: a Monday Roundup completely lacking in articles on SEO. How very strange.

What we do have, on the other hand, is Avinash Kaushik on 'not useful' KPI's, common usability errors made in the name of usability, Googles 1000's machines per query, and Microsofts stolen phone prototype.

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More Google Analytics Power User Tips

Next up in the Google Analytics Power User series is one of my favorite reports, the Traffic Sources: AdWords report. This report enables you to dive into and optimize the performance of your AdWords Campaigns like not other (No surprise that there is such a tight integration between Google's AdWords and Google Analytics. One of the primary drivers for Google to give away there analytics products is to empower people to improve their websites so that they can more effectively and efficiently spend their ad dollars with Google. Smart move.)

Within the AdWords reporting section of Google Analytics there are two different reports, the AdWords Campaigns report and the Keyword Positions report. To get the most out of these two reports you need to have your AdWords account linked (configured) with your Google Analytics account (For more information see Step 7 in Part 2: Account setup )

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Shopping for video games on the Future Shop website (www.futureshop.com) can be a very frustrating experience.

They let you pick your platform (e.g. Xbox 360), but once you've done that, results are displayed alphabetically only:

To find a game, you must know its full and exact title. For example, my nephew told me he wanted "End War" for his birthday. He even sent me a photo of the box, to ensure I bought the right one:

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not that kind of canon

Finally, its time to spread the word! Search engines have got their act together and have given us a tag to help deal with duplicate content. This is something that people have been waiting on for years and now Google, Yahoo! And MSN have got on board and given us a Canonical URL tag.

Building a profitable website is difficult enough without having to deal with the constant worry of duplicate content issues. There are a large number of reasons as to why duplicated pages may appear on a website and probably most of us have had to deal with this at one time or another (especially if you run an ecommerce site). Developers should be spending more time on building a better user experience and should now spend less time dealing with how identical pages are interpreted. It's about time that the guessing games stop with search engines trying to figure out which page should be considered the original source and its way over due that they are now giving us the option of helping them out with this issue.

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you want to forge strong, high quality links

Link building is one of the more difficult tasks a website owner or seo will need to tackle on their way to a high ranking site. Luckily there are a ton of tools out there that make the job quite a bit easier. Let's take a look.

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a heavy roundup

Lots has been going on this week. We've got a new canonical link tag being accepted by all three major search engines, a cool new online text editor from mozilla, personal email campaigns, Zoomable User Interfaces, paper based information design, and a cool new script from our very own Erik Vold.

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When you are deciding how to allocate your online dollars you will want to have a solid understand of how your campaigns have performed in the past. A great way to get a quick high level handle on this is with the All Traffic Sources Report.

So let's start with a couple of definitions. What do Source and Medium mean?

Source is the referring site, that is, the domain of the site that a visitor has clicked on; a link that has taken them over to your site. Some common referral sources are search engines (both paid and organic), a link from an affiliate's site, a blog or article, an email, a partner or any other site that has a link to you. It could even be a document with an embedded link to your site.

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Designing a good search box isn't difficult. So why do so many sites feature such poor search boxes?

We have boxes with unnecessary words and instructions:

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