SEO Starters Guide for Beginners | Search Engine Optimization

According to a poll I conducted, just over 1 out of 10 people don’t think SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is mandatory as a designer; and what really surprised me is about 24% don’t even know what SEO is! If you’re among the quarter of people who don’t know what SEO is or understand how it can help you, you should really read this article. This is an SEO guide for designers who want to learn about making it easier for websites or blogs to be found by search engines. I’ll explain the common mistakes made by designers and developers. Then I’ll provide some basic tips that you should be practicing to optimize your site for search engines.

Why Should You Learn About SEO?

• SEO isn’t only for online marketers. As a web designer or frontend developer, most on-site SEO is your responsibility.
• If your site is not search engine friendly, you might be losing a lot of traffic that you’re not even aware of. Remember, besides visitors typing in “www.yourwebsite.com” and backlink referrals; search engines are the only way people can find your site.
• There are many benefits of getting a high ranking site. Let’s use ndesign-studio.com for example. I have, on average, about 14,000 visitors a day. About 40 – 45% of that traffic comes from search engines (about 6000+ referrals a day). Imagine, without search engine referrals, I would be losing thousands of visitors everyday. That means, I’m risking losing potential clients too.
• SEO is also a value-added service. As a web designer/developer you can sell your SEO skills as an extended service.

The Basics: How Search Engines Work?

First, let’s look at how crawler-based search engines work (both Google and Yahoo fall in this category). Each search engine has its own automated program called a “web spider” or “web crawler” that crawls the web. The main purpose of the spider is to crawl web pages, read and collect the content, and follow the links (both internal and external). The spider then deposits the information collected into the search engine’s database called the index.

When searchers enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index.

What makes or breaks a search engine is how well it answers your question when you perform a search. That’s based on what’s called the search engine algorithm which is basically a bunch of factors that the search engine uses to say “hey is this page RELEVANT or NOT?”. The higher your page ranks for these factors (yes some factors are more important than others) than the higher your page will get displayed in the search engine result pages.

Your Job As a Search Engine Optimizer

Each search engine has its own algorithm in ranking web pages. Understanding the general factors that influence the algorithm can affect your search result position, and this is what SEO experts are hired for. An SEO’s job has two aspects: On-Site and Off-Site.

On-Site SEO: are the things that you can do on your site, such as: HTML markups, target keywords, internal linking, site structure, etc.

Off-Site SEO: are the things that you have much less control of, such as: how many backlinks you get and how people link to your site.

This is a guide for designers and developers. The main concern is the On-Site aspects. Secretly though, if you do your job right… and design a beautiful site… and/or produce useful content… you’ll get Off-Site backlinks and social bookmarks without even lifting a finger.

Top 9 SEO Mistakes Made by Web Designers and Developers

1. Splash Page

I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage. The worst case — the “enter” link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

2. Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

3. Image and Flash Content

Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.

4. Overuse of Ajax

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

5. Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (ie. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

6. “Click Here” Link Anchor Text

You probably see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

7. Common Title Tag Mistakes

Same or similar title text:
Every page on your site should have a unique <title> tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t
that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because every single blog post will have the same text “Site Name > Blog Archive >” at the beginning of the title tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it
should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.

Exceeding the 65 character limit:
Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including
spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

Keyword stuffing the title:
Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:

“Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures”

“Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.

8. Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms “abstract” and “dj“.

9. Unfriendly URLs

Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

Example of Friendly URL: domain.com/page-title
Example of Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=12356

General SEO Do’s and Don’ts

Let me tell you WHAT TO DO by telling you WHAT NOT TO DO:

Don’t Ignore Your Audience

Write about topics your audience cares about. Like what? Find out, by conducting a poll (like I did), scan some relevant bulletin boards or forums, look for common topics in customer emails, or do some keyword research. There are great free keyword tools like the Google Keyword Tool or SEO Book’s Keyword Tool and loads more. The plan is not to spend your life doing keyword research but just to get a general idea of what your visitors are interested in.

Don’t Be Dense About Keyword Density

Once you have a topic for readers; help search engines find it. Keyword Density is the number of times a keyword appears in a page compared to the total number of words. You want to make sure your keywords are included in the crucial areas:

• the Title Tag
• the Page URL (friendly URL)
• the Main Heading (H1 or H2)
• the first paragraph of content.
• at least 3 times in the body content (more or less depending on amount of content and if and only if it makes sense).

Most people aim for a keyword density of 2% (i.e. use the keyword 2 times for every 100 words). But what if your keyword phrase is “SEO for Web Designers and Web Developers” how many times can you repeat that before it sounds just plain unnatural? Write for your readers not for search engines. If you follow the tips
in this article you’ll be writing naturally for your readers; which works for the search engines too.

Warning: Do not over fill your page with the same keywords or you might be penalized by search engines for keyword stuffing.

Don’t Ignore Relatives

In this article, it makes sense to mention topics like “keyword research”, “search engine crawlers” and “title tag use”, but what if I mentioned a highly trafficked term like “cell phone plans”… kind of out of context right? So use other keywords and topics that make sense to your audience, the search engine measures keyword relations to determine relevancy too.

• Cars and Tires (yes)
• Web Design and Flying Monkeys (no…well sometimes)

Don’t Be Afraid of Internal Linking

Do you want the search engine to see every page on your website? Help the search engine spider do its job. There should be a page (like a sitemap or
blog archives) that links to all the pages on your site.

Tip: You can promote the more important pages by inserting text links within body content. Make sure you use relevant linking text and avoid using “click here” (as mentioned earlier).

Don’t Ignore Broken Links

You should always search for and fix the broken links on your site. If you’ve removed a page or section, you can use the robot.txt to prevent the spiders crawling and indexing the broken links. If you have moved a page or your entire website, you can use the 301 .htaccess to redirect to a new URL.

Tips: You can use the Google Webmaster Tool to find broken links and your 404 Not Found errors.

Don’t Be Inconsistent With Your Domain URL

To search engines, a www and a non-www URL are considered two different URLs. You should always keep your domain and URL structure consistent. If you start promoting your site without the “www”, stick with it.

Don’t Be Scared of Semantic Coding

Semantic and standard coding not only can make your site cleaner, but it also allows the search engines to read your page better.

Search Result Position

Coding and setting up your site to be SEO friendly can improve how well a search engine can access your website, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll end up at the top of the search engine result page (SERP). There are many factors in determining the search result position, but here are the basics:

PageRank

Some professional SEO’s pay attention to Google’s PageRank and some don’t. In my experience it doesn’t hurt to have a high Google PageRank. It’s a nice little benchmark to let you know how important Google sees your web page as. You can improve your PageRank by following the tips above and building-up quality backlinks. If you want to learn how PageRank works, Smashing Magazine has a very good article.

Domain Age Before Beauty

You might be surprised to learn that domain age is also a factor in the search engine algorithm. Older domains have a history, and their content is looked at as more credible than the website that got started last week. Older domains sometimes get the edge in search results.

Be Patient

You may have done every single thing right., but your site is still not showing up in the search engines for your target keywords. Why? Because everything takes time. It takes time for the search engines to index and rank your site (especially for new domains). So, be patient.

Another reason — it could be the keywords that you’re trying to target are very competitive. Try altering the keywords on the page and you may have different results. Remember, you are competing with millions of web pages on the internet.

Resources to Help You Go Farther

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools allow you check the crawl statistics of your site. If you haven’t been using this great tool yet, login to the Google Webmaster Tools, then add and verify your site.

After you’ve verified your site, you can find out:

• When was the last time Googlebot crawled your site
• HTTP errors
• 404 Not Found errors
• External link counts
• What keywords people are using to link to your site
• What are the top search queries to your site
• And more.

Free SEO Tools

Here are some online SEO tools that you can use to check your PageRank, Link Popularity, Search Engine Position, Keyword Density, etc.

• www.pagerank.net
• www.iwebtool.com
• www.seochat.com/seo-tools
• www.webconfs.com
• tools.seobook.com

SEO Resources

Here are some external links where you can learn more about SEO:

• www.seomoz.org
• www.seochat.com
• searchenginewatch.com
• www.searchengineworld.com
• www.mattcutts.com

Final Remarks

Please note that I’m not a SEO expert (although I manage to get very high rankings on all my sites: N.Design Studio, Best Web Gallery, and Web Designer Wall). The tips I share in this SEO guide are based on self-taught knowledge and years of web design experience.

Good Luck.

Created by: http://www.webdesignerwall.com

Paid Search Ad Testing

Jun 1, 2009 at 1:17pm ET by Andrew Goodman of Search Engine Land

“Horror” is an apt term for how many experienced paid search practitioners respond to the newbie’s mistake of optimizing paid search ads solely to CTR.

Before getting to the nuances of ad testing, though, it’s important to emphasize yet again that rapid setup of ad rotation, for testing purposes, was the gift given to us by the Google Gods in 2002 when they rolled out what was then called AdWords Select. Seven years later, many marketers have not fully accepted the gift.

Although few drivers are as key to performance as the ad copy, many campaign managers have a tendency to neglect ad testing to this day. There is still much more industry “noise” in the day-to-day tactical chatter about two other levers: (1) keywords and (2) bids. In those areas, the newbie’s attention is easily grabbed by vendors who have nothing to sell but more keyword discovery, and more frequent bid changes.

By contrast, ad refinement requires know-how, experience, and a testing methodology. It’s the guts of this little response engine you’re building. Don’t neglect it.

Optimize for maximum clickthrough rate (CTR)?

I’ll call it CTR for short, but it may include “other relevancy factors.” Today’s paid search systems no longer use CTR alone as a proxy for relevance and quality, for ranking purposes. They use “quality” measures that focus primarily on CTR. One of the reasons CTR is so important to the engines is revenue.

As such, many of the built-in tools in the campaign management platforms have a high-CTR bias.

When you enable a new AdWords account, your ad rotation setting is defaulted to “Optimize.” If you’re taking advantage of ad rotation, the system will automatically favor “winning” ads that have a high CTR. You need to change this to “Rotate” if you want to take control back.

Dynamic keyword insertion is a trendy tool that can help you match the ad title or body copy elements to what the user typed into the search engine. Typically, this raises CTR’s. It’s very popular, but again, should be used for special purposes only.

The agency world—at least the more cynical side of it—also has a pro-CTR bias. If the client fails to ask performance-based questions, and is treating paid search more like a media buy than a “tweakable lead generation machine,” it’ll be tempting for some agencies to turn on the above tools and to optimize for higher CTR especially if they’re paid as a percentage of spend. And some in-house managers might also want the line item for search to go up, as opposed to improving ROI. Higher CTR means more clicks, and therefore a higher spend.

(For the same reasons, they might overbid the campaign into an ad position that is higher than economically desirable.)

By extension, although they’re certainly going to say otherwise if you ask intelligent questions about filtering, analytics, negative keywords, and the like, Google’s default advice will carry the same bias. Why wouldn’t it? Higher CTR’s mean more clicks which mean more revenue for Google. And meanwhile, they can make more users happy.

That’s fine if you’re not concerned about paying higher costs per acquisition for the extra volume. But optimizing strictly to CTR is generally seen as a rookie mistake by more performance-oriented search marketers.

Optimize for maximum ROI?

So now what? Just test the ads for a few weeks and an apparently statistically-significant number of sales conversions or leads, and kill the ones with the worst cost-per-sale or cost-per lead numbers, right? After all, that cost per conversion number is right there in your AdWords interface as long as you have AdWords Conversion Tracker installed. And pausing or deleting the non-performing ads is just a click away.

If your approach is cautious and a “pristine” ROI (as opposed to total profit) is paramount among your objectives, that’s fine. But it’s often the wrong move.

What if you happened to have two ads in your test (of four or five ads, say) that tied for the lead in ROI, but one had a significantly higher CTR? It wouldn’t hurt to favor the higher CTR one, would it? Even if your criteria were solely internal to your company. Assuming profitability to begin with, total profit would be higher if you chose the high ROI ad that also got more clicks than the ad it was tied with for highest ROI.

Unfortunately, that only rarely happens, but it illustrates the potential you could be missing out on.

Go for the “double win”

If you’re rewarding yourself (but not The Google) with lower CTR ads all the time, the economics of that can hurt you because the system’s tuned in the house’s favor.

In addition to potentially hurting your ad position and therefore click volume, an ROI-only approach to testing ads will actually hurt the ROI itself. If you want to regain the lost volume, you’ll have to increase bids above where many competitors are bidding. That’ll cut into the “better ROI” you temporarily achieved. The house wins. 🙁

Why? Google, in particular, places such a huge weight on keyword CTR in its ad ranking algorithm, that you could be hurting keyword Quality Scores if you’re always overfiltering and settling for nice high ROI ads that also have poor CTR.

In other words, if optimizing for pure CTR is just plain careless, optimizing for high ROI alone can be the “easy way out” that hurts total profit and also eats into ROI itself. When you’ve refined to the point where you’ve got ads with higher ROI, you need to hold out for further discovery so that you can find—among contending high-ROI ads—the high-ROI ad among those that has the highest CTR possible. I call this a “double win.”

That’s not easy. But your chances of finding one of these are increased if you’ve been through a staged ad testing process and are now doing some kind of proprietary multivariate ad testing. A partial factorial approach to testing from a potential pool of 64 ads, say, gives you a greater chance of stumbling on that “genetic freak” of an ad that just happens to do a little better on both counts than all the rest.

Note: most of the literature you’ll read on multivariate testing applies to landing pages. Most advertisers have not yet thought to apply this to the ads. And in the ad testing field, we have certain advantages if we’re conducting the tests with our own methods or tools. Luckily, tools like Google Website Optimizer introduced a “pruning” feature to allow advertisers to arbitrarily give up on certain losing elements or combinations prior to test completion to reduce testing time. In the ad testing field, advertisers can “prune” a losing ad based on judgment, at any time.

Avoid subjectivity where you can

The above brief notes on methodology suggest that we can do a lot for the economics of our campaigns by sticking to a plan and trying various methods and various creative theories to achieve superior consumer response. Yet oftentimes we don’t get there because we don’t experiment enough. Either we’re content to stop too soon, or someone in authority (the famous HIPPO’s) vetoes an effective ad element because they deem it wrong somehow.

What about other considerations?

To be sure, there may be budget issues, brand or feel considerations, to say nothing of regulatory, seasonal, or factual concerns that stop you from testing everything to the ideal degree.

On the whole, many advertisers have a long way to go before their ad testing strategy is up to par. The first step for many is to ward off the industry-wide CTR-only bias, and the second step is to look again at the importance of boosting CTR if ROI has become the only benchmark for ad performance. Further refinement is possible with focus, patience, and a strong methodology.

An Introduction to A/B Testing and Multivariant testing

Design is very subjective in the print world and on the web.  Fortunately, internet marketing folks have it easier than print designers because they have the ability to test web pages they publish on the internet.  

A/B testing and multivariant testing is one of the primary tools in any data-driven environment.  You can think of it as a big cage match. Send in your champion versus several other challengers and out comes a victor.  Of course, on the web there’s less blood and more statistics, but the principle remains the same: how do you know who will win unless you force them to fight to the death?

A/B Testing lets you compare several alternate versions of the same web page simultaneously and see which produces the best outcome, e.g., increased click-through, engagement, or any other metric of your choice.

Ok, What is A/B Testing, Really?

A/B Testing is a way of conducting an experiment where you compare a control group to the performance of one or more test groups by randomly assigning each group a specific single-variable treatment.  Let’s break this down.

First, you decide on an experiment.  Maybe you’re building a web application that forces users to register and you want to experiment on your landing page.  You want to see if you can improve the percentage of people who register.

For example, if 1000 people visit your landing page today and 200 of those people register then you have a conversion rate of 20%.  All else being equal, the landing page with the higher conversion rate is better.

Building Treatments

Once you know what you want to test you have to create treatments to test it.  One of the treatments will be the control, i.e., your current landing page.  The other treatments will be variations on that.  Here are some things worth testing:

• Layout. Move the registration forms around. Add fields, remove fields.
• Headings. Add headings. Make them different colors. Change the copy.
• Copy. Change the size, color, placement, and content of any text you have on the page.

You can have as many treatments as you want, but you get better data more quickly with fewer treatments.  I rarely conduct A/B tests with more than four treatments.

Randomization Means Control

You can’t just throw up one landing page on Tuesday and another landing page on Thursday and compare the conversion rates — there’s no reason to believe that the conversion rate for users who visit on a Tuesday is the same for users who visit on a Thursday.  In fact, they’re probably not.

A/B testing solves this by running the experiment in parallel and randomly assigning a treatment each person who visits.  This controls for any time-sensitive variables and distributes the population proportionally across the treatments..

An Example

Say we are testing mortgage loan messages and we’re conducting an experiment on our landing page.  Our goal is to improve the conversion rate by at least 10%. When a new visitor arrives on the landing page we randomly assign them one of three treatments: the control, Treatment A, or Treatment B.

Let’s also say these treatments involve the headline copy.  For example, the control treatment’s headline copy might be “Record low mortgage rates. Apply Now.” One of the experimental treatments might have “4.3% 30 yr morgage rates— click here.”

You run the experiment for a few days and get the following data:

From the data above you’d conclude that Treatment B is the winner, but you have to be careful — if the conversion rates were closer or if your sample size were smaller you wouldn’t be able to tell which treatment won.  For example, can you say for certain that Treatment A is better than the control treatment, or could it just be due to chance?

The bottom line is this, multi variant testing is important, and it can positively impact your bottom line.  If you’re a small business owner or large company not taking action, this is the time to knock out your competitors and grow your business.   Take the results up above. If you sell insurance products, loans, or just collect leads off the internet, wouldn’t you like to increase your conversion rate by 6%?  You decide…

Interested in landing page optimization?

This directory is meant as a comprehensive guide to companies, products, and services that can help you.  If you feel like we’ve left off a web site resource, please leave the URL in the comment section below.

Conversion Testing Companies – These companies focus primarily on conversion rate improvement through testing of alternative website designs.

• SiteTuners – Specializes in very-large-scale testing. As Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant can implement A-B Splits or Multivariate/Taguchi testing. Larger tests are done with proprietary TuningEngineSM technology. Choice of flat fee or pure performance based payment options.
• Kefta – Recently acquired by Acxiom Corporation (Nasdaq: ACXM). Kefta focuses on testing an personalized content delivery for Global 2000 (very large) enterprises.
• Optimost – Uses A-B split and Multivariate/ Taguchi testing. Makes unrealistic claims about possible test sizes on their website (“billions” of possible versions in a multivariate test). Charges by getting a client into an ongoing subscription of tests. Recently acquired by Interwoven.
• Omniture Test&Target – Focus is on larger e-tailers. Charges upfront fees and then per-page for content served even after the test is completed. Recently acquired by Omniture.
• Conversion Rate Experts – U.K. based conversion consulting company. Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants.
• TaguchiNow – Site seems very hype-heavy and talks about some special secret about how to make Multivariate/Taguchi testing work for online marketing – there is no secret.
• Widemile – Taguchi testing for interactive agencies.
• Maxymiser – UK-based testing company.

Conversion Testing Tools – These companies primarily provide tools for conversion testing.

• OnDialog – Visual creation of landing pages with SiteTuners TuningEngineSM automated testing system built in.
• Google Website Optimizer – FREE A-B Split and Mutlivariate tool available to all AdWords users in their account.
• SiteSpect – Testing tools intercept traffic after it leaves the site and shows the end-user the correct content. Does not require I.T. support or changes to your original pages. Designed for larger companies.
• Verster – A-B Split and Multivariate testing tool provider – full-service engagements are also available.
• Hiconversion
• SplitAnalyzer

Targeting & Personalization – Companies that improve conversions via dynamic personalization of individual visitor content.

• Magnify360
• [x+1]

Information & Resources – These websites provide articles, blogs, and tips on conversion tuning.

• Blog.SiteTuners.com – Tim Ash’s blog about conversion rate improvement.
• Google Conversion University – Google’s excellent collection of articles on conversion tuning and other aspects of web analytics.
• GrokDotCom.com – Bryan Eisenberg’s conversion blog.
• TheSiteIsDead.com – Matthew Roache’s blog.
• The Landing Page Design Toolbox – 100 Tools, Tips and Resources.

Web Analytics & Tracking – Most web analytics software companies offer support for basic A-B split or multivariate testing. Some also offer specific support for testing engagements.

• Google Analytics – Very comprehensive and free in the ASP version. Can also buy server licenses to run on your own machines.
• Omniture – Web analytics company focusing on larger clients. Recently acquired Offermatica.
• WebSideStory
• WebTrends
• FireClick – Owned by software industry e-commerce company Digital River. Offers comprehensive web analytics suite.

Conversion & Usability Consultants – These companies focus primarily on consulting or complete site redesigns meant to improve conversions.

• FutureNow – Focused on website conversion consulting. Uses persona-based “Persuasion Architecture” to improve conversion rates.
• Interactive Marketing
• WebSiteOptimization
• Web Site Evaluations

General Online Marketing – These companies focus on several aspects of online marketing, but offer some kind of landing page testing.

• Clix Marketing – Performance based PPC and conversion improvement.
• WebShare – Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant and full service search and conversion marketing firm.
• LunaMetrics – Web analytics and metrics company focusing on conversion consulting.
• Memetrics
• IdeaArc Media (formerly Inceptor)
• Stratigent
• Brooks Bell Interactive

Market Research & Case Studies – These companies publish reports and case studies involving landing page optimization.

• MarketingExperiments.com
• Marketing Sherpa
• Jupiter Media
• Incisive Media

General Usability Resources – These companies or organizations have a broad focus on usability.

• Nielsen Norman Group – Usability consultancy founded by recognized heavyweights Jakob Nielsen & Donald A. Norman
• User Interface Engineering
• Usability Sciences
• Intuitive Websites

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