Google search and Adwords results differ based upon your locality. It is really nice to be able to look at search and Adwords results the way the SERP's will appear in that locality.

The quickest and easiest way I have found to do that is to add the region and a zip code from that region to the search results. I'll show you an example of how this works for me.

Let's do a search for orange county lasik using Google. Notice below that the PPC results include Houston, Tx based upon Google's geo-targeting of my ip address.

Part of usability testing includes the use of screen readers. A screen reader is a product that attempts to convert text on a web page to a text to speech format called braille output. These products are designed to assist visually impaired people using the Internet.

Fangs is a firefox extension that provides a down and dirty quick look at what a screen reader would interpret from a web page. Once the extension is installed just right click on the page and left click View Fangs. This page is displayed in three tabs:

• Screen reader output
• Headings List
• Links list

The page text is rendered as a screen reader would output the words. Headings are defined in blue identifying the level and links, bullets, lists and the like are identified in a grey color.

Many webmasters don't use an analytical approach to out rank their competitors.

Have you been down this road? Just drop links everywhere, anywhere, hoping that Google, Yahoo, and MSN will believe that you are generating natural links. Submitting to thousands of free directories, blog comment spamming, and hundreds of posts on a forum or two seems to be in vogue.

The search engines are not as good at identifying related, themed links as you might think at this point.... but I am confident that they will get better and better and better at it.

So, let discuss exactly how you can quantify the competition for a particular keyphrase rather than using random approaches that some other webmaster told you worked for them, in a totally unrelated niche, against different competition.

How good are you at finding the results you want using search engines? Advanced search operators can really be useful to narrow search results and keep your hair from falling out trying to weed through irrelevant results.

These are simply the most useful commands I have found helpful along with a little legend indicating which of the big three search engines these tips work on.

The results obtained with link related commands are often somewhat incomplete. Live search currently allows the +link command but this can change at any time. Google displays select links only and Yahoo includes more linkdomain and link data than the others.

There are other advanced search operators available, I just don't use them much. Here are the links to each engine's respective page. What do you find useful when sifting through SERP's looking for just the right results?

Advanced Google Search Operators

Usability is an important and often overlooked part of website design. Since usability testing may be too expensive for some webmasters I have included some basic information to consider when creating or rebuilding a website regardless of the niche or purpose of the site.

Everyone wants to impress people. Whether you use 6 syllable words or industry jargon it is easy to forget that not everyone is quite as up to date as you are about your content.

Not only that, but if you make visitors stop and think about what to do next too often, they will generally just leave your site. Keep things simple. Use words that a 6th grader would understand and make sure to organize things in such a manor that the visitor's scanning eye recognizes exactly what you are trying to convey to them and what they have to do next.