Monday January 12th Roundup

Everything is back to normal this week. The snow is gone, the staff is back, and the internet is abuzz about

In this weeks roundup: HTML 5—because we’ve had too much CSS3—, how search element segmentation will affect SEO, more ways to improve your analytics, and the release date of Google Chrome for Mac.

• Up until last week I had never read Huo Mah, which surprises me because his articles are fantastic. Last Thursday he took a crack at explaining how page segmentation will affect SEO. He discusses how this will affect link value, relevance, and cut down on spam.
• Yoast last week had a wonderful hack from Greasemonkey legend Joost. Joost has managed track SERPs in Google Analytics. Like any hack its a bit, well, hackish, but neat (and useful!) none the less.
• Click Equations has a nice primer to impression share. They discuss how to gather, understand and improve impression share. Useful for anyone getting your feet wet in PPC.
• Finally, no week would be complete without an article from Seomoz. Last week they were testing the value of internal anchor text. They report seeing no change on internal rankings in most cases. Not that surprising, but interesting to see given how prevalent this practice is.

• AListApart insists that the most needed feature of HTML5 is extensible semantics. They provide an interesting argument for the inclusion of extensibility through attributes.
• Broadchoice is reporting on their experience migrating from their old provider to Amazons cloud. What’s special about this is their experience moving ColdFusion to EC2.

• Avinash Kaushik is once again at it, with a list of fantastic ways to improve your analytics.
• Conversion Rate Experts have 5 reasons to get obsessed with, you guessed it, conversion rate optimization. They nicely sum up why conversion rate optimization matters—beyond, of course, money.

• UsabilityPost has been contemplating the usability of comment forms. Not something I would have spent a lot of time linking about, but they make some nice observations about comment form layout and how that meshes poorly about how we think about “signing” comments.
• Good Usability has a nice comment on the use of numerical links (or ‘1,2,3 links’). By numerical links I mean the kind of numbered links you see at the bottom of, say, google. Sometimes these links are required, but I agree with the author that the usability of these links are very rarely considered, and result in guessing games where users have to figure out whether the link they are clicking is going to take them to their, say, date range, or whether its going to over/undershoot.

• Our miscellaneous story of the week comes not from blogs, but from ‘the media’. Google Chrome for Mac has a release date. Well, kinda. Well, ok, not really, but they plan to have it out before the first half of 2009 is over. If they can.
  Chrome is also setting itself up for extensions and other forms of customization (I hear greasemonkey being thrown about).Now where is my iPhone version, Google?