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Helping Your SEO Along: How to Optimize Your Content
To rank high among search engine results, a lot of different website elements need to fall into place. But you don’t need to be an SEO expert to rank in search results. You can make a difference in your rankings simply by changing the writing on your pages. Here’s how.
First, it’s critical to know what keywords people are using to search for websites like yours. Use a free keyword research tool such as overture.com or Google’s keyword research tool to generate lists of words and phrases people are using to search for your subject.
Once you’ve chosen keywords, use them naturally in your website content. If you’re using a key phrase such as “diamond engagement rings,” break up the phrase so it flows naturally. Use your keyword once in the first paragraph, once in the last and a few times in the middle paragraphs. Concentrate on one keyword on each page; if you use secondary keywords, use them only where it’s natural. For optimal SEO, each page should contain approximately 200 words at minimum.
Good SEO is only part of a successful business website. Don’t sacrifice readability in your website content—each word has impact and works to sell. If you can balance good SEO with good sales writing, your website is sure to be a success.
Think Like a User
What’s the first question you ask yourself when you sit down to design a website? If it is “how can I incorporate every possible form of internet bling into this site?” then you’ve lost the plot. To really do your job right, you have to think like a user. Are you ready for heartbreak? Maybe you’d better sit down for this. Ready? OK. Rule number one is this:
The End User of Your Website Doesn’t Care About Your Flash Intro
You may think that the Flash animation, your pride and joy, which users see when they click on your site is the coolest thing ever, and it may well be. However, what users see is something that will take a few minutes to load. Web users are not known for infinite patience. In fact, web users are not known for having any patience.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t use your glitzy Flash animations, your labor of love. You can; just make sure that not only do you use one of those “skip intro” links, but it is placed where the first time visitor can actually see it. Everyone wants traffic for the site they’ve designed. The last thing you want is for visitors to be put off by long load time, an obscure interface and other inconveniences. The first and most important design principle to stick to is, keep it simple and make it easy for the user to get around your site.
They’re There for the Content
Even if your site is basically your web design resume, you would do well to bear in mind that the end user who visits your site is there for content. What does that mean to you, the designer? While a good looking site is nice to have, the most important thing is to have the content they want where they can find it easily. In other words, don’t bury the important stuff through a thousand glitzy rollover menus and don’t obscure important text by having a watermark photo in the background of the text that contrasts so little with the text that it makes it hard to read. Remember, the best sites are ’sticky’ you want people coming back to them, you don’t just want to impress first-time visitors. You want them to come back.
Don’t Make Them Think
The end user is there for your content. Most users don’t focus and concentrate when they’re browsing the web (that’s why they call it browsing). Make it easy for them to find what they want, or they will go elsewhere. Navigating your site should be obvious and self explanatory. If the navigation and architecture aren’t totally intuitive, the number of times the user has to stop and think of what to do next to get from point A to point B should be minimal. Think in terms of a clear structure, and leaving little visual clues to guide your user along.
The bottom line is simple: when designing a web page, go out of your way to make life easy for the end user.
How to Get Web Design Clients
Web clients are vital for your business, especially during this period when the economy is struggling. Many individuals are losing their jobs due to the state of the economy and how so many businesses are laying off employees. Due to this, many of these laid off individuals are going to try to start their own business to survive. Provide professional services, invoices, actions, and behaviors, and you will be able to survive this time and build your business into something you can be proud of.
It is important to be competitive in this age in order to compete with the many different web designers who exist on the internet. In this age, in order to compete with the many different web designers who exist on the internet, you need to be highly competitive and direct with would-be clients. Although you will at times receive “No’s”, for every 20 who reject you, you are going to receive at least 1 yes. In addition, treat your customers well as many of your new customers will come from existing customers who give referrals.
You can be competitive by being proactive. Do not merely post your electronic card out there and expect them to come to you. Instead, be actively searching out websites where you feel you can improve on them and contact the individuals who own them. Explain to them your feelings about their website and how you would like to show him or her how you can make them more money be redoing their webpage. Be tactful, courteous, and determined. Show them why you are confident and why your designs will be better than anything else they currently have. Never be afraid to take the initiative and your clients will respond to your skill and honesty.
Here are some tips and tricks on getting web design clients. First, do not be afraid to follow your instincts. Your instincts can set you apart from individuals who may seem better than you because they learned their trade, whereas you have it inside of you; it’s natural. Do not be afraid to contact any individual, even those whom you know and that you frequent using their services like a hair stylist, small book store, popular sandwich store, etc. You are limited only by the creativity which exists inside yourself and once you realize this, the possibilities are endless.
Remember to always act professional, get your work in on time, and be courteous to your web design clients. True professionalism begins with your behavior and how you interact with not only the human portion of the project, but also the work itself and the effort you put into it. If you work from your home, put on a professional face and give the project the care you would if you were working from an office under the scrutiny of a supervisor. Remember, your web design clients will return to you for more business if you treat them as if both they and your project are the most important things to you in the world.
Flash content now spidered by Google
It looks like the battle against sites built on All Flash technology may have lost some ground. One easy way to steer development away from “flashy” sites with things flying in and out everywhere has been that Flash sites “can’t be indexed by search engines”.
Google killed this argument last week when it announced that this is a shortcoming of the past.
from Google Webmaster Central Blog:
“Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.”
To me, Flash site development still tends toward tiny unreadable text and annoyingly long page transitions. I like Flash, in it’s place - there are things that html still cannot do that flash can ( even with the help of ajax)… But do we really need more All Flash sites? […]
Download the new Nine Inch Nails for free
I am glad to see some bands are thinking out of the box. NIN and a few other bands have decided to let fans download their music for free. Big Head Todd did it back in December - but they just gave away the MP3s. Nine Inch Nails let’s you download their new album in 6 different flavors…
- high-quality MP3s (87 mb)
- FLAC lossless (259 mb)
- FLAC high definition 24/96 (942 mb)
- M4A apple lossless (263 mb)
- high definition WAVE 24/96 (1.5 gb)
All you have to to is give em your email address to send you the link. 100% free and legal tunes, “all files are 100% DRM-free.” What are you waiting for, download the free NIN album now. Oh, and have your torrent client ready. Most of the downloads (except the MP3s) are by torrent.
PHP - Pagination With PEAR and MySQL
We’ve all come across pagination, from using google to browsing amazon you’ll have seen pagination before. It’s the numbered pages at the bottom of a given page to paginate the results into multiple pages.
Okay so the usual way of paginating mysql result sets within php involves code that looks something like this:
$total_pages = ceil($total_records / $products_per_page);
for($i = 1; $i < = $total_pages; $i++){
echo "” . $i . “”;
}
if($_GET['page'] >= 1){
$current_page = $_GET['page'];
} else {
$current_page = 1;
}
$offset = ($current_page - 1) * $products_per_page;
$sql = “SELECT * FROM table_name “;
$sql .= “LIMIT ” . $offset . “,” . $products_per_page;
While this is fine for quick hack job scripts. We as programmers have access to a solid framework in the name of PEAR. Within PEAR a package called Pager can help us enormously.
Paginating with PEAR […]
Can designers now ignore what a site looks like in IE6?
Can someone explain to me why a designer thinks that he can just ignore what a website looks like in Internet Explorer? Hey - if you want to boycott IE on your personal site, more power to you. But the reality is that IE6 exists and it doesn’t support PNGs and a bunch of other stuff that would be helpful.
It has always been a challenge to design for multiple browsers, especially if you have let go of evil table layouts. With the addition of IE7, we have some additional challenges. But the reality is that IE6 will be around for a while. Can we expect all of our clients and their site’s viewers to upgrade or buy a mac or switch to Firefox? I think not - I still have clients use AOL and still have no idea that there is a web outside of AOL.
Seriously - how can a site that looks like this in IE6 end up on cssmania…
[…]
BBPress theme Crystal : updated
There has been alot of interest in the BBPress theme, Crystal - so I went ahead and improved-slash-updated it for the current version of BBPress, “Desmond” version 0.8. I fixed the issues with cross-browser compatibility and the code now validates. And no more bugs (that I can see).
You can view the demo here and download the updated code here.
google-hosted gmail for your domain
I have been testing the new gmail “google apps for your domain” service for some months now with great results. Although, when I first switched over, the service was down for a day or so and I panicked. Mail was being returned to senders and I thought I had made a big mistake. I temporarily went back to my normal mail server, but the amount of spam the filters were not catching was too much to bear. So, I went back to hosted gmail and haven’t had a problem since. I tried to keep my domain’s mail server as a backup server, but then all of my client’s email (on the same server) defaulted to server - so I bit the bullet and deleted the backup mail server settings. […]
IE7 standalone runs alongside IE6
I have been dreading the thought of “upgrading” to Internet Explorer 7 for the simple fact that I need to know what my CSS design looks like in IE6 too?!
I have been using my laptop with IE7 installed to fix the mess in some of my websites, but it didn’t seem like a long-term solution.
I remembered a while back hearing about a way to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer at once, but I figured it would be too much to ask for this to be possible with version 7. But, it is possible! […]