published by Dan in Blogging | SEO | Usability
For people who maintain blogs, it would be fine to write about anything you wish. But bear in mind, people today are after updated information. Preferably, you should have a reliable source such as Google or Yahoo news to which you can use as reference. You don’t have to rewrite what you read. You can use their content but don’t forget to link back or stress them in block quotes and a source link at the bottom of the content you copied.
This way, you cannot be tagged as stealing content. There are a lot of sites out there who copy content and could care less about what other people would say. To people who are up to date with the blogosphere today, it is obvious that such a practice is deemed unethical and unprofessional. If you want to establish yourself as a professional blogger, it would be best to give credit where credit is due.
There will also be times you would want to write about something but it may not necessarily be relevant to current hot topics. You can always do a simple search and find related topics that are normally dated to which you can use as reference. You can even pick up a couple of keywords from them which in the end can help improve your rankings as far as SEO considerations are concerned.
Remember, content is king. It will always be sought over the web. But to make sure that you are among the crawled sites, be sure your content is not passé. If so, you are losing more than ranking; you are losing readers as well.
published by Dan in SEO | Tools & Resources | Web Development | Web Technology | Writing for the Web
If you happen to have a website and want to generate income from it using Google adsense, it would be wise to determine how you place your ads. We see this option from Google once we are ready to create our own ads but while the Google tutorials are something to guide us, it all really depends on where you place your ads.
For the record, Google allows you to place a maximum of 3 ads on a certain page. Going over that will leave you a blank space. So for blogs, if you want to maximize the advertising spots, it would be wise to place your ads near the posts. Remember that your posts are the ones which changes frequently and to broaden the ads that will be shown on your site, fresh content is usually the keywords that they will rely on.
Just be sure not to overdo it. While it would be best to place Google ads for content, it may render your site worthless if you forget about why the people are there. Formatting is still essential. Blogs are meant to provide information and if you screw that up, chances are you may not get the visitors who will eventually be clicking those ads to generate your revenue.
This has been proven already. Placing them near posts raises the bar of potential ads that may be of interest to your visitors. Just bear in mind, if you don’t update or have good ads, why would a visitor become interested in them if they see recurring ads each time they land on your page?
published by Dan in SEO | Tools & Resources | Web Development | Website Analytics
For some people who want to get traffic in a hurry, some pay third party companies in directory submissions. Some charge a reasonable rate, sometimes at 4 cents per directory and considering that there are a large number of directories on the web today, it is bound to escalate at prices beyond your imagination. This scheme of submitting your site at a “per directory” option is indeed tempting since it looks cheap. But once you accumulate it, you will be surprised at the bill you will get if you don’t keep track.
Regardless, this is a form of search engine optimization that your site will surely benefit from. Not all people who put up websites have the time and effort to do research and do the online marketing practices needed to be able to get the necessary exposure these days. Apparently, some people are likewise hesitant to shell out some cash since the validity of the claims of some services are sometimes categorized in scams.
But in reality, there are really people who do this as a specialization. The best bet you can get in locating these services is to ask around or perhaps read forums that focus a lot on web development and search engine optimization. While you are at it, you can follow the conversations. You can pick a lot of tips from how they go and for sure the rest will be easily understandable.
That is all you need to do and you can be pointed to the right direction to help your site flourish and return the expected results that you have in mind when you started out on a site.
published by Dan in SEO | Web Development | Website Analytics
So you have your site up and the next thing you want to know is for the whole world to know that you exist. How do you go about it? Well for starters, don’t expect an overnight success as far as obtaining a well-optimized site is concerned. SEO can be achieved but it needs the element of time. It may take some months to be discovered and it all depends on the online marketing practices that you will apply.
SEO is not based on how sophisticated your site is programmed and presented. It has to establish itself as a reliable source and answer to most queries done online. Patience is needed as well as you have to wait for indirect ways to which your site will mature itself. Some turn to content generation and use of keywords which can speed up the process. But it does not come easy.
Vying for the same slot and exposure is the thing in mind of most web developers today. Whether you are employing such strategies such as link building or comment marketing, you need to wait a bit. Site optimization can only settle down after it has been properly crawled on.
Similar to business, you have to plant your seeds to gain exposure and popularity. In this case, link popularity will set in once you have properly applied the various means of online marketing. Turning to more strategies such as perhaps social bookmarking or even article marketing will help but it still needs the curing time to establish your site. In short, you should first invest everything and before you know it, your site will get a good ranking with the search engines today.
published by Dan in Blogging | SEO | Web Development | Website Design
Turning to the different scripting techniques to make your website stand out above the rest of website designs today may be something that will not always be good. For one thing, web site design does play a role in SEO but if your site does not load fast enough, you may eventually lose the potential visitor. It shall always be what is in your site that will matter to them as information is what they are after.
This is not to say that you should not consider extravagant web designs. In fact, readers may even love you for it. But if you don’t use optimized designs that are concerned with making sure that your page loads faster, people will not be patient enough to see what you have to offer them.
Perhaps this is something that says a lot of the character of the web designer. For sure he is amazed at how new scripts and add-ons make a site tempting to check out. But at times, it is the developers of these web designs that is really the one that is being satisfied and not what visitors really want to see. When that happens, website optimization is obviously not met.
There are certain gauges to determine how a site is optimized. Content and keywords used in them is perhaps the best source of them all. For one thing, when you do search queries, you don’t see them looking for design. It’s all about the keywords. Focus on that and then think of an ideal but tempting design that will keep your guest coming back for more.
published by Dan in Blogging | SEO | Web Development | Website Analytics | Website Standards | Writing for the Web
While there are various commercial sites where you can generate income from your site, bear in mind that there are also private ones who may want to advertise on your site. The manner of finding you is easy; they found you while searching for potential partners. While it may seem that it is a long shot, the validity of it all is the most important thing.
If you happen to get an email all of a sudden asking you if you wanted to accommodate certain requests as buying ad spots on your site or even certain posts, you will be amazed at how much people would pay you for it. One entry can make a difference and while it may seem low at first, imagine the number of advertisers who would do the same thing? In fact, the more posts you have the better since it would mean that you are offering quite a number of spots that can allow advertisers to choose from.
As far as payment for these ad spots is concerned, it would be wise to seek advance payments. For example, if they want to have a spot all to themselves for a year, payments made online like perhaps Paypal is fair enough. You can specify the size, number of words or even limitations (which is perhaps rare and dependent of the site where they will be advertised). Of course you would want ads that do not disrupt the flow of your content.
Finally, if they find you, it only means one thing. You have done a great job in marketing your site and it is safe to say that your site is optimized on the web after all.
published by Dan in Blogging | Web Development | Web General | Web Technology | Website Analytics | Website Design
When it comes to putting up sites these days, we can see a fair amount of people left with two choices, blog sites or websites. Some may ask what is the difference between the two since they can both be hosted using any domain and maintained using the standard ways of search engine optimization. Between the two, it seems that blog sites are easier to maintain since with software such as Wordpress or TypePad, you can easily just compose and save your blog entries and even add an image or two and you can start building on rapport on the web.
Websites on the other hand are known for requiring the need of advanced scripting and programming languages such as PHP or CSS. Not all people can easily understand how they can use these software and all they care about is putting up a site, adding some content and then applying certain scripts to get their website up and running. These programming languages are actually being studied by most people since they all know that websites are something that most businesses need right now to establish web presence.
Putting up a blog seems to be simple but it does require some scripting to get traffic. Blogs have so far evolved from the usual online diary belief into something that can be made profitable. Through adsense and some text link ads, blogs can generate good revenue if you really focus on building them. Its all about content generation using main keywords in demand in cyberspace today. That is where the profit lies these days.
published by Dan in Blogging | Web Development | Web General | Website Standards
When it comes to being among the optimized and top preferences that will come up when it comes to searching for certain topics, people who are planning to put up websites should focus a lot on unique domain names. This makes it more user-friendly and easier find, especially if you want your target visitors to easily find you on the web.
Now this may not necessarily be easy. For one thing, a large part of the preferred names that we have in mind are already taken. The domain name extensions such as .com or .net are rare these days and unless you are able to come up with a unique name to define your site, chances are you will have to consider other domain name extensions. But perhaps the difference between the two is that you may have to pour optimization efforts like content and meta tags so that your website can be counted among the crawled pages on the web.
Some people would use the placement of dashes in between words such as seo-blog to be able to register their ideal domain names. Others use plural words while others come up with changing certain letters like S to Z just to be able to provide a clear definition on what the site is all about. Domain names have a large bearing on what a site is all about and rather than keep them guessing, it would be best to use domain names that bring them exactly to the point.
published by Dan in SEO | Web Development | Web General | Website Design | Website Standards | Writing for the Web
When it comes to designing a website, people normally point at advanced programming such as PHP or CSS for reference. But there are software today that make it easier. There will still be the usual coding and commands that a site developed will have to get used to but generally, if you know logic, you can handle it yourself.
Normally, hiring a professional website designer would be the immediate solution to the problem for most. But getting the proper one will cost a lot, sometimes even more than the site URL and hosting. For most it would not matter since it is a one time thing. But seriously, if you are inclined to learn, you can use the help option or even get simple tutorials online on basic to advanced programming.
It may all sound simple but most of these seasoned website programmers started out the same way. You will be surprised to find that they have not really garnered any specific dedicated studies towards web programming as most of these software are new to them. In fact, you may be surprised that they would know the latest software when in fact they claim to have learned it long before it was introduced on the web.
This is not to discredit what web programmers do these days. But there are people who do that. The thing is, if they can do it then why can’t you? It is all about taking it one step at a time. There will be basic to advanced modes and once you get the hang of it, the pieces of the puzzle will fall into place and you may even pick up a lesson or two when it comes to building good websites.
published by Dan in Web Development | Web Technology | Website Design
- Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) - Powerful XML-based markup user interface markup language and application markup language in one. Has the combined functionality of various user interface markup languages such as XUL, SVG, and CSS. Created by Microsoft.
- OpenLaszlo - Supports Flash. Newest versions 4.x and releases also supports Dynamic HTML (DHTML). As you have already probably deduced from the name it is open-source.
- MXML - Markup language for Micromedia’s Flex language. Like OpenLaszlo, MXML-defined user interfaces are rendered by Flash Player.
- GIMP Toolkit/GTK+ - Created primarily for GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) but has evolved in a feature rich toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces that is cross platform compatible. The primary platform that uses GTK+ is still the X Window System but it is also already supported Windows 2000 and upwards, as well as newer versions of Mac OS X.
- Curl - If you have heard of Curl before and thought it was actually a programming language then don’t worry because you are right. Curl IS an object-oriented programming language AND a markup language. Curl was actually developed by MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science as a research project (Curl Project) but due to it’s success now a corporation (to which site I linked to) fully dedicated to bringing commercial products.
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