Wedding Photography and SEO Articles

What Does Your Web Design Do For You

Jul 31, 2008 Web Design

There are so many websites on the internet nowadays, so if you want a great website that stands out from the crowd, you are going to have to have brilliant web design incorporated into it.

A website that is badly designed will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. If you want a website that is remembered for the right reasons, you are going to have to have a design that makes your website unique.

Your web design is the first thing that people notice when they arrive at your website. If you have an untidy website with bad graphics and terrible navigation, you are going to lose your readers and viewers right from the start. That is why web design is important in the process of creating a successful website. Whether it is a personal website or one that you intend to use for business purposes, it needs to be well designed and well maintained.

If you can grab the reader’s attention by graphics that are relevant and useful, text that is of a very high quality, colors and layouts that are easy on the eye, then you are half way there! Research has shown that more people buy from websites that are designed professionally and look trustworthy, rather than quickly made and with badly thought out designs.

So, you can see how important your web design really is now. There are many ways to improve your web design, both for free and by hiring someone else to do it for you. Which you choose will depend on your budget and your time frame. A busy web designer may not be able to fit you in for months.

How you layout your website is also very important. You may have lots of great content on your website that people would love to read, but what if they can’t find it? If you haven’t clearly and easily laid out your website in the web design process, your readers won’t be able to find any other pages. This could be disastrous if you are selling some kind of service or product.

All in all the web design aspect is only a small part of getting your website up and running, however, it is very important. When you are designing your website, remember to make it easy to navigate, concise and clear.

If you are not familiar with web design and all the aspects that go into creating a website, it may be worth your while looking for a professional web designer or a pre made template. Web designers come with different price tags all depending on where you get them from and what you need doing.

If you want a relatively simple design you will be looking at a fairly cheap price. If you are looking for a complex website with many features you can expect to pay a fair amount of money for it. A good designer will include you all throughout the process. You will be able to approve the website as many times as required.

Ready-made templates are great if you don’t have the budget for a professional designer and don’t have the time to learn how to create one from scratch. There are many free ones that you find on the Internet or ones that you can buy for a small amount of money.

Tags: Add new tag, Questions, Web Design

Italics - When you should use them

Jul 31, 2008 SEO

The purpose of italic typefaces is to aid comprehension by separating off certain words and phrases from their surrounding text. But when exactly should you use italics?

The basic purpose in typesetting a story or article for a book, newspaper or periodical, for print or online, is to enhance understanding of the text and thereby make the reading an easy, pleasant experience.

Roman type is the straightforward, upright type we read everyday in our newspapers, magazines and books, and on our monitors.

Italic is the ‘handwriting’ equivalent of whatever roman font we are reading. It has a sloping cursive quality that reminds us of the manual writing we learned in primary school.

Bold type is roman or italic font that has been emphasized by thickening and making it darker than the surrounding text.

The question is: when should we use which version of a particular typeface - roman, italic, or bold? The answer must focus on the reader’s needs and the reading experience.

It is obvious that for most copy the roman version of the chosen font should be used. This is because, having an upright face, it is the easiest to read and it is what readers expect.

Because the bold version of a font makes text stand out strongly, it is used for highlighting important words, phrases and sections. Thus headlines, decks and subheads set in bold will, along with pull-quotes and other tricks of the typesetter’s art, provide the casual scanner with clues as to what your article or story is all about. The judicious use of bold in this way will induce him or her to read the main story.

Bold however is too strong to be used, except very occasionally, within body text. To set off words from surrounding text is the main function of italics.

So when should you use italics exactly? Here’s a sort of check-list, a mixture of accepted practice and my personal opinion.

Most of these when-to-use-italics rules apply equally to words in body copy, head-lines and captions, and whether you are typesetting books, articles, stories or web-pages.

[1] The names of ships and aircraft; eg: The Caribbean Cruiser sank yesterday. This is the oldest when-to-use-italics rule. It allows the reader to quickly grasp what is being referred to in the message.

[2] The titles of poems; eg: As You Go Dancing by James Stewart is famous among the literati of the Arabian Gulf. This is another very traditional use of italics that enables quick reader-uptake.

[3] Foreign words; eg: We turned left and found ourselves in a cul de sac. Another very traditional use of italics that makes for quicker reading.

[4] The titles of books, newspapers, articles and stories occurring within a sentence without further explanation; eg: The Saturday edition of the Limerick Leader was always on the streets by Friday afternoon.

However titles that appear within larger works are not italicized but are set off in quotation marks; eg: ‘An Irishman’s Diary’ in the Irish Times is sometimes interesting.

[5] Latin phrases used to classify living things; eg: Many people wonder why mankind is referred to as homo sapiens. Another use of italics that has been around ab aeterno.

[6] Where a word is used as an example rather than for its meaning; eg: The word Kennedy is a proper noun. This is neater than setting the noun within single quotes as in: The word ‘Kennedy’ is a proper noun.

[7] For introducing new terms; eg: In Freudian psychology reference is made to the ego, the super-ego, and the id. This is a neat solution to highlighting words that will probably be explained later.

[8] For the subjects of definitions; eg: An odd number is any number that cannot be divided by two. This is useful for the reader as, should he or she wish to refer back to the definition later, a word in italics among a sea of roman letters is easy to find.

[9] For mathematical symbols: eg: The standard acceleration of gravity g is 9.81183 metres per second per second. The symbol does not need to be surrounded by commas or single quotes which would be required if it were set in roman type.

[10] For emphasis; eg: Janice wasn’t the only girl at the party. The use of italics for emphasis is less intrusive than bold and more subtly suggestive.

[11] To indicate a character’s internal reflections in stories; eg: This just does not seem right, Janice thought. However many writers prefer other ways of expressing inner thoughts.

[12] Using a letter or number as a noun; eg: He was vexed because they had left out the d in his name. However many writers would prefer to put a letter or number used in this way between quotes: eg; He was vexed because they had left out the ‘d’ in his name.

That’s about it for the when-to-use italics rules. Except, what should you do if you need to use italics within italics?

If some word or phrase that should be italicised is already within a run of italics, the trick is to switch back to roman type for that word or phrase; eg: I’m in a really weird situation, Janice thought.

This italics-within-italics solution works best when italics are used to highlight internal reflections; eg: Why can’t we just look up Wikipedia for the answer? he wondered to himself.

Of course, you don’t have to follow these when-to-use-italics rules. However most of them are in current use because they do aid reader comprehension.

Tags: Add new tag, HTML Code, SEO

Ten SEO Mistakes Made on Database Driven Websites

Jul 31, 2008 SEO

Search engine friendly websites is one of those often heard phrases, both from web site development companies and from their clients. Everyone knows that this is important to have, and yet it is one of the things that is actually often overlooked.

Search engine optimisation companies actually spend a lot of their time analysing a website and removing barriers to the search engines ranking a site highly. At the web development level, it is possible to build a site that is perfectly search engine friendly. One of the hardest types of sites to get right though are database driven websites. Listed below are ten of the most common issues that are created, often unknowingly, in the development process of a dynamically generated web site.

1. Pages with duplicate content - not enough differential areas within the pages, so that only small areas of the page change from page to page. It is essential that enough of the page text changes for the search engines to see an appreciable difference between one page and the next.

2. Pages with duplicate page titles - the page title is a great indicator to the search engines of the primary content of the page. Whilst this is often unique on sites such as e-commerce websites, it is often overlooked in other sites, particularly where small areas of the site are generated from a database, such as news pages.

3. Pages with duplicate meta descriptions - again, this is easy to overlook and set a global or category level meta description. These give the search engines a reason to penalise your site for not giving them enough information, and again, creating a unique meta description for every page is an essential SEO task.

4. Using auto-generation of pages as a shortcut instead of creating good content. This is linked quite closely to point 1, where it is possible to create pages that have only a tiny percentage difference between them. Databases are fantastic ways of storing information, but you still need to put the work in to fill them with content. Unique information about the subject of the page will immensely help both the long tail and the ability of the search engines to determine that a page is valuable.

5. Creating pages that are hidden behind form submissions or javascript postbacks that cannot be accessed by a search engine crawler. This is far more common that is generally realised. For instance .NET creates postback links by default instead of proper links - potentially making huge sections of a site unreachable. Likewise, it is easy to hide lovely content rich areas of your site behind a drop down selector in a form that means certain areas of the site are not visible.

6. Too many query strings - this is a common bugbear of the professional SEO, where complicated database selections create deep levels of pages, but with seven or eight &id= type strings. Additionally, some bad development methodology can leave pages with null query strings that appear in every URL but don’t do anything. The answer to this is generally URL rewrites, creating much more search engine friendly and user-friendly URLs!

7. Putting query strings in different orders when accessed through different places - this can create duplicate content issues, which can cause major penalties.

8. Not using user language to generate automated pages - if you are going to create a database driven website that uses words in the query strings (or better in rewritten URLs) make sure that you use words that will help you with SEO - if you sell widgets, make sure you are using the word widgets somewhere in the URL instead of just product= or id= - keyword research can assist with this.

9. Not allowing the meta data and title to be edited easily after the site build. It is possible to hardcode the generation of meta information into a database that doesn’t allow it to be edited later. Creating a mechanism for modifying this information initially helps everyone at a later stage when the information needs changing without shoehorning it into an already developed structure.

10. Creating keyword stuffed pages by using auto-generation. Once upon a time, search engines quite liked pages with high densities of your keywords, but now these are likely to get you marked down rather than up. So be aware when creating pages that long pages with lots of your products on can create too high a density. For instance listing blue widgets, light blue widgets, navy blue widgets, sky blue widgets is going to create a page with a very dense page for the phrase “blue widgets”.

These are just 10 of the most common potential optimisation pitfalls when creating dynamic websites. There are many more facets to producing a great database driven site, including user friendliness, speed, performance and security, but they all add together to make the best solution to your needs.

Tags: Add new tag, mistake

Search Engine Positions, Improve It

Jul 26, 2008 SEO

When it comes to a successful site, one must always keep in mind that the competition is looking for the same success. One of the best ways to keep the competition at bay is through better search engine placement. This placement on the search engine ranking boils down to being at the top, or being obscure. Are you going to be before the rivals page rank? Or are you going to be virtually invisible? The object to success with better search engine placement, is simple be on the biggest search engine possible or not be seen.The Masses Follow Large Scale For Better Search Engine Placement

While it may be enough for some to simply have their site recognized on the web, it is those whom will not settle for mediocrity that finalize the day with their objectives met. Better search engine placement not only allows you the chance to be seen on a large-scale medium, it affords you room to stretch your legs so to speak. Truth be told, 85% of all consumers searching for goods or services will turn to a large search engine first and foremost. This is where you need to be, should you intent on meeting your target audience through better search engine placement.

Simple Measures To Obtain Better Search Engine Placement

One of the easiest ways to gain better search engine placement, would be to use properly formatted Meta tags and keyword phrases. This will allow many variations on the keywords you have chosen to draw hits to your site through the search engine. These Meta tags and keyword phrases should be used throughout your site’s pages. It would also help to use doorway pages that cater to specifically selected keywords. This in a word is optimization that will net better search engine placement.

Avoiding The Mistakes That Take Away From Better Search Engine Placement

You will want to ensure that there is no Spam content on your site, should you wish to have a high ranking as the search engines do not praise this practice. Keep it simple and content rich; yet never overdo your keywords to a point that it is considered keyword stuffing. Never go with a sub par domain, as this will do nothing for better search engine placement. The same can be said for web hosting as well, you will want to search for web hosting that is search engine friendly. A large mistake made on the road to better search engine placement, is to not submit your URL to the top 10 search engines on the web. Lastly you will want to monitor and analyze logs and files, this will help you periodically improve your site thus gaining better search engine placement.

Homework Is Key To Gaining Better Search Engine Placement

Finally it must be touched upon, the importance of observing the marketplace. To obtain better search engine placement, it is best to see what is going on with the people you are competing with for business. By analyzing their success, only then can you understand what will work and what will not. Improving on your week points and re-enforcing your strong points will be a sure way to obtaining better search engine placement on a strong search engine.

Tags: SERP

The DMOZ Factor

Jul 26, 2008 SEO

There have been soo many discussions about DMOZ in both positive and negative lights on forums that if I had a penny for each one, I could put Bill Gates out of business.

Point is, Google still uses DMOZ as it’s back-up directory source and until that changes, it will always be important to have your site listed in it’s index. Now, despite some other seo urban legends, you can get top rankings in Google without being listed in DMOZ - but it’s a quality link if you can get it.

So, how much time should you dedicate to getting a DMOZ link?

All you need is about 15 minutes in total, and you’ll be set.

There are two ways you can submit your site to get listed. The harder way is to find the category your site resides in and enter your site there.

The easier way is to drill down regionally to where your business location is. Then look for the category you want within that region and submit there. It may not be an exact match, but it is a DMOZ link.

So how powerful is that link?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: DMOZ

Earned Links Versus Bought Links

Jul 26, 2008 SEO

There are many discussions about acquiring links from the Internet. While all links matter, some have much more value than others.

Earned links are thought to have much more viral value, as they are links that people place on their sites linking to yours by their own accord. Often, your site provided some value, whether it was in entertainment, information or an offering of a great product or service.

Depending on where the link is placed, the search engines will place a certain amount of value or “weight” on the link found on the site. While this same technique can be falsely accomplished, over time, these earned links will continue to accumulate, with little effort on the web owner.

Bought links offer up a way for your site to get some “web cred” almost immediately. One of the most expensive ways to get this is to purchase a “channel” sponsorship on the website, HowStuffWorks.org. That site is highly ranked by Google, so getting your link placed on that site will not only enhance your site in the search engine’s eys, but also from a traffic standpoint, you should expect a boost from that advertisement.

There are also text link brokers who offer up sites that allow you to rent some text link time to get your site a Google PageRank Boost. The problem with most of these sites is that it’s a monthly service, not permanent. If you are going to invest your time in paid for links, the best resource are fee based directories. After that, if you can find sites that offer permanent links, you should grab as many of those as you can.

Remember, all links count as a vote to your site, and every link you get is only going to help.

Tags: Backlink, Bought Links

Automatic SEO

Jul 26, 2008 SEO

You heard it here first.

Within 3 years, almost anyone will be able to perform search engine optimization (seo) to their site.

It will all be done through a back-end content management system (CMS) - and it will be easy and fast working.

But, it doesn’t mean it’t the end of the world for Optimization services.

While a properly optimizd site is nice to have, if no one finds it, that won’t matter. Expect to see more companies offer Search Engine Marketing as the premiere service, as that is more time intense anyways.

How can this be? Let’s take a trip back to 1995.

You remember: blinking text, huge jpeg graphics, dial-up and AOL was all the rage. Back then, it was believed that all you needed was a website, and you could become an Internet millionaire. While that was true for a few lucky people, for the rest of us it was still the same old grind. But the, the emergence of template editors arrived. MicroSoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and others appeared making the creation of a website fairly easy.

Once the online world realized they could create their own sites, they next wanted the ability to edit their sites. Thus, the birth of CMS became a reality and many web design shops found themselves scrambling to offer thses back-end modules or services to their clients.

Today, people expect to have a website that they can edit, which brings us to SEO. There are many properties within a site that can be generated with a CMS system. For example:

• Meta Tags
• Page Titles
• Page Names
• Site Maps
• CSS Stylization

If the web administrator knows the simple basics of seo, they can easily apply those values to all the pages any CMS system creates.

I know this is coming because I’ve built these exact systems for clients. Once a client learns the importance of proper naming stuctures, and the best way to naturally place their keyphrases into all parts of their website, they are already two steps ahead of their competition.

Search Engine Optimization is still a valuable way to earn money, but as more people integrate the Internet with their lives, they will become knowlegeable enough to perform those tasks on their own.

The next step will be the automation of SEM, which I still think is only about 5 years away…

Grab the money while you can!

Tags: Automatic SEO

Hollywood vs Google

Jul 26, 2008 SEO

Everyone knows the impact Google has had on both the Internet world and the real world. With Google trying to actively list and maintain all the touch points to any piece of information, it only makes sense that Hollywood would have issues with Google and the other search engines.

People want information and access to anything instantly. Google feeds this desire by returning blazingly fast results anytime someone enters a query into the site. It’s from this ability to be only one click away from a competitor is what frightens Hollywood so much.

With the click of a mouse, I could download the latest movie in the theaters - with minimal chance of getting caught - and while the quality and convenience is not to the same level as a dvd release, if I am looking for free entertainment, it’s easily available.

Hollywood needs to embrace the new technology and it’s ability to deliver what the people want. Imagine walking out of a theater with a fantastic movie you just watched, and waiting for you was a representative from the studio with that exact movie you just watched available on dvd. $20 on the spot, and you have a top-quality version of the movie.

There is a delicate balance that must be determined because currently, dvd sales are what can turn a clunker in the theaters to a money maker in post release.

Hollywood also needs to figure out a way to let the consumer order a movie over the Internet via streaming, or even if I wanted to order a movie through my TiVo. They need to create an encryption technology that allows for only 1 copy to be made, and even have something that subtly alerts a viewer that the product they are watching has been copied. This marking technology is already in place for dvd screeners that the studio releases.

At a certain interval, there is a specific series of lights (that usually form a letter or number) which identifies to whom the screener was released to. This way if that copy gets on the Internet, they not only have a quick reference point, but can also have a starting point as to how that movie got pirated.

Another thing that Hollywood needs to consider is the technology used to display it’s products:
Film and a silver screen as seen through a dusty projector. While the film enthusiast in me absolutely loves the look and feel of seeing a movie in the theater, there is a huge segment of customers who purposely wait until the movie comes out on dvd simply because they have a better looking and better sounding system at home to watch the movie with!

Hollywood had really begun to reach it’s commercial end by allowing for traditional advertising before a movie plays. While I fully understand and recognize why it’s being done (Russell Crowe ain’t cheap!), it REALLY takes away from the movie experience. I fully expect to see trailers for upcoming movies - but not commercials. That’s what television is for.

By including commercials before a movie gets played, they have connected the movie experience to that of watching the boob tube.

It’s in all of this that Hollywood and Google should get together and create a solution that is amicable to everyone involved. There will always be bootleggers - that is a given. But if you can reduce the number of illegal downloads and copies being marketed, the studio can keep more of it’s money used to get people to see their films in the first place.

The search engines provide value, and Hollywood provides the experience. Marrying the two would create an instantaneous feeling of overwhelming satisfaction for the new age user.

Tags: google, hollywood

How to Create a Google Site Map

Jul 26, 2008 Programming

Officially announced on June 6th, 2005 at Google’e Blog, Google Site Map allows you to submit a listing of all your urls for Google to crawl.

There have been many questions concerning the procedure of creating a Google Site Map. Below is the non-Python way of creating one. (Note: Google has further documentation at their site)

First, create a file named sitemap.xml

Use the following code in any HTML editor:

Here’s a breakdown of those properties:

lastmod -
This is the date the document was last modified and uses the following formats:
dd.mm.yyyy
dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm
dd/mm/yyyy
dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm

changefreq -
Tells Google Sitemaps the frequently that content of a particular URL will change.

Your options are “always”, “hourly”, “daily”, “weekly”, “monthly”, “yearly” or “never”.

The value “always” should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value “never” should be used to describe archived URLs.

priority -
The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on your site.
You may select between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your website and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your website.

Add as many pages as there are in your website.

Google Sitemap supports up to 50,000 pages per XML file.

Once you’ve completed all of those steps, you’ll need to submit your site map page.

Submit to: (requires gmail account)

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Tags: Scripting, Sitemap

How Misspelled Words Affect Your SEO

Jul 26, 2008 SEO

You may say that SEO Visibitly is just plain wrong! I know the very idea would upset Mrs Garton, my old English teacher, but sometimes using misspellings could be the right thing to do.To explain why optimizing for a misspelling can help increase your website’s traffic we need to take a look at our own search habits. I type fairly quickly, but not very accuratley or should that be accurately, so mistakes, like that one, often occur.

When I’m using a Word processor or my blog account spellcheck takes care of those errors for me.With the search engines there’s no spellcheck, you get exactly what you typed. I guess the same is true for a lot of people searching for information. So, quite often, a phrase like SEO Visibility will be transformed into SEO Visibitly.Keyword Research I did some research using Wordtracker Competition Search Automation and KRA and the results are worthy of note. I found that the phrase SEO Visibility is searched for approximately 167 times per day across all the major search engines.

SEO Visibitly, the misspelled version, is searched for slightly less with around 142 searches, but when we look at the competition for the phrases there’s a considerable difference. Spelled correctly SEO Visibility has 600 competing pages, the misspelled version SEO Visibitly has only 7.

A search using googles ‘operator intitle: gives us a more accurate estimate of pages that have actually been optimized to for a particular phrase and so weeds out the ‘accidental hits’. The search for intitle:’ visibility’ returns 219 competing pages, not a massive level of competition, but take a look at intitle:’seo visibility’ and there are still only 7 pages to compete with. As long as you have SEO Visibitly in the title tag you can’ fail to be on the all important first page of the google search results. The only question is would you prefer to compete with 219 sites or 7 for about the same amount of traffic, I know what I’d prefer!

But what about the Mrs Garton factor? Or ‘can you be a trustworthy source of information if you don’t know how to spell?’ This question touches on the issue of trust, which is especially important for anyone trying to sell a product or service online. The perceived risk is higher if buyers have no personal contact with sellers. So this is a genuine problem that needs to be addressed whenever you use misspellings to bring in traffic.How you do that will depend on the structure and aims of your articles or the copy on your webpages. My own chosen method is to admit my mistake early and explain that I use misspellings to ensure that everyone can find my site. Instead of being a negative, misspellings are a kind of additional service. I don’t have any hard data, but I’m pretty sure a misspelling in the title tag drives off a few really pedantic searchers.

Conclusion In the end, Search Engine Optimization is all about generating targeted traffic. To that we need to be giving people what they’re looking for. By using misspelling we’re aiming to give people what they want and that’s got to be a good idea in any business.

Tags: mistake, SEO