Over 300 Web 2.0 sites rated, ranked, and awarded.
A great opportunity to learn about some outstanding web sites and web tools. Be sure to check these sites out, you’ll learn so much about the latest web technologies.
Lorelle on WordPress has a wonderful article, DIY Search Engine Optimization.
This in-depth article should really help people who use WordPress as a blogging tool with their search engine optimization plan. This weekend I plan to review my blog and incorporate all of Lorelle’s suggestions. Even though there is a lot of information for WordPress users, this article is excellent for anyone who is building/promoting a web site.
I would like to thank Lorelle, she visits this site often, comments on posts, and offers advice and tips to students in this program. She is a great supporter of this class and her contributions are appreciated! Lorelle also reviewed this blog and posted links to her favorite articles.
Support and guidance from experts and members of industry is needed and greatly appreciated. Thank you!
I’ve been reading some books and articles on search engine optimization and I wanted to post some of the tips that I have gleened from these resources:
1. Use standards compliant, accessible XHTML or HTML code. Avoid using presentation tags/styling within the XHTML/HTML files. Presentation should be controlled with an external CSS file.
2. Concentrate on getting your site listed in the following search systems:
You can learn more about getting listed at these sites @ Search Engine Watch’s article Major Search Engines and Directories.
3. Brainstorm for a list of keywords for your site before you start building the site and writing the content. Keywords are used by search engines to index your site. Keywords should be used in the title, pages names, content, headings, links, alt and title tags, and meta tags. Important keywords should be at the top of the page, in the title, and the heading tags. Keywords can also be bolded or italicized, or added to bulleted lists. Tools like Google’s AdWord’s Keyword Tool can be useful for brainstorming keywords for your site’s content. Look at your competition’s keywords, use singular and plural forms of the words and you may want to use obvious spelling mistakes in your keywords.
4. Get people to link to your site. When sites that are already indexed link to your site, your site will be spidered by the search engines and indexed as well. When someone links to your site ask them to use “keywords” in their links. Text links should be descriptive and contain keywords; avoid using links like “click here”. Search engines use the text in links for indexing, text links are very important. Comment in blogs, leaving your URL when requested.
5. Content is king when it comes to search engine placement. Focus on writing excellent content. A page that relies on images or Flash may not index well. If you are using images, use keywords in the alt tags to describe the image.
6. If you are building a site for a local business be sure to use geographic keywords to identify where your business is located For example, “bay area” “conta costa county”, “california”, “pleasant hill”, “east bay”, etc. are all keywords that I use for the web design class site.
7. If you are setting up a blog, use Technorati ta
As a follow-up to our class discussion on Search Engine Optimization, SEOmoz.org has a Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization. What a great resource!
You may also be interested in browsing highrankings.com forums. This is a forum devoted to search engine optimization. This is an active forum with wonderful advice and resources. While you’re there be sure to check out the rest of the high rankings site for even more useful articles, newsletters, and information.
You may also find the discussions at Search Engine Forums, SEO Chat, and Search Guild helpful.
I wanted to share some search engine optimization resources with you. As you’re writing content and coding you must take search engine optimization into account; it does no good to create a beautiful site if nobody can find it. These articles will give you a good foundation for creating pages that are search engine friendly.
You should see some common themes in all of the articles below:
Using XHTML/CSS for an Effective SEO Campaign - While this article may seem “dated” (2003) it’s not. The article outlines good coding practices with XHTML and CSS and how these practices will help you with search engine placement.
High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization - designing accessible sites not only benefits disabilites; search engines favor highly accessible web sites.
26 steps to 15k a Day - read, print, and paste on your monitor. These are easy to understand and follow steps to improve your site’s performance in search engines.
Top 5 Myths to Achieving High Search Engine Rankings -this page includes the top “myths” of search engine optimization, as well as, five steps for better search engine placement. This article provides information on researching keywords.
Getting To Done: SEO Made Easy - like the title says, easy search engine optimization tips
Search Engine Ranking Factors - a large list of the factors that can influence a web document’s rank at the major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves) for a particular term or phrase.
Search Engine Watch - articles, tips, forums, links and resources that pertain to search engines.
Keyword Suggestion Tool - unsure of what keywords to use in your titles, headings, and content? Try this keyword suggestion tool.
A few free sites that you should work to get listed in:
Dustin Diaz has put together a very nice CSS Shorthand Guide. What’s nice about this guide is that it includes the default value for the property values so you don’t have to guess at what will display if you don’t include a value in your shorthand.
CSS Selectors, Part 3 is now available at 456 Berea Street!
Here are the first two installments for your review:
CSS 2.1 selectors, Part 2
CSS 2.1 selectors, Part 1
These are great articles for those of you who are working on the CSS unit; what am I saying, they’re great for everyone.
While I was surfing 456 Berea Street I found some other articles that you may enjoy:
Google, SEO and using CSS to hide text
Are HTML and CSS easy?
Top ten web design mistakes, 2005 edition
I love this new art medium, check out San Francisco, jello style!
I was doing a little online shopping last night and I came across a site called My Product Advisor. At the site you can compare cars, digital cameras, PDAs & Smart Phones, and TVs. This site recommends products to you based on your individual preferences.
Pagecurve.com offers lots of quick Photoshop tutorials.
If you don’t feel like using Photoshop to create a banner for your web site try bannerbreak.com to quickly create free web site banners.
When you start to market your web site, you may find this free robots.txt generator useful. Robots.txt files are used to allow and deny search engine spiders/robots.
CSS 2.1 selectors, Part 2 is now available. If you missed the first installment, read CSS 2.1 selectors, Part 1 first. Since so many of you are working on the CSS unit now, these would be great articles for you to review.
W3C Compliance and SEO - learn why W3C compliance can improve your search engine ranking.
Here is a terrific list of web related cheat sheets, be sure to bookmark this!
Web 2.0 is about… a very good, easy to understand, article by Kevin Yank of SitePoint.
Brainstorms and Raves has been a favorite site of mine for many years. Recently the article Behind the Scenes with Apache’s .htaccess was posted. This article provides a clean explanation of the .htaccess file and a lot of 3rd party resources. Excellent resource!
The list of Absolutely Free Software - Best Free Web Applications has been updated. It includes wonderful, free software applications.
Neevia Document Converter eXpress makes it possible for anyone to instantly convert their files to PDF or Image without the need of installing special software.
Free AOL? Yes, it’s true, much of the AOL popular content that was once available to members only is now available to the rest of the world. Not only is the content going free, Google and Comcast want a piece of AOL.
Ten Easy Ways to Improve Your Resume - Katharine Hansen offers ten tips for improving your resume. You may also be interested in reading this post made on Craigslist on Tips for applying to a job from Craigslist - Good tips for making your cover letter stand out from the rest. 25 Words That Can Hurt Your Résumé may also be helpful when you’re revamping your resume.
MaxDesign has an excellent Basic Web Standards Workshop that I would recommend that you all read. It outlines xhtml, standards, css, accessibility, and css issues and bugs.
Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to explore all of the pages in a domain. Simply enter the web sites address that you would like to explore and Yahoo will display all of the site pages that have been indexed by Yahoo. It’s a great way to quickly display an index or site map of a site that you may enjoy.
Are you still unsure about tags and how to tag your content that you’re bookmarking? Tagyu suggests tags for your content. Give it a URL or some text, and it will give you some suggestions for tags.
Goggle now has an RSS feed reader. Just type the topic that you are looking for and search; Google will find related content. You can then subscribe and read the RSS feeds.
Digital Web Magazine has two design articles that you may want to review: Principles of Design and Elements of Design.
Another weekend just flew by! While I was working on the classroom site this weekend I found a few resources that I thought you might find useful:
Active Meter - tracks web site visitor statistics. There is a free, invisible version of this statistical service and you can track multiple sites. This service is very similar to StatCounter, but the log file size is 150KB (50KB larger).
Inquisitor Instant Seach - an instant search technology that takes the waiting out of searching the web. It is an AJAX-style web application that retrieves web results and suggestions as-you-type. Pretty cool!
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is an open, feature-rich multi-platform office productivity suite. The user interface and the functionality is very similar to other products in the market like Microsoft Office or Lotus SmartSuite, but in contrast to these commercial products OpenOffice.org is absolutely free.
Digg.com - another social networking site with a twist. At digg.com you can submit an article and digg members will comment on it and “digg” stories that they think are cool. Depending on the number of “diggs” a story may be promoted to the homepage. Here is the complete digg tools collection.
Next Up: Google Office? An interesting article on the possible joint venture of Sun and Google.
Treehouse, an online developer’s magazine, is now available. This first issue is free to all! (This is a 50+ page PDF file, please do not print it in the classroom.)
If you have an iPod, you may want to check out some of the Podcasts from the Web Essentials 2005 conference. Veerle’s Blog has an entry on some of the available topics and speakers.
I know that some of you would like to work on PHP/MySQL at home, here is a guide to Install & Configure Apache, PHP, JSP, & MySQL on Windows XP/2000. This guide is current as of this post.
Dynamic Drive, which is a great resource for JavaScripts and DHTML scripts, has a list of a few online web tools you may enjoy and find useful.
Lifehacker offers the Ten Must-Have Bookmarklets. David can you please add some other “must-haves” to this list?