Blogging for SEO

…Is probably where the password is to your databases. Earlier I had a pretty bad case of a coupling of bad memory and malfunctioning keepass. Right when I started up a site going for Global Resorts Network I set the DNS up, since the password to get into changing that was simple enough, but for setting up FTP…yeah…with my memory, there’s no way in heck I’d be able to remember that password offhand.

Luckily, someone else that has a much better memory memorized it, but they had been gone for quite some time. Which can be pretty frustrating. Which in this case, it really was frustrating. I guess the point of this is to say that you either really need a good memory or someone on hand that has one. After all, there is no “I” in “Team”, right? Although I’ll certainly look up later if there is in another language for giggles.

The next time you plan on designing a website or just a webpage, be sure to plan ahead and strategically place your images or map out accordingly on your webpage. A good SEO practice when designing your website is to always remember to put your alt tags for all your images. The reason for this is that Search Engines sends out spiders or crawlers that will read all the text that is on your site, including the text in your alt tags for your images. It does not read your image file,  such as a jpeg or gif, so alt tags are beneficial when you name it accordingly. Make sure your alt tags are described. Also give a good SEO friendly description for your alt tags so that it is easy  to understand what it is. This will help you out in a lot of ways. 

Well, most of today was just content addition to some sites, but what do ya know, I finished a new account today as well. One with additional income online. Not much to say about it, I personally like the way I styled this one to match it’s splash page, and as it’s Christmas Eve, there wasn’t much time to do any other new accounts. lol Not that I’m not happy about that, yay for holidays!

Today, websites and web pages are popping up every where by the minute. So many places to surf and so many places to see. For the average web surfer, who cares, right? Basically you can’t just build a website and expect to get a lot of visitors. Yes, anybody can be anywhere around the world and at anytime be online. How do they find you? These days, you cannot just make up a domain name and expect to be found. It takes more effort than that. Specially if you want visitors for your site. What if you have an online store where the amount of visitors effect your business.

You can try maybe PPC as an option. Warning, Pay Per Click can be expensive. Yes you can set up a limit of what you want to spend a day. For as long as I managed PPC’s and ROI (Return on Investment) for an online store company I used to work for, they (the PPC companies) never actually landed on the set amount (for example $15.00 U.S./day) that we specified. Doing an investment for $15 U.S. / day sounds reasonable for some. But if you do the math, it is roughly a little over $450 (U.S.) a month. We did this for two major Search Engine Companies, Yahoo and Google, so that was $900 a month if it actually stayed on the set amounts of 15 dollars /day. I don’t know about you, but if I had to do this for my own website, I could never afford to do that for my own ROI. Yes PPC’s can be expensive if you’re not a multi-million dollar corporation like the one I used to work for. But even the owner for that company didn’t like the idea of spending that amount of money a month for his investment. Though he did make quite well with his ROI, well over 100%. A way to manage this is by the keywords that you specify. Make sure you do your research and figure out what your potential customers are clicking on and so on.

Another way to be successful is to be found by Search Engine companies the natural way. By the contents of your websites. Google does this by sending out their web crawlers known as spiders to your site and basically read the contents of your web pages. SEO Companies like usaseopros.com specializes on this type of method and can give you good results. Also your ROI can be achieve with great success and with less investment on your return. This is because SEO companies like usaseopros.com can meet your special needs for your company. They have different payment methods and SEO plans to choose from. So there is hope out there for most of us. SEO companies can be your friend, go ahead and give it a try.

Well, not much today, but I made something new of a splash page for an MLM site for additional income online. With this, I took the lot of it and made it blue obviously. For the header, I put the header as 9 individual images. I actually like the way it turned out as well as its counterparts. Though, the counterparts aren’t finished quite yet due to other things during the day. Took awhile to design it to begin with, but it’ll help out greatly in the long run.

Div tags are better to understand than Tables

More and more websites are being built with div tags and with few tables or without any. A good reason for this is not only because it is much lighter in code, SEO friendly, and in my opinion, easier to learn. Tables if you haven’t worked with it yet (xhtml wise), is too difficult to memorize. This meaning you would also have to specify the width, height, padding and so on. On the other hand, Div tags are much easier because you just have to enter the opening and closing div tags on a note pad or any regular text file. After you lay out everything (code wise) on a note pad, you can fix the attributes or properties for color scheme, width, height, and background image with CSS. A Firefox browser with add-ons is great for this visually. The less tables and codes for those search engine crawlers to go through, the faster your rankings will possibly improve. Why I say this is because it helps speed things up. This is because Div tags are linked with CSS outside of your html code, making things much lighter. So with this is mind, together with CSS, Div Tags are easier to understand for both the coder and the web crawlers that the Search Engine companies like google.com sends out.

The myriad of tags that HTML offers are for far more than just styling up a page. Infact, styling up a page should be the farthest thing from your mind when deciding which tag to use for a particular instance. Far too often, I see tags abused and misused, and this misuse of tags can do nothing but harm your search engine placement, especially for a young site that doesn’t have the weight of years to boost it’s placement.

Here are some tips to get the most out of your elements and help the search engines properly identify and categorize your content:

• Never use <h1>-<h6> elements, unless you are making a header element. If you want large text, use a <span> or <div> and give it a ‘class’ element with some associated CSS stylings to make it big. Using the header tags makes a spider think that is a header and gives it greater weight. Do you really want a site about dog breeding to be categorized under the title ‘Now serving 4 states in the southwest United States!’ when you just wanted that text to be large? If you need help figuring out if your use of headers makes sense, try this experiment…remove everything from your page, except the header elements. Does the page look like a proper table of contents? If the answer is no, then consider changing some out into <div> or <span> tags.
• Avoid tables! I can’t stress this enough. Let me repeat that a few times…tables are bad. Tables should not be used. Tables are not proper search engine optimization. A table does not tell a search engine how data relates to other pieces of the document. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are often self apparent. If you can’t take the table and put it into a spreadsheet and have it still make sense, it’s no good. The top row should be header elements and each row after should be a record of data with each column matching its header element. The use of <div> based layouts with a heavy reliance on CSS is not only far more coherent for search engines, but also far more flexible for design changes. If you contact a company to build a website for you, make sure to ask if they use table based designs. If so, run to the hills. Or better yet, run to USA SEO Pros, a company that I can confirm does not use table based designs.
• The <label> tag is an underused element that helps spiders figure out what a form is all about. Each<label> is tied to a single form element through the ‘for’ attribute on the label and the ‘id’ attribute on the form element. You can get quite attractive forms by placing a <label> and <input> inside of a <span> and using some CSS on each element. The span will define the overall size and placement of the <label>/<input> combo, and the CSS on the <label> and <input> can be used to align those properly within the <span>.
• Another underused set of elements is the <dl>/<dt>/<dd> tags. These are used for defining objects on the page..
  • <dl> is the definition list, which will be the wrapper around the <dt> and <dd>
  • <dt> is definition term. It is usually something short and sweet, like “Name” or “Address”.
  • <dd> is the definition definition. The <dd> that immediately follows the <dt> is assumed to be it’s definition. For instance…<dt>Username</dt><dd>devsteve</dd> would be used to define the username as devsteve.
• Try to avoid the <br /> tag as much as possible. The break tag is merely used to jump to the next line, which should never be needed if these other tags are properly used with good CSS. <p> tags wrap a paragraph and do an automatic line break at the end, <div> tags have an automatic line break. Any element with the CSS value ‘display:block;’ has a line break. The <br /> tag is forcing an action that should be smooth and automatic.
• Do not touch the <font> tag! Unlike my advice against using <table>, this one is absolute. There is no exception to this rule. There is no ‘but sometimes its okay’. There is nothing but a slap on the wrist over this one. The <font> tag never should’ve existed in the first place. HTML is not about defining how something looks. The aesthetic qualities of HTML, such as the large font sizes for an <h1> or the bulleted attributes of an <li> were put in place as mere placeholders. CSS is about styling HTML, the HTML itself is defining data. A <ul> tag with its accompanying <li> tags merely says it is a list of items that are not particularly ordered. The font tag tries to place style attributes into the HTML, and that is bad. That is very bad. Anytime you plan to use a <font> tag to style up some text, use <span> instead. Give this span a class, give this class some style. You’ll have more options than <font> and you won’t have people scoff at your work.
  

I rampantly mention CSS through this list, so for those of you unaware of what CSS is, I highly recommend W3Schools to learn the basics. This site also provides good info on the HTML tags I’ve listed above.

When designing a website, one question that comes up for any decent web developer is how important is making sure your code is valid and using the most modern standards. But…when it really comes down to it, how much does this matter? Wrapping your attributes in quotes, properly closing your tags, and conforming to W3C standards is sometimes quite a pain.

In addition to code validity, what about using code that complies to the Web Accessibility Initiative, a program created to assist the blind in surfing the web? Is this important?

The answer to these questions is somewhat vague. While standards compliant code is something that should be taken seriously, it won’t help your page rank any higher on the search engines. Completely invalid and broken code will most certainly help, but if you reuse an id, fail to self-close a <br /> or <img … /> tag, you won’t find yourself blacklisted from Google.

In the end, pay attentio, but don’t kill yourself over it. Don’t spend days making sure code is valid when you could be spending those days putting in new content, advertising, or running your business.

While working on a new client today, I discovered that the original site from the client did not match the approved list of keywords for the client….In the beginning of the morning probably because I was too tired to worry too much about it I tried to make the keywords make sense even though they did not make too much sense with the main content on the original site…I did this for like an hour before I decided I just could not…

But how do you know if the keywords are not what the client wants? I mean sometimes the original clients site does not even make it clear on what they do or trying to accomplish…but I guess I just want to leave you with an example of this with the site I did….

Client’s website is Atlanta Training Group

Just for reference the keywords were to Multi-level Marketing and Home Based Businesses…just for laughs you see if you can write sensible content for this company with those kid of keywords….SEOTech know the keywords I am talking about!!!

I was looking at ETC., a website that I visit often, and they had an article that I wanted to share with everyone. The article is about search engines spiders and what they look at when they go threw a site. It also has a tool that you can enter the url of a site and it will show what the search engine spiders see. It will also break it down for you. The link to this article is “What do Spiders See”

Here is an example from one of the sites that I have built; Go Mini’s

Page Title:

GOMINI’S OF CALIFORNIA

Meta Keywords:

california portable moving and storage california portable storage los angeles portable storage oxnard self storage san fernando moving and storage santa barbara moving and storage santa barbara portable storage santa clarita moving and storage santa clarita portable storage southern california portable storage thousand oaks moving and storage thousand oaks portable storage ventura county portable storage ventura county self storage ventura self storage” /

Headers:

Level 1 —

• GoMini’s Of California

Level 2 —

• Locally Owned
• Operated
• 888-899-MINI

Level 3 —

• Nationwide Moving Available
• Quick Links
• And
• Call Our Friendly Customer Service

Level 4 —

• [no level 4 headers in content]

Level 5 —

• [no level 5 headers in content]

This is just a sample you can see the rest here.