Blogging for SEO

Doing reworks from months ago and adding the upgrade of new template style to an existing site to add ranks to the client. Usually most of these old reworks are not ranking due to lack of bullets or bold keywords….

I am finding it easier to just upgrade the site and bold words, I think in most of these cases the content is okay, just needed alittle tweaking….although it is hard to see if any of these reworks will work, atleast for a month….so stay tuned

Herbalife Distributor - Angella Menzies-Petersen

All Vacations Free - Carlos Hoy

And no, I don’t mean watch your use of expletives.

OK, wait…watch your use of expletives.  There.  I’m done on that side-topic.  *Gets off his soapbox*

Right…onto more serious stuff…

When you have a client, it’s not just the wording you use in your SEO content.  What you say is just as important as how you say it.

For instance, suppose you have (gasp!) an MLM client.  Your content should sound excitable and jumpy to match the same emotion your client’s trying to elicit from his or her prospects.

If it’s an insurance company, take your language and make it concise and easy to follow.  You want to be able to break the lingo of insurance-ese down for normal people to understand, but it doesn’t have to sound bouncy and over-energetic if that’s not the client’s intent.  Take the energy level down a few decibels there, Sparky.

Basically, try to capture the mood and motive your client’s going for.  You’re writing your SEO content for both ends:  Your client and the end-user (or end-reader, as it would be).

With CSS we can target the ‘:hover’ child class for links and update their background properties.

Example
.nav a:link, .nav a:visited {
width: 160px ; height: 30px ; display: block; overflow:hidden;
background: url(’images/nav1.gif’) 0px 0px no-repeat;
}
.nav a:hover, .nav a:active{
background-position: 0px -30px;
}

The Image itself contains both the normal and hover state. This is called a sprite, using this technique the image needs only be loaded once.

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Listening to: Aesop Rock - Coffee
via FoxyTunes

Well, you can’t make every browser happy all at the same time due to the huge amount of them available, but you sure can try. While re-working an account for a San Jose travel agency for more content about Caribbean vacation travel packages and European tour packages, it looked like the main title was a bit too close to the header image, because I know that in IE, the title would be covered up. Which of course is bad.

What I found was that it indeed was covered up, but the main menu on the top had a horrendous white background going over the header image! Meaning that whoever previously worked the account didn’t test out the design in IE and only referenced Firefox. The design though is really very good I’d say and I like the whole glass effect.

Decide on a basic layout using the grid system, about 800px wide is good. Measure out the amount of space you want between your columns, width of columns and the width of your content area.

Here is an example of what one layout might look like:

gutter 1- 24px 3%
column 1- 384px 48%
gutter 2- 24px 3%
column 2- 160px 20%
gutter 3- 24px 3%
column 3- 160px 20%
gutter 4- 24px 3%

total 800px 100%

When calculating your percentages in a CSS liquid layout, we are not basing them on an exact 800px width, we are basing them on the variable size of a browser the user might view the website in. So, make sure you leave some room within your calculations for errors that may occur. This means rounding one or two of your measurements down a percentage point. One way to do this is to have the percentage width of a gutter set to undefined.

Browsing around the net on my endless quest to improve my own abilities in SEO content writing, I found a pretty snazzy (yes, I said “snazzy”) article on writing SEO content:

http://ezinearticles.com/?SEO-Article-Writing-101&id=59911

The author talks about how you shouldn’t just write for the search engines, but also for people who are browsing your site.  It’s well-written, and makes a lot of great points.

While you are working on SEO there are some things that you can have right next to you that will help you keep your focus and flow. When I am doing SEO, I like to have a pack of gum next to me, some people prefer pens, some people prefer styrofoam to keep their mouth busy, but I stick with my gum. Drinks are also important, because what you are trying to do is have everything that you might want for later with you when you sit down so you are not distracted by having to be pulled away from your SEO. What if you get hungry? Have a snack with you or some chips so you can sit and wait till lunch time. Candy is also a great thing to have close by. That sugar rush comes handy sometimes with SEO. I need to get a coffee pot for my desk, maybe a vending machine…

Linking and/or importing stylesheets would seem to be a no-brainer to the intermediate or advanced CSS developer, but I want to stress why this is so important. I’ve seen many sites start out with clean, well-organized CSS files but then get littered as time goes by, with embedded or even inline styles (due to fast updates needed on short deadlines, or possibly sometimes even pure laziness).

Imagine that you are working on an extremely large-scale website with hundreds of ways content can appear. You have fast deadlines, so you opt for making “quick fixes” or updates by using embedded or inline CSS. Years go by, and this habit continues… Until one day you’re told the site is being completely redesigned (but all the content is to remain the same), and you only have a week to build it (including testing).

Normally, this would have been a fairly simple task of updating the stylesheet(s). Except you have years worth of “quick fixes” scattered throughout the site — and no way to remember where they all are. So now you have to either a) find a way to clean everything up and get everything styled for the redesign in one week (Good luck!), or b) find a new job.

Don’t make your job harder than it really has to be. Linking and/or importing your stylesheets is not optional. Create it clean, keep it clean, and you’ll be much happier.

When it comes to SEO writing, less is not more. In fact, more is more.

Yes, yes, I know, “But SamRam, you’re stating the obvious, yes-no?”

Yes. And no. (more…)

With there being more sites promoting financial freedom online, I have to go into old client sites and add one more round of content including keywords that they would like to be listed for. Being ranked for trusted opportunities for home business is a bit difficult, so adding bullet lists and such with those keywords is important. As you can guess, sites that have to do with a home based franchise is one of the most difficult things to rank considering how many of them are out there looking to all gain the same thing.