Blogging for SEO

This little trick gives your image a bit of a white border around the edges, just like photos in real life often have. Like this:

.photo img {

border: 1px solid #999;

background-color: #fcfcfc;

padding: 4px;

}

You can see the results here. What we’ve done is added a gray border to all four sides, changed the background color of the image to a very pale gray (almost white), and then added a bit of padding to all four sides between the background and the image itself, so the background color could show through. And you’ll note we used a class of “photo” here: this way, we can pick and choose in our code which images get this treatment.

Basically, footers need to provide users with the information they are looking for. This is why contact details and a brief information about site or / and site owners needs to be placed in the footer. Corporate designs may need to provide driving directions, telephone number, a web form or at least an e-mail.

Blog designs usually have a bunch of different data hidden or displayed in their footers. For instance, the latest posts, comments, last job opening, last forum discussion or link to a random post.

Some designers go even further and place the whole navigation at the bottom of the page. In such cases the site is split in two parts; the upper part takes care of the content while the bottom section takes care of everything else. In such cases it’s not really reasonable to speak about footers.
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Listening to: Breaking Benjamin - Forget It
via FoxyTunes

So, you’ve researched your meta keywords. You’ve kept them to no more than three phrases per page. You’ve focused the title, meta description, and H1 tags to the keyword sets without going overboard. Your code is lean and mean—no crummy JavaScript or tables. You’ve gone content-crazy and have a respectable mass of content constantly refreshing on your site. You have a juicy site map. You’ve done it all. Or have you?

Relax, there’s always room for improvement with SEO.

It’s generally accepted that search engines place higher value on the code closest to the top of your HTML, and some may only read part of the HTML document. Most Web pages have plenty of code before the main content, usually the links that form the main navigation of a site.

Unfortunately, moving content above navigation code often makes things difficult to display well, for all but the simplest of layouts. What if you have, say, a header navigation scheme atop a two-column layout?

It is hard enough to come up with ideas to write about on a daily basis…so I went in search for new ways to write an SEO blog and keep it relevant and informative. I ended up finding a professional SEO blog on how to write effective SEO blogs…I figure since at times most of us struggle coming up with some things to write or say….it is an excellent site….the author gives you 101 different topics to blog relevant information on and I think it will help us when we are stuck on what to write about….

I Will Help Your Blog Sizzle

This site is a great list of topics in what they say will make your blog sizzle…………check it out if you need ideas on what to write about

It’s going to happen eventually.

You’re going to hit that nagging bout of writer’s block.

And it’ll hit just as you’re on the verge of wrapping up your best chunk of SEO content.

What do you do when the gears grind to a screeching halt?

Step away.

Doesn’t have to be literally. Take a minute or two and grab a snack. Or go back and read some of your old content. Whatever you do, just find a way to get your mind off the current wave of keywords and keyterms. Then come back when your mind’s been purged. You’ll find that the gears feel a bit loosened once you’ve unfocused your mind for a moment.

A fresh mind does wonders for your SEO writing!  Just don’t overdo it.

I found a really cool Firefox extension this morning that could help designers when building a site. Its called GridFox. I want to share some of its information with you.

Grid-based layouts have become really popular among web designers over the last year. This popularity is due largely in part to the work of Khoi Vinh, Design Director of NYTimes.com. He’s spoken at several venues touting the advantages of grid-based design and demonstrating how the concept can translate from print design to the web. However, I ran into a problem when coding grid-based layouts. How can I be sure my grid is maintained from the original mockup to the final coded version? When I coded my first grid-based layout, I found myself regularly taking screenshots of the site and comparing them with my original grid in Photoshop. There had to be an easier way. Click here to read the whole article.

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Listening to: Breaking Benjamin - Breaking Benjamin - Home
via FoxyTunes

CSS Variables allow authors to define variables that are reusable as property values anywhere in a stylesheet and queryable/modifiable through an extension of the CSS Object Model described in this document.

The definition of a variable and a call to a variable should be simple enough so web authors don’t have to drastically change their existing stylesheets to take advantage of CSS Variables. Use case: remove all existing occurrences of a given value in a given stylesheet to replace them by a call to a single variable. The definitions of variables should cross @import boundaries so variables can be contained in a standalone stylesheet and imported by all stylesheets needing them. Use case: company-wide graphical charter for a set of corporate web sites.  The value of variable should be modifiable by script. Such a modification should instantaneously update the value of all properties calling the corresponding variable’s value, possibly triggering changes in the rendering of the document. Calls to a variable in the assignment of the value of a property should make the corresponding CSS declaration invalid in a non-conformant legacy browser, the CSS error handling rules allowing then a fallback to a regular CSS Level 2 rule.

You know, it’s great when you have to write SEO content for a client that has a ton of keywords and keyterms that are nearly identical. Then you can get away with something that search engines will still recognize.

Say, for example, your client (we’ll call his company Willy’s Hot Dogs out of New York) has a list of keyphrases that includes “hot dogs”, “hot dogs new york”, “hot dogs chicago” and “all beef hot dogs”. You could go one of two ways with this:

1. Come to Willy’s Hot Dogs, where you can enjoy some of the best hot dogs in New York. You can’t find better hot dogs in Chicago or anywhere! Our all-beef hot dogs are delicious!

Hmm…not the most natural-sounding sentence out there. A bit long, and sounds…well…redundant.

How about a second way:

2. Willy’s Hot Dogs is the place for the most delicious all-beef hot dogs and Chicago dogs in New York!

This is better. It contains all of your keyterms in one nice, combined package. With “hot dogs” falling right before “Chicago” and “New York”, you’ve covered three different keyterms in one shot. And the inclusion of “all beef” throws all four keyterms into one sentence! Plus, it sounds a tad more natural than the first phrase.

Mmm…all this talking about hot dogs…makes me hungry.

When working with CSS, there’s the challenge of knowing what selector value will be placed on a element. Fortunately the W3 realized this and came up with a schema for browsers to follow in order to keep it standard amongst browsers and also something for coders to debug their code against. What’s best about it is that even though it’s not widely known, once you learn it, it will stick in your head forever (or at least when you need to use it).

For each selector you get a point value. Each point value starts out as 0.0.0.0 and grows as you process what is in each selector.

For every element in the select, you add 1 to the last column;

p,div {
color: #FB1;
} The value would be 0.0.0.2

For every class you have, you add 1 to the value of the third column;

div.cat {
color: #BCA;
} The value would be 0.0.1.1

For every ID element, you add 1 to the second column;

div#header li.nav {
color: #232;
} The value would be 0.1.1.2

And finally, if you use the style attribute in a tag, it adds 1 to the first column;

<div style="color: #424;">blah</div> The value would be 1.0.0.0

How it works is that CSS will go through and determine by specificity which rule will be applied to a property of an element. It’s essentially the higher the number, the more power it has. You should note that if one rule has a specifity of 1.0.0.0, it will rule over any other rule. Also a value of 0.1.0.1 would overrule 0.0.899.35 because it has a value in a higher level. Points are not transfered over, so there will never be a case where just classes will override something with an ID.

Remember, many professional and amature coders don’t know this or utilize it. Learn it and give yourself an edge in your debugging or general coding practices.

Recently having reworked a site for a business making it easy to qualify for a mortgage, I made a few changes to the system that was implemented at the time to a newer version. This way made it much easier to offer contact information in the weblink div for them to offer bad credit refinance and FHA eligibility. The pages help pull in more content for the site that is based off their keywords to help the ranks even further. Bottom line is that more pages are a good thing.