Blogging for SEO

When writing the code often it’s useful to apply some special formatting to order CSS properties — to make the code more readable, more structured and therefore more intuitive. There is a variety of grouping schemes developers use in their projects. Some developers tend to put colors and fonts first; other developers prefer to put “more important” assignments such as those related to positioning and floats first. Similarly, elements are also often sorted according to the topology of the site and the structure of the layout.

“Error 404: Page Not Found” is a blessing that most Webmasters curse. Why? Getting a visitor on any page of your site is fantastic! Don’t blow the opportunity. Not only can you make your “404″ page a valuable sales tool, you can use the following search engine optimization techniques to attract customers in droves.

A.) Use your main keyword in your title, add a “pipe” (usually above the Enter key) and then use your secondary keyword.

B.) Add your site’s standard navigation system (bar, column, etc.) as mentioned above.

C.) Make the look and feel of the customized 404 page match your main site as closely as possible with a template, matched palette, cascading style sheets, etc.

D.) Create a link to the site map page if available, and make the link easy to find. You want your visitor off the 404 page and into your main content as quickly as possible.

Setting up a custom 404 page link usually takes less than five minutes on most major Web hosting companies like Godaddy.com. But whatever it takes, it’s worth the effort.
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Listening to: A Perfect Circle - 3 Libra’s
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I was working on a site for coastal synergy and while making the header image, the background in the beach picture was seriously difficult to deal with. With the sky and the leaves being so mixed together, taking the blue out would’ve taken way more time than the project had. To complete the site to earn income from home Santa Barbara, I just used the color replacement tool in Photoshop! Replaces the blue with the green and bam. You now have more green in the leaves and less sky. Without resorting to that method, taking out every bit of blue might have taken me a good hour or two. Not good at all.

Optimize your HTML code: Make sure that your site doesn’t have any unwanted tags and that it is optimized.

Maximize content area: This not only reduces load time, it enhances the readability of your site.

Stick to simple designs: Most fast loading sites have very simple designs. Take the hint! Complicated designs will slow down your pages.

Spread out your content: In case you find yourself having very long pages of content, break them down into separate sections and thus bring down the sizes of the individual pages.

Using Layers instead of tables is a new concept for better load time. We will be bringing out an article on it soon.

Read More

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Listening to: 10 Years - Prey
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Don’t rush into production. The ink is barely dry on the contract and already they are opening Photoshop and editing code. Not enough time is given to laying the ground work. A good web designer needs to understand the context of the project. Why is the site being built? Who is the target audience? What call to action do you want them to complete? Who are the competition? How is the sites success going to be judged? Having all of this information at your fingertips makes the design and development stages much easier.

While designing a new client site, since the content is being written for you, you want to avoid falling into the trap of staying repetitive….It is hard to change things up knowing it really doesn’t make a difference in SEO sense, but you also want the client to enjoy looking at their site and you want there customers to enjoy the design of the site as well once they find it….

What I figure is that the more and more news you do on the same template  the more you have to get creative in the CSS just to keep your sanity sometimes…..

So remember to keep pushing yourself to learn more tricks and better CSS style so that you can just keep pushing yourself to become better

I tell you.  I’m working on content for a client that runs a pest removal company.  I usually tend to file every nugget of information away in my colossal (cough) brain in case I need the information later.

But it’s amazing how much you realize you know after researching a client’s site for information.  And comparing it to what you know or who you know in the same area.

For instance, I now know a pest control company, an eco-friendly landscaping group and a real estate agent in the same vicinity.  I can tell you where to go to buy your house, decorate your yard and make sure it’s bug-free.

Now, how’s that for useful knowledge?  And if you research your clients’ goods or services enough, you’ll be able to pull this off too!

When making changes to your existing styles, leave some indication of what you changed. Like indenting the new lines that you put in a tab further than the rest. This will allow you to easily find recent changes in case something goes wrong, like on another page for example.  To take this another step better, add a comment with the date you last made the update, after the indented line.

When you’re working on a particular site, always make sure that the site is linked to something. If it’s live, then you can still benefit from it being up. This is where you just put in the link that your client gives you ( unless they don’t have anywhere in particular to link it to ). While working on a license site for Colorado MLM compensation plans, this was the case for me as there is no client. So connecting it to us helps us drive traffic towards us so someone can rent the site and gain traffic towards their lucrative home business in Colorado.

1. Define a table of contents

One possibility of integrating a table of contents is to display a tree overview of your layout with IDs and classes used in each branch of the tree. You may want to use some keywords such as header-section or content-group to be able to jump to specific code immediately. You may also select some important elements you are likely to change frequently — after the project is released. These classes and IDs may also appear in your table of contents, so once you’ll need to find them you’ll find them immediately — without scanning your whole code or remembering what class or ID you once used.

2. Define your colors and typography

As Rachel Andrew states, “one way to get round the lack of constants in CSS is to create some definitions at the top of your CSS file in comments, to define constants. A common use for this is to create a color glossary. This means that you have a quick reference to the colors used in the site to avoid using alternates by mistake and, if you need to change the colors, you have a quick list to go down and do a search and replace.”

3. Indentation is your friend!

For better overview of your code you might consider using one-liners for brief fragments of code. This style might produce messy results if you define more than 3 attributes for a given selector. However, used moderately, you can highlight dependencies between all elements of the same class. This technique will dramatically increase code readability when you have to find some specific element in your stylesheet.
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Listening to: Chevelle - Antisaint
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