Blogging for SEO

Sometimes, the smallest change in code can mess things up, and that’s where bugfixing comes in.

I generally follow a cleaned CSS template that I edit for each individual optimized page that I create, because I know the stylesheet so it’s easier for me to read and edit.  But when changes are made to the skin, oh ho ho can there be major bug fixes then!  That might seem slightly irritating, but if you know the flow and dynamics of your code, it’s not that bad - you just have to figure out what changed, and you’re good to go.

Sometimes a helping hand is all you need to finish up that damn project, or just get through those horrendous tasks that keep kicking you down like a Krispy Kreme truck driver making a late delivery to the 7-11 next to Jenny Craig’s. Because information is key, and sometimes you lose your keys, the great folks over at smashingmagazine.com compiled a list of said helping hands; cheat sheets for quick referencing. Everything from PHP to CSS2 can be quickly printed out and posted next to your desk.

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

I was surfing the net for just random things that I could find and I stumbled across a really cool free program called ZScreen. ZScreen is a screen capture program that can do more than just take screen shots. It offers a selection function that lets you select the area that you want to capture. After you have selected the area and captured it you can put it in any image editing program you want. So if you’re looking for a capture program ZScreen is a good one to get.

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Listening to: Common - The Game - Common & DJ Premier
via FoxyTunes

Over the last few weeks our development team has been hard at work updating code on usaseopros.com and I am proud of the work thats been performed on this project. Updating all the code onto a more OOP environment and making the system easier to edit in the future. In the past, usaseopros.com had been a stress to work on, and at times still is, with extremely poorly written sub-procedural development and vastly redundant loops and functions not needed to perform the task at hand. What was 160 lines of code is now under 30. And its a pleasure, versus the horror it once was. When completed, the transition from old code to new code for the end user will be minimal at best, and should be fairly transparent. Usaseopros.com is our ‘flagship’ code source. More specifically is the backend to the code, where the admin, employees and clients log in. As more comes to head, and the system launches, I will be posting it here to let you know when to check out the new usaseopros.com

Stolen directly from Wikipedia:

JavaScript is a scripting language most often used for client-side web development. It was the originating dialect of the ECMAScript standard. As such, it is a dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based language with first-class functions.

JavaScript was influenced by many languages and was designed to have a similar look to Java, but be easier for non-programmers to work with. The language is best known for its use in websites (as client-side JavaScript), but is also used to enable scripting access to objects embedded in other applications.

Despite the name, JavaScript is essentially unrelated to the Java programming language, though both have a common debt to C syntax, and JavaScript copies many Java names and naming conventions. The language was renamed from LiveScript in a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun in exchange for Netscape bundling Sun’s Java runtime with their browser, which was dominant at the time. The key design principles within JavaScript are inherited from the Self programming language.

document.write();

document.writeln();

The differences are actually quite simple.  So simple in fact, you can just go to w3schools and look it up…which is exactly what had to be done when I was asking a couple of veteran programmers what the difference between the two are. Funny thing, the only reason I didn’t know is because the book I’m using for my programming class SUCKS!

So what is the purpose of adding ln to document.write ?? All it does is create a new line after each expression.

Have a good day.

Wikipedia  says that PHP is a computer scripting language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. The name PHP is a recursive initialism for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.  I just got a Visual Quickstart Guide on PHP yesterday, and was almost late getting to the office because I got caught up reading it this morning, that is very easy to read and allows me to immediately implement what I just read. If you are interested in learning PHP you can test your  development taste buds by checking out the PHP tutorial at W3C .

Recently I have been working on a new skin for a site thats been in development for some time. And I haven’t worked on some of the code for awhile, and had to remind myself of the coding that needed to be done. Luckily with a team of developers, I was able to quickly remind myself, with their help, of some very critical pieces of the ‘puzzle’. The site is now nearly ready, except for paging, one of the ‘banes of my existence’. That being said, I should be able to get that taken care of very quickly, and get the site launched. To find out how USA SEO PROS can help you implement your new system, or how USASEOPROS.COM can help with any and all SEO needs/concerns, contact us today.

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.