SEO Tips N Tricks

It was nice to be able to tackle a different challenge today and write about the lovable St. Bernard, Howard Huge! Appearing in newspapers all over the world since its inception in 1980, the strip never fails to elicit a chuckle as it combines a larger than life personality with a slice of life situational comedic situation.

I only hope that I can do the Howard Huge site justice in the long run for all the entertainment it’s given me over the years.

Baby-Duck-Syndrome

Baby Duck Syndrome describes the tendency for visitors to stick to the first design they learn and judge other designs by their similarity to that first design. The result is that users generally prefer systems similar to those they learned on and dislike unfamiliar systems. This results in the usability problems most re-designs have: users, get used with previous designs, feel uncomfortable with new site structure they have to find their way through.

Banner-Blindness

Web users tend to ignore everything that looks like advertisement and, what is interesting, they’re pretty good at it. Although advertisement is noticed, it is almost always ignored. Since users have constructed web related schemata for different tasks on the Web, when searching for specific information on a website, they focus only on the parts of the page where they would assume the relevant information could be, i.e. small text and hyperlinks. Large colourful or animated banners and other graphics are in this case ignored.
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Listening to: 10 Years - Waking Up
via FoxyTunes

encountering a strange problem this morning….completing rework account on an California Insurance Company and for some reason the site is receiving poor ranks….looked through the content and seems to have covered all the local key terms on the cities in California and the basic insurance terms….I am guessing that because it is an insurance site and their are plenty of them in California it might be causing the site to get overlooked….writing this post due to i am lost for words on how to add the right amount of content to improve rankings without writing too much content and maybe hurting the ranks ever further…my suggestion is to add more content on localized cities in the state of California and see if I can pull in ranks that way…..I believe this is a case of key terms not being strong enough to rank this client….

No matter what your business or service, good content writing can really spice up even those that are considered somewhat dull. For example, many people consider businesses like banking and insurance boring. However, they are necessary industries in the everyday world. However, when you are searching online for a particular product or service, what captivates you more? The product you were searching for anyway or something worth reading that completely captivates your attention?

I would almost say the latter. When you look at all the advertising and marketing out there, don’t the ones that present the product or service in an interesting manner appeal to you more? To illustrate this point, when I go shopping, I would never in a million years even think of wandering down the aisle to purchase something like beef jerky. However, the whole “Messin’ With Sasquatch” campaign was so humorous and well done that when I passed it the next time, I actually bought a package.

Presentation works! Grab their attention and, as long as you are able to back up your product or service from your end, you will be successful!

A Flash website without a html alternative

Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don’t like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can’t read Flash content and therefore can’t index it.

Using only Images for Headings

Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet or consider this approach: http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text.
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Listening to: The Spill Canvas - The Truth
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You don’t change users’ window size.
Some browsers, e.g. Internet Explorer, saves the browser dimensions and uses them for further browser sessions. As Ben Bodien commented, “it’s just plain inconsiderate to assume that you know better than the user how their software environment should be configured?”

Your links open in the same window.
Visitors want to have control over everything what happens in their browser. If they’d like to open a link in a new window they will. If they don’t want to, they won’t. If your links open in a new window you make the decision which is not your decision to make.

A well ranked site on search engines is fine and all, but when people go on it, how are they going to get back to you? Working on a site for herbal supplements, I added the contact information for the specific client so if the client doesn’t click on the link, the information to contact them and for them to receive business is right there. Now they can sell their antioxidant products and we can get them to rank on the first page of search engines.

After writing similar content for very similar websites, you sometimes arrive at a catch-22 when writing for new SEOs.

You want to write bold and exciting new material but need to get them done as quickly and efficiently as possible while not compromising the integrity of the client. However, it is often difficult to come up with entirely new material so quickly. Many times, you have to reshape what came before in order to finish in a timely manner. However, that becomes redundant not only for you but for search engines when they start to recognize similar content repeatedly.

Today I had bursts of creativity for sites which I had previously written about…but what happens tomorrow or the next day when that runs dry.

Any suggestions out there in SEO blogland?

1. Grouping and commenting your CSS rules

Setup certain sections in your CSS files that always exists: page structure, links, header, footer, lists, etc. Those sections are always CSS commented to name each section appropriately.

2. Keep style type on single line

Combine properties onto a single line by using shorthand properties means that your CSS will be easier to understand and edit.

3. Place color scheme in one place for reference.

Before you start your CSS file, comment your common colors and add it to the top of your style sheet.This will save you ton of time and will insure that your site has one color scheme.

4. Use a meaning naming system.

Having a naming system for classes and id’s saves you a lot of time when updating your document or debugging, you can use parent/child structure. The parent would be the container. So if our DIV is named “header”, and two divs nested called “menu” and “logo”.

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Listening to: Breaking Benjamin - Breaking Benjamins - No Games
via FoxyTunes

When it comes to about six hours into the work day there are some things that can easily become forgotten while performing SEO tactics. When I am working SEO that is the first thing that I do when I build a new SEO site for a client. Because we know how the search engines work and crawl our sites it is important to keep this in mind all the while performing SEO. Making sure that the name has a key word in it is important as well as the site tag line. Spiders also check the meta description so creating a sentence with key words put in early in each sentence helps the bots find relevancy to the rest of the site, and after the spider crawls your content, the bot then checks the links, so putting key words in where you can inside your links will also help your SEO rankings as well.