Danny Angelosanto's Webmaster Blog

The Definition of Optimize

2009-12-22T07:08:00.000-08:00

Oxford English Dictionary Definition:

optimize (also optimise)

• verb - make the best or most effective use of (a situation or resource)

The world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is plagued by the most irritating people in web design. Day after day I read new material, whether on forums, articles, abused social networking sites or some crappy website loaded with hidden keywords, which claims to hold the ultimate secret to SEO, or claims that the best way to "do SEO" is to submit to directories, or the worst one, when somebody replies to a plea for advice with "Get more backlinks".

The reason that these people are such a problem in the area of SEO is usually because they don't belong there - many of them have simply misunderstood or never even contemplated the meaning of SEO. I believe the clue is in the 'O'...

Above is the Oxford English Dictionary definition of 'optimize' and it says pretty much what I expected it to say when I looked it up: "to make the best or most effective use of"

The fact is, that to 'optimize' your site for search engines is simply to modify it to the point that it will be in the best condition to be recognized by search engines for the terms that the user enters that are relevant to the subject matter of your site/page.

This definition automatically rules out artificial backlinking and all forms of spamming as having ANYTHING to do with optimization.

It's not wrong to advertise your site by, say, paying for a backlink from another site, but it is not optimization, it is more to do with publicizing your site.

promotion

• noun - 2 the publicizing of a product or celebrity. 3 the activity or business of organizing such publicity

Another dictionary definition. This is the category under which most of what the uneducated think is SEO comes under.

Bottom line - promote your site as you please but don't call it SEO. Remember that SEO has far more to do with what you do ON the page than what you do off of it. Learn what SEO is really about, which is optimizing your excellent content to be recognized by search engines as being excellent.

Do You Want To Know The ULTIMATE SEO Secret?!

2009-12-18T15:56:00.000-08:00

There isn't one.

How to do SEO Badly

2009-12-11T06:49:00.000-08:00

A lot of people seem to be woefully ignorant of what SEO is, and refuse to listen to the wisdom of the more intelligent designers and webmasters who generously share their advice.

So here is the penultimate strategic guide of how to do SEO badly:

1. Never create unique/funny/interesting/credible content - why bother when you could just copy someone else?

2. Get hold of a huge list of e-mail addresses - if you disrespect somebody's inbox by filling it with crap they don't want, they're sure to want to visit your site.

3. Three words: backlinks, backlinks, backlinks. Make sure you put them everywhere,
predominantly in the least relevant places.

4. Definitely post your URL on a .gov or .edu guestbook, because if you have a backlink from a site like that, you'll be the king of Google in no time.

5. Get 2000 reciprocal backlinks. Viewers of your website will love trying to navigate through all the links to irrelevant websites.

6. Make sure you hide keywords in places that the search engines can see but the viewer can't for an extra boost.

7. Sitemaps are for losers.

8. Your top priority for your content is for the search engines to like it. Don't listen to these idiots who tell you that you should design your site with the viewer in mind.

9. Design your site in flash. It's awesome.

10. Social bookmarking was invented so that you can bookmark peoples sites in exchange for them bookmarking yours. Exploit sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon to the max.

11. Remember, it doesn't matter what sort of visitors you are bringing to your site or whether
their needs are relevant, just so long as you are getting lots of them.

12. Remember, SEO is all about learning the secrets! Look for people in forums who claim to hold the ultimate key to unlocking huge traffic to your site, those people really know what they're talking about.

13. The most important value in SEO is Google PageRank. That little green bar is the God we all
bow to. If my site is PR6 and yours is PR5, you must look
up to me as your superior. The green bar has spoken.

I hope that was helpful

;)

Red link backgrounds - firefox add on to blame!

2008-08-13T06:03:00.000-07:00

Recently, red backgrounds have been appearing on my links in my browser and it was doing my head in! i looked on a couple of forums but despite the amount of problems people were having nobody knew how to get rid of them.

Turns out it was a Firefox add-on that was doing it - and not the web developer toolbar like a lot of people thought. It was 'SEO For Firefox', an add on that gives you information about a sites SEO status.

If you have this add-on and are suffering from the same problem, its easy to fix:

Right Click >> SEO For Firefox >> Options

And its the enable/disable highlighting option

Hope this sorts your problem out!

Centering divs/Centering your page

2007-08-01T16:27:00.000-07:00

People often ask questions about centering divs, or how can I center my page?

Well there a fair few centering techniques out there, but heres one I find particularly useful.

It supports skinny web designs, that is sites that don't use the entire screen. Usually, these pages' HTML is set out so that there is a wrapper div (or a containing div) around the rest of the divs and content. This is the div that you need to center.

The way I go about it is to give the wrapper div a percentage value, we'll use 80% in this example. Then, take the remaining percentage (in this case 20%) and half it (10%.... obviously :D). Then give the wrapper div a left-margin of 10% (or whatever number you came up with).

Now the wrapper div will always appear centered, and therefore all of the inner divs will be centered along with it!

Digg ditches Google and teams up with Microsoft

2007-07-26T12:20:00.000-07:00

Digg.com, the popular user-provided news site, has sacked Google as its ad provider, and instead struck a three-year deal with Microsofts younger 'adCenter'.

The deal came as a surprise to the users of Digg, as the site has be known to support Apple and Unix, and practically campaign against Microsoft and its Windows systems. One Digg user, Lemonblood, stated simply, "Today is the day Digg died."

It has been suggested that Microsoft may have offered a revenue share that was too good to turn down, despite the fact that they may not make anything at all on them.

The deal has been likened to the one that Microsoft did with social networking site facebook last August. People are expecting to start seeing these deals take place with other such sites, for example, the fastly growing yet unfinished Sceneparty.com

I guess we'll have to wait and see

Free Directories - huge list

2007-07-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

Found a big list of free directories that I thought you might be interested in:

DirectoryCritic.com

Hope you find it useful!

Bookmarking Sites List

2007-07-19T05:45:00.000-07:00

Hey, I've always wondered about all of the different bookmarking sites that there are nowadays, as well as the ones that everyone knows about. So when I came across a big list of them (on http://www.populair.eu/) I thought I'd share it with you

Alternatively of course, there is a pretty good little thing you can use:

This is a simple way of having lots of different bookmarking sites on your own, as it uses 34 bookmarking sites in one button. You can find these buttons absolutely free at AddThis.com

Anyway, this is the list:

1 del.icio.us/popular?new
2 furl popular headlines
3 stumbleupon buzz
4 simpy / de.lirio.us
5 netscape
6 rawsugar popular
7 hot spurls
8 clipfire popular
9 jots
10 backflip
11 wists top galleries
12 blogmarks most populair
13 ma.gnolia popular
14 wat vinden wij
15 netvous popular links
16 linkroll
17 feedmelinks mile-long
18 i89
19 linkaGoGo most popular
20 yahoo by popularity
21 blogmemes most popular
22 diigo
23 wink
24 livemarks (del.iciou.us)
25 populicio.us (del.iciou.us)
26 my bookmark manager
27 igooi most popular
28 connectedy hot topics
29 maple
30 openbm
31 blabb today pop
32 chipmark most recent
33 kmfavorites
34 Smarking popular
35 guicookies popular
36 Syncone
37 buddymarks latest
38 myhq
39 my link vault
40 myvmarks recent
41 sa.bros.us
42 scuttle
43 stylehive
44 recent dealclips
45 blinklist HOT now list
46 shadows

SEO-Friendly Image Headers

2007-07-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

OK, so everyone knows that images containing text that are used for headers are not very good for SEO. You can use the "alt" attribute, but its still not as good. So heres how to do it the SEO way...

HTML:

<h1><span>Your Header</span></h1>

Obviously, the difference here is that there is an extra "span" tag in there. Reason will become obvious in the styling...

CSS:

h1 {

background-image:url(yourimage.jpg);
width:200px;
height:40px; (Width and height must be that of the image)
}

h1 span {

display:block;
height:0;
overflow:hidden
}

This means that the text will essentially be there, but it will not be displayed

"Why not just use "display:none"?" I hear you say. (If you didn't, just humour me)

Well, its a possibility. That method is known as the Fahrner Image Replacement (FIR) technique. Unfortunately, it has a flaw, which is that it not only removes the visibility of the element, but it will also be ignored by screen-readers. Therefore if you want your site to be accessible by people with certain disabilities, it is better to use the first option.

Hope that helps you out!

Little CSS Tip

2007-06-15T11:25:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd share this for those of you that don't know, because there seem to be a lot of people who don't. I get a lot of other designers say to me, "I wish there was a way you could look at peoples external CSS on their websites so you can see how they managed some of their effects"

There is! I was under the impression that this was VERY common knowlege but perhaps I was wrong.

Well here it is for those of you who don't know:

(1) View the pages source
(2) Look in the head tag for the link tag containing the attribute 'type="text/css"'
(3) Copy the filename in the "href" attribute (Usually something along the lines of 'style.css' as you probably already know from personal use
(4) Then simply type the URL of the main page of the site in the address bar and add to the end the filename that you copied from the source! Voila!

Sorry if you've taken the time to read this and you already knew all that, but for the rest, I hope its a help!

50 Hot Ways - Drive Traffic To Your Website Today.... improved!

2007-06-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, I found this useful little list knocking about on forums and stuff. I'm not sure who to credit for the original list, but I found it on Webmaster Talk HERE

Anyway, I found the list as I said and I decided to re-write it and include some useful stuff in it. I originally just wanted to have this offline for my own personal use, but I thought why not share?

So here it is - the new and improved "50 Hot Ways - Drive Traffic To Your Website Today" list!

1. Write and submit articles to the article directories.

Here is a huge list of article directories

2. Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a backlink to your site.

Here is a list of personal blogs based in the UK
This appears to be a Spanish blog list. It shows stats which is useful
Another one from the same site

3. Answer people’s questions on www.answers.yahoo.com.

4. Post QUALITY info on forums and have a link to your site in your signature.

I would definitely reccomend finding forums either high in PR (?) or relevant to your site

5. Write a press release and submit it to www.PRWeb.com.

6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category on www.CraigsList.com.

7. Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.

8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100’s of free blog directories. Good Examples:

blogrankings.com
all-blogs.net
bloghub.com

9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines. (edit: new software just came out will submit to hundreds for you at the push of a button <> it's a free software but don't know how long it will remain free)

This submits to some search engines for you...
These are the search engines it will submit you to

10. Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.

11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. It’s a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.

12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.

If you don't know how, look here

13. Use PPC search engine advertising. Read up on how to master it

For all you need to know about Google Adsense

14. Add a “bookmark this site” link to your webpages.

This is a great site that offers a free icon and service. Definitely reccomend this

15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.

If you are unsure how to write this script, heres a free one

16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.

Submit articles here

17. Hold a crazy content and make it go viral.

18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.

19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.

Here is a good RSS tutorial

20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.

21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.

Typically found on webmaster forums. Here are a few sources:

Webmaster Talk
Digital Point
build-reciprocal-links.com

22. Create a software program and give it away for free.

23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.

Check a domain names availability here

24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.

25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.

There are soooo many business card websites. Here are a few reputable ones:

vistaprint.co.uk
cardsmadeeasy.com
gotprint.net

26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.

27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites such as www.MySpace.com.

This is a new social networking site tipped to be big, sceneparty.com
MySpace of course
Facebook

28. Submit a viral video to YouTube.com

29. Conduct and publish surveys to your website.

30. Find joint venture partners that will send you traffic.

31. Start your own newsletter or ezine.

32. Use a autoresponder or email campaign to keep people coming back to your site.

33. Purchase ads on other sites.

Very easy to find on webmaster forums

34. Send a free copy of your product to other site owners in exchange for a product review.

35. Sell or place classified ads on eBay.com with a link to your site.

36. Post free classified ads on any of the sites that allow them with a link to your site.

37. Exchange reciprocal links with other related websites.

See "21"

38. Network with other people at seminars or other live events.

39. Purchase advertising in popular newsletters or ezines.

40. Advertise on other product’s “thank you” pages.

41. Create a free ebook and list in on the “free ebook” sites.

42. Buy and use a memorable domain name.

43. Do something controversial.

44. Create an Amazon profile and submit reviews for books and other products that you have read.

45. Start a lens on Squidoo.com.

46. Use a traffic exchange (low quality traffic, but can sometimes be worthwhile).

47. Get referrals from similar but non-competing sites.

48. Create and sell a product with resell or giveaway rights and include a link to your site in it o others pass it around for you.

49. Email your list. If you don’t have one, get one.

50. Buy a pair of sandals; get your website engraved on the bottom and walk on the beach, stomp in the mud or play in the snow.

Heres 'Paul Taylors custom sandals!' :D

Hope that helps a few people!