Blog to get better search engine rankings

I’ll start with the summary…

1. Structure your web pages so that the search engines can index your content and provide enough content so they can understand what your site is about. Don’t embed your content in images or flash.

2. Routinely provide fresh engaging content that users will want to read, find interesting, and feel compelled to share with their peers.

Monitoring and Leveraging Communities

Every industry has an online community of some size. Some industries — such as travel in particular — have literally thousands of forums and blogs talking about deals and experiences. Savvy marketers can leverage these platforms by becoming an active participant — without being “spammy” or invasive — and gain traction within rankings as a direct result of this community participation strategy. Additionally, there’s lots of user generated content about products and services in these communities, providing both invaluable feedback for refinement of current offerings and services, as well as an excellent base for R&D efforts.

Keep Content Fresh by Updating it Regularly

For some organizations, content is hard to update on a regular basis. For example, a company that sells one type of widget that never becomes obsolete may seemingly have no reason to update its content. However, the majority of sites on the Internet could benefit from occasionally “sprucing up the place.” Bottom line: if the content seems like it’s “getting stale” from your human perspective, imagine what a search engine that crawls it every month may feel.

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3627642

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3629342

Liquid Resize Photoshop plug-in: resize an image without traditional geometric limitations while minimizing distortion

Liquid Resize will allow users to resize an image without traditional geometric limitations while minimizing any distortion that would typically result from changing the original aspect ratio of an image.
It’s a free plug-in for Mac and Windows, beta testers are encouraged to participate.

http://www.creativepro.com/article/onone-software-announces-free-liquid-resize-public-preview

The importance of the TITLE tag

Here’s a goodf article on the importance of your title tag. I’m interested in hearing about other peoples current title tag process and strategy.

http://www.marketingprofs.com/8/title-tag-strategies-basics-brown.asp?adref=znnpbsc148

A quick reference when building a site with CSS

I think this website was referenced or linked in a previous top 10 list earlier this semester, but I’m going to reference it again. I found my way to this CSS Crib Sheet by Dave Shea, and I think he was talking to me when he said, “You will no doubt come across many quirky layout issues when building a site with CSS. You’ll end up banging your head against a wall time and again.”

There is a lot of good information, links, and tips here, that I’ll definitely keep in mind as I continue to code HTML with CSS.

User Interface Guidelines

This article caught my eye. You can take what you want from the author’s views on Apple vs. Microsoft, but it was their UI guidelines – the article includes links to both of them – that I found most interesting. Whether you’re developing static web pages, full-blown fully-featured web applications or something in between, these sets of guidelines provide some worthwhile considerations and guidance.Mike A.

Limitations of CSS

While reading about all the great things you can do with CSS I began to wonder what CSS can’t do. What would someone want to do with CSS that can’t be done? I’m not sure how accurate this is, but Wikipedia offers this info…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets#Limitations

Market share

There is a interesting company that tracks web activity by the type of browser. Check out net applications to find the latest data on how people are accessing the web: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0

cheap software!

Someone made it known in class that you could get css2 or css3 for cheap if you went to a certain site with your student id. If you know where this is please let me know. My dad might help me get those programs I have til Friday. Thank you all!

webt143 Lists

In Ronis class for the vertical list. I am having a horrible time making the boxes larger. I find that I have a box within a box (trying dashed border 2px). Here is my code. I am so confused! A box within a box sighhhhhhhhh

#ver {

margin:40px;
}

#ver li{
padding:5px;
list-style-type:none;
font:12px “times new roman”,serif;
}

#ver li a{
background-color:yellow;
border:#436 2px dashed;
color:#000;
text-decoration:none;

}
#ver li a:hover{
background-color:orange;
text-decoration:underline;
color:white;

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Jean

webt143ListslistsLists

Wow, boxes within boxes. Something I ran into while doing our list lab that I found interesting. The list can have a border and then when you say background-border: dotted the box also has a border. So you sit there and have a box within a box, both having borders. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.