One of the best ways to help a site improve in the search rankings is to add new content on a regular basis. One of the best tools for doing this is to add a blog. A blog adds new content to your site every time that you post. If you are lucky enough to have visitors add comments that relate to your post that adds even more to your content, even though it was written by someone else.
Today I was reading a post by randfish on his SEOmoz blog. It’s called “Reasons Why Corporate Blogging Fails”. He points out many reasons why a corporate blog will not work.
“In many cases, a blog is NOT right for your company. Some companies simply don’t have the flexibility to tolerate a human voice - their rigidity is a closely guarded asset and one they’re unwilling or unable to loosen.”
There are many good points that I haven’t considered before. All in all it shows me another good reason that small business can have an effective edge on the web if they are willing to work at it.
Read this post and if you think that these negatives don’t apply to you or your company then you should consider having a blog on your site.
This is a great resource set up by Google for webmasters to get together and chat. It’s part of Google Groups and in this group, webmasters share questions and information with one another about how Google crawls and indexes sites. This area has hundreds of questions about how Google’s crawls sites. There are also good questions about web site design and how design relates to search.
Although, as with any public group, there will be some off the topic conversation and some information that is just plain wrong. The nice thing about this group is that it is sometimes visited by actual Google employees who do their best to clear up any problems, especially blatant untruths.
One of the things that I like most about the Firefox browser is that there are so many free plug-ins that will do almost anything that you want. Because the program itself is open source there are thousands of developers who are working on more each day. Because their work is also open source their plug-ins can be easily reviewed by the community who can pass on their reviews or security warnings. It also makes hiding spyware and other bad stuff virtually impossible. So any of them you find on the on the Firefox site should work well and safely.
Today I’m recommending a valuable tool for anyone designing websites. The Web Developer 1.1.3 plug in, by Chris Pederick for the Firefox browser. The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various very useful web developer tools. It can be used to edit text, css, tables, and much more.
It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
My nephew is in his high school’s musical “Dames At Sea”. Mar 29-31 and Apr 1, 2007
http://www.carlynton.k12.pa.us/jrsr_dames.html
I saw a preview last night of their show along with two other schools.
They were all really fun to watch and all of the performers did really well so I thought I would give them a plug.
West Allegheny HS is doing one of my favorites “Honk” Mar 9-11 and 15-17, 2007
http://www.westallegheny.k12.pa.us/hs/index.html
Bishop Canevin HS is doing “The Boy Friend” April 25-27, 2007
http://bishopcanevin.org
No matter where you are please support the kids in the musicals in your area.
Most of these shows are wonderful and they could all use your help.
I love movies. Since I started my own business I don’t get as much time as I would like to watch them, but since I signed up for Blockbuster’s mail order deal I get to see more. So every weekend I will recommend a movie or two. Do with it what you will.
Steven Spielberg’ version of Peter Pan. A wonderful version of the tale. Robin Williams plays Peter and there could never be a more perfect Hook than Dustin Hoffman. We would watch this movie every year on our beach vacation.
One of my all time favorites.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good, and are clear and easy to use. They don’t use Flash at all or use it only when necessary and never for navigation. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in english and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Simone Attanasio. This site is for a graphic designer so you would expect good images. I like the shadows and the easy to use clear navigation with wide spacing.
More…
Most anyone who buys keywords for search knows about Wordtracker. They will show you how popular your keywords are and offer some suggestions for more specific and alternative terms.
This has always been a paid service until now. Wordtracker is offering a free keyword suggestion tool. The tool gives webmasters up to 100 keywords in each session.
In a press release announcing the free tool, Mike Mindel, co-founder of Wordtracker, says, “We’re confident that once people see the benefits of initial keyword research, they will realise that this is a profitable marketing resource that they simply can’t do without.”
This is one of the most popular paid-for services on the web and now they are letting people try it for free. The reason that they are doing this may be that there were rumors that Yahoo was discontinuing their free suggestion tool, but I found it was working and Yahoo says it was down due to high volume.
Now there is also a new site who is also offering the same free service, KeywordDiscovery.com. They use mutiple search engines for their results, but you have to accept their cookie.
If you Pay for keywords or are just thinking about it you should visit all of these sites and decide for yourself which is best.
Here’s something for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
It looks like this site has been around for quite a while, but I just found it. I have been to the Lego® store and this is just as cool. I especially like the Escher ones.
The title tag is the tag on your web page that puts the title of the page in the blue bar at the very top of your page.
It usually looks like this in the code <TITLE>This is a Title Tag</TITLE>
Many people believe that this is the most important part of your page as far as search engines go. It’s curious that something that most visitors barely notice can add so much weight to your pages, but I believe this to be true (for now anyway).
Jill Whalen at the Search Engine Guide has written an article called “All About Title Tags” with some valuable information for anyone who is writing web pages. I have already put in effect many of her thoughts, just have a look at the title of this page. I have added the “SEO Title Tag” plug-in that she mentions at the end of the article.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good, and are clear and easy to use. They don’t use Flash at all or use it only when necessary and never for navigation. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in english and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Blender.
Blender is free open source software that lets you create wonderful 3D content. I have known about it for quite a while now and have downloaded and installed it, but I have now played with it much until now. I love their new site with it’s rounded corners, plenty of whitespace (blackspace) and plenty of pictures of what can be done with their software so you can tell what it’s about without even reading the words.
When I noticed they have completely updated their site and how much I liked the look of it I also took notice of the new version of Blender available for FREE and started to use it. In the end that’s what you are trying to accomplish with your site to get your visitors to take some sort of action.
Although I am not an artist by any means Blender seems very easy to learn and use. My mind is racing trying to figure out what I can use this for. If you are an artist I would recommend this software to you to try. It’s free so what do you have to lose?
