I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Lucy Blackmore.
Lucy is an artist and crafty person living in the Harrogate UK. Her site is a blog and it’s designed in way that lets you know exactly what she’s in to.
The site really shows off her paintings well, which is exactly what it’s purpose is. There are only a couple of links to her site pages and they stand out right at the top. I also like the date and comment tags that look like tabs on the sides, a very nice touch.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
In the spirit of the 4th of July holiday (Independence Day) here in the US and all of the “Green” incentives going on these days I give you way to cook your meal without the air poluting charcoal. There are quite a few to choose from.
I know that I could write better titles for these posts. When I scan through my past postings I know it right away.
What I usually do when I write my posts is to write the title first and then start on the post. Sometimes I change the title later, but not very often. Then once I’m done writing my post I read it over and make any changes to the wording spelling, etc., but I rarely go back and change the title.
Search engines consider titles very important when deciding where and how high to rank your page for any particular keyword search so it also is important for your titles to really say something about what your article or post is about.
Recently I found this post on Wordpreneur called “Is Your Title Compelling?” I’m going to try out some of these suggestions and you can decide for yourself if it helps or not. I invite you to let me know what you think and to visit Wordpreneur and
Read Is Your Title Compelling?
I recently read where a TV station in Philadelphia (CBS 3) is launching a revenue sharing partnership with local blogs and social media websites.
This is a great way to promote your content. Paying them is probably even more than they need to do. Just giving them help promoting their content would probably have been enough, unlike Viacom who is suing Google and everyone else that they can think of. My take on this is that Viacom is shooting themselves in the foot and will regret it.
Congrats CBS3 In Philly. Hey Pittsburgh media outlets, I can probably be bought!
Yesterday I got an email from a pool company in Virginia. They wanted to exchange links with me.
“Please consider adding our link to your site on your page: http://lillicotch.com/Blog/2008/02/28/add-additional-income-to-your-site/”
For those of you who don’t have blogs, when you allow visitors to post on your site you will get blog spam. Some of the posts will attract more than others and this page is one of my worst for spammers. So what I’m guessing here is that this pool company hired an “SEO company” to help them with search engine rankings and that company probably first tried to post an ad as acomment on this page and then when my spam filter stopped it they tried this email.
Have a look at my page that they wanted a link from. There was nothing about swimming pools on it, in fact, I can’t think of any page on my site that has anything to say about swimming pools except this one.
I also went to visit the pool site and it looked fine. All about swimming pools. Then at the very bottom of the page there was a link to “Resources”. This was a link to page after page of completely unrelated links (a link farm). While this may have been an effective and acceptable form of promotion in 1996 it won’t help you at all today and may actually hurt your rankings. At the very least it looks your site look cheap and spammy.
Of course they probably never actually visited my site, but how much more simple would it have been for them to find any post of mine that they had some interest in and to write a short relevant comment? If the comment was related to my post I would have allowed it along with a link to their site and I probably wouldn’t have noticed or cared that it was a swimming pool site. Not only that one way links tend to be much more valued than link exchanges anyway.
If you want to know the right way to get traffic to your site there’s a good interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the USA Today’s site. Anyone want to trade links?
It is a pretty much undisputed truth these days that getting inbound links to your site will move you up the search engine rankings. It’s also true that higher ranking sites pointing to yours will help more than lower ranking ones.
I can’t even guess how many times that I have heard people say that I’m not going to bother trying to get links from “them” because they are too new and won’t be worth anything. That may be true if you are planning to close down your site tomorrow, but do you think that these sites will always be new and low ranking?
You may be able to look into the future and see which of these will grow and which ones won’t, but I’m willing to bet if you could do that you would be retired, living on a tropical island somewhere and probably not reading this blog.
I believe a couple of things. First that unless your link is on a link farm page or some kind of spammer/scraper site that all inbound links will help your rankings right now. Is is also much easier to get new sites to mention you, especially if you offer them something (your help, advice, encouragement or just a friendly word).
High ranking sites are just not in the habit of giving away free mentions. Just try to get Yahoo, Cnet, WSJ, etc. to link to you and you will see what I mean. Newer smaller sites will be much more receptive and some of them won’t always be smaller. They will grow and so will the value of their links to your site.
If you would like to read more there’s a post on the Search Engine Watch site by Justilien Gaspard that I recommend called…
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
You may know that I’m a big movie fan and I see way too many for my own good. I recently found the /Film site (SlashFilm) and thoroughly enjoyed it all.
Their site is set up as a blog and they have a category called “Cool Stuff” that’s just, well, cool. I think it’s a really wonderful way to spend a Friday instead of working (tell your boss I said it’s OK).
One of the things that I tell my customers when we first start to design their site is to try to think of keywords that they should use in their content to help search engines find them. To put these keyword(s) in the headlines and once or twice in the main text.
I have written before about keyword suggestion tools that help you determine popular keywords that people search for, but what I never really had was a process for deciding which words that my customers should be using. I usually have them tell me what keywords that they want to be found for and many times they weren’t the best ones for people to find them for or were not very popular search terms at all. I’ve said many times before what good are millions of visitors if they just come and then leave right away? You want keywords that bring traffic, but visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.
Recently I read a post on the SEOmoz blog that described a step by step process for helping discover what keywords would work best for a customer’s site. This is some great advice and it always helps to have a standardized process for determining what needs done. I highly recommend reading…
Whenever I design a new site I like to have a look at in all kinds of different browsers to see how it looks. Now days I usually have a look at it with my phone as well.
One of the most popular ones has always been Internet Explorer and as I have written about before Microsoft tends to make up their own “standards” and you can never be sure how your site is going to look in IE. Firefox has a cool little plug in called IE Tab that lets you switch between Firefox and whatever version of IE that you have installed in your computer.
The problem becomes when you want to see it in older versions of IE. I don’t worry too much about version 5.5 any more, but I still see quite a few visitors stopping by with IE6 and once you have upgraded to IE7 it’s pretty hard to go back.
I used to dig my old computer out of the drawer, fire it up and go to the new site, but now I’ve found IETester. It’s a free program that lets you view pages in IE 5.5, 6, 7 and even IE8 beta 1. It’s a really useful tool for web designers and it’s free.
I recently bought a Blackberry Curve smart phone and so far I really like it. It allows me to have up to ten email accounts which is probably the most important thing for me in a phone, but I love that it has so many built in features and many more that I can download. The WiFi can be very useful as well.
One of the things that it didn’t have was some kind of GPS to use it for directions when I’m on the road. Now I have discovered another great free tool called Google Maps For Mobile. This downloadable application puts local information, directions and maps right in your phone.
You can download Google Maps to your own phone and it’s much more than maps.
- Where’s the nearest (anything you want)
- Is there traffic up ahead?
- How do I get there from where I am?
- How do I get there using public transportation?
I’m just getting started with this so I’m sure that there’s much more and even more coming. If you have a smart phone I encourage you to
