Tips for Optimizing Your SEO

March 13th, 2008 by Jenna Gruhala

We came across a great arti­cle on the do’s and don’ts of Google search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO). The beef of the arti­cle is included below.

DO

  1. Have other qual­ity, rel­e­vant sites link to yours
  2. Sub­mit a site map using your Google Web­mas­ter Tools account
  3. Sub­mit your site to qual­ity, high author­ity direc­to­ries in the appro­pri­ate category
  4. Make a site with text links and a clear hier­ar­chy, and make sure every page is reach­able by at least one sta­tic text link
  5. Cre­ate use­ful, unique and clearly writ­ten content
  6. Make sure your title tags and ALT tags are descrip­tive and accurate
  7. Main­tain clean HTML code
  8. Keep the out­go­ing links on a page under 100
  9. Make it easy for search bots to crawl your site with­out error
  10. Make use of the robots.txt file to limit crawl­ing on pages that aren’t use­ful to visitors
  11. Make pages for users, not search engines

DON’T

  1. Don’t include bro­ken links on your site
  2. Don’t use hid­den text or links
  3. Don’t cloak or use sneaky redirects
  4. Don’t load pages with key­words or phrases a.k.a spam
  5. Don’t send auto­mated queries to Google
  6. Don’t cre­ate dupli­cate content
  7. Don’t cre­ate pages that install Tro­jans, viruses, etc.
  8. If you par­tic­i­pate in an affil­i­ate pro­gram, don’t pro­vide dupli­cate, run-of-the-mill content
  9. Don’t par­tic­i­pate in link­ing schemes – blog­gers are watch­ing you!

Source: seonoobs.com

Posted in SEO, Workflow having 1 comment »

Design Time: CSS Timeline Part 1

March 6th, 2008 by Jack Keller

You have a client, they have money, a goal begins to emerge. Before long you are head­long into a design project. What are the steps to take, how do you get from point “Okay, we have a deal” to point “Here’s the final­ized results now pay up”?

A project can start on a few dif­fer­ent lev­els, either tak­ing an exist­ing design and cre­at­ing a real­ity, or cre­at­ing the con­cept from scratch, and then tak­ing the con­cept into a real­ity. This here will only deal wiht the for­mer as it’s all about how to get the look from Pho­to­shop* and putting it suc­cess­fully to Fire­fox, IE, Safari, etc.

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Agility Recovery Solutions: 10 misconceptions about disaster recovery

February 22nd, 2008 by Jenna Gruhala

Agility Recov­ery Solu­tions, a Snack­box PR client, offers great infor­ma­tion regard­ing busi­ness inter­rup­tion plan­ning. Read on to learn more.

Paul Sul­li­van has seen it all. A 25-year vet­eran of dis­as­ter recov­ery and busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity man­age­ment, Sul­li­van wit­nessed the growth of con­ti­nu­ity plan­ning among the For­tune 1000 in the 1980s. He watched, first hand, the suc­cesses and fail­ures of busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity plans fol­low­ing the events of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 and in 2005 through­out the most active hur­ri­cane sea­son in recorded his­tory. Today, Sul­li­van is help­ing small and medium-sized com­pa­nies plan for and recover after sig­nif­i­cant busi­ness interruptions.

“Con­ti­nu­ity plan­ning has always been asso­ci­ated with big busi­ness,” said Sul­li­van, Vice Pres­i­dent and Gen­eral Man­ager, Agility Recov­ery Solu­tions. “We’re using the same knowl­edge, strate­gies and tac­tics we devel­oped with the For­tune 1000 and imple­ment­ing them among small and medium-sized busi­nesses across North America.”

Agility Recov­ery Solu­tions, a for­mer divi­sion of Gen­eral Elec­tric, focuses plan­ning and recov­ery efforts on small and medium-sized busi­nesses, though the com­pany con­tin­ues to do work with giants such as IBM and HP.

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Posted in Workflow having 1 comment »

Working with Clients

February 16th, 2008 by Jack Keller

Infor­ma­tion flow. It’s a prob­lem we expe­ri­ence every day, and all too often in this line of work. When infor­ma­tion flow is halted, it is as if you’ve jum­bled your index cards before a big pre­sen­ta­tion and now you don’t know exactly what you have to focus on to keep things mov­ing. The path to an effi­cient work­flow and timely com­ple­tion has expe­ri­enced a slight dis­con­nect. In this case, you have to fum­ble through your infor­ma­tion and pos­si­bly come off look­ing poorly to your client, which nobody ever wants to do.

So how can you man­age infor­ma­tion bet­ter? As a project begins, the infor­ma­tion flow is rea­son­able; you ask ques­tions and get answers to help you develop the project scope. Email is a great resource because you are given a dig­i­tal paper trail; how­ever, a lot of time can be spent on the phone gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion. How do you keep that por­tion straight? This is where I used to jot notes on scraps of paper and text files, but ended up get­ting the infor­ma­tion jum­bled at some point, which usu­ally left me with egg on my face.
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Simple Dynamic Image Gallery using PHP

February 13th, 2008 by Jack Keller

So often you may want to show a lit­tle gallery of pho­tos on your blog or web­site, you have a few choices out there. Choice one would be to just do a down and dirty bit of html, <img src=" etc etc or you could go with a pro­gram that cre­ates gal­leries. Those usu­ally don't inte­grate with a site too well, and often are overkill for show­ing the world your new car, puppy or din­ner entrees.

Luck­ily if you have your FTP pro­gram and a few pics handy you can just tra­verse your direc­to­ries and spit out the files in code. This can be handy for swap­ping the files around and even adding more down the road, it will dynam­i­cally expand the gallery.

PHP:
  1. $path = "/home/user/public/foldername/"; //path from root
  2.     $dir_handle = @opendir($path) or die("Unable to open $path");
  3.     while ($file = read­dir($dir_handle)) {
  4.         if($file == "." || $file == ".." || $file == "index.php" )
  5.         con­tinue;
  6.     echo '<img src="$file" /><br />'; //formatting this is up to you
  7. }
  8. closedir($dir_handle);

If you want to be slick, make thumb­nails with the same name, but tag like tn_ before the image name and put them in another folder, this will allow you to call some­thing like this:

PHP:
  1. echo '<a href="$file"><img src="otherfolder/tn_$file" /></a><br />';

Note: This will also work for files, you can add options to fil­ter only images if you'd like.

Posted in PHP Be the first to comment! »

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