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Why “TAGS” Are So Critical To Improve Your Google Search Ranking

Gregory Milby — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:23:29 +0000

Many times it is easier to write 1000 words for an article than it is to create 5 unique words to make the article valuable (/findable) to people who would potentially be looking for it. Using basic formulas, like the ones people use for creating articles, can provide a helpful way to make a summation of tags that will turn out to be useful, and statistically rewarding.

Creating tags is not a magical task, but tag creation is critical if you’re doing any content publishing or blogging. Search engines, plugins, and even crawlers look for instances of the reuse of key terms and index your page/post accordingly. Getting ‘tagged’ can be the difference of your site coming up in search results, and leaving you in the dust. Using some generic logic can help you discern which words to latch on to, which words can help you to get closer to the top of the search results.

One method that is common is to search for the words and phrases that you want to use [inside your search engine of choice]. Place yourself amongst those who you want to be compared against. If you want to be a fine dining result, then find like-minded sites, and study their keyword source – see if it’s pertinent to what you can, factually, offer as a word to ‘be known by’.

Anyone who wants to come up on a page of results needs to tag their site. If you’re using templates, use the meta keywords tags in the head, if you’re using a blogging structure, then take advantage of the seo/keywords/tag features that come default on almost any blog framework. CMS (content management systems) have even incorporated a tagging logic, allowing each page of the system to be able to be crawled, index, and make it a contender for a pertinent search query.

Example of the Meta Keywords tag:

Blogging systems like WordPress, have input boxes on the side, where you can enter keywords, one at a time, called “Post Tags”. The use and common advice is to repeat features that may ‘best describe the point you want to get across’. For this post we chose, “metatag”, “keyword”, “seo”, “example”, “how to”, “html” and “blog”. Just by even stating what my keywords are will increase the ranking of the post (the frequency).

There are different guidelines for each crawler, but as a general rule, you can usually use 10 keywords safely, and up to 25 – each separated by a comma. With this in mind, place (what you feel are) the most critical keywords up in the first 10. Likewise, make your site description short and sweet – usually one sentence. If possible, include your region – even your address if possible.

references: Seomoz | webmarketingnow.com |

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Free Software Give-Away – Enter Today!

Gregory Milby — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:35:58 +0000

Anyone who knows me, knows that I do not endorse many things, and the things I endorse are usually freeware or opensource. Despite my warnings, my wife and all of our friends & family use windows as their primary operating system. Yours truly is the designated help desk for any and all emergencies.
During the past 4 years (that’s about 20+ virus & trojan emergencies [per year]), I stumbled across a product that actually works as described. It’s rare to find something that completely works, but I’ve yet to find anything malware, spyware, trojan issue that this software cannot handle – COMPLETELY HANDLE and REMOVE.

During some conversations with the Marketing Director (Mike Duncan), we decided to share the experience by offering a free PROFESSIONAL license for the product – which carries a life time subscription (hence, no surprises later). We will be awarding one license per month for the next three months. You need to enter each month in order to be eligible. If you would like to register for a chance to win one of the free lifetime license keys – click on the following link:

Enter The SUPERANTISPYWARE Give-Away

The best part is that you can try this software for free, “NOW” and they even offer a free version. The free version offers some limited features & does not offer the proactive features, but it still will removes ALL of the malware, spyware, and trojans. It just will not self-update, run 24/7/365 and do scheduled scans/remove all the bad things automatically like the professional version does.
If you decide to try the freeware version, there is no nagware – no aggrivating things asking for your information/etc. Either way you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the experience, and more importantly you’ll be shocked at what it finds & removes from your system.

Follow Me On Twitter!

====Ammendment====
Congrat’s to Jonathan Pereira our final SuperAntiSpyware Pro License winner for December 2009!
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The Primo Top 3 CSS Menu Sites & Generator’s Systems To Add A Stylish Navigation To Your Webpage

Gregory Milby — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:31:45 +0000

Creating a functional navigation for your website is key – especially if you want to add any style that retains cross-browser functionality. I’ve gone through hundreds of sites and have found the top 3 primo CSS menu generators that will give you the most options to get that stylish nav menu you’re looking for.

13 Styles offers cross browser/lightweight menu’s that offer a variety of styles ranging from simple to elegant to fun. Most of the menu’s are generic, and can be easily implemented into an exisiting design. The most you would need to do is to adjust some of the colors in the CSS. The stylesheets are using standard property componenets (CSS1/2), and appear to work in backward versions of browsers also. Which is good considering the bulk of corporate America is using ie6 still. If you’re interested, these menu’s offer the PSD’s to totally customize the menu (for a price) if the free version doesn’t work for you.

CSS Menumaker offers more menu’s that are utilizing a more graphic flair, and most seem that they make work well with more conservative color palets (considering the vibrance of the menu’s). These CSS menu’s offer solutions for creating dropdown menus (unique – most CSS sites do not even approach this topic). This generator has a pretty extensive customization feature – allowing you to build more than just the look on the webpage – this generator actually builds the menu items. If you’re creating the menu’s dynamically, then this feature will not matter a whole lot.

CSS Play is the perverbial “Mother-Load” of every configuration imaginable… literally. I was able to look through about half this site, and it’s literally overwhelming as to how many resources are actually offered. The multi-level dropdown menus are new, and the menu’s appear to be consistent. Sometimes CSS/js menu’s will have gaps depending upon the layout or browser used. All of the menu’s appear to “look correct” regardless of how they’re used, and how they’re viewed. If you are concerned about page size, they have some pure text CSS menu’s that are actually appealing.

enjoy.

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Google Chrom(ium)

conartistdesign — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 10:00:57 +0000

Two months since the release of Google Chrome, Google’s Web Browser, Mac users have been awaiting the Mac relsease, and it seems as if it will never come. But there is a solution. The profound company of Code Weavers, the makers of the very successful Crossover (Wine), released Chromium shortly after Google’s Windows only release of Chrome.

Chromium is essentially a individual virtualization of Google Chrome with the Wine core. Chromium has sweet perks but some downsides as well. The Browser is a virtualization and therefore has the XP/Vista fell to it, creating an out of sync feeling one your mac. Its X|_|[] controls contrast against those positioned on the left on macs, creating confusion. But on the bright side, it is Chrom(ium) on a Mac, and it works.

Chromium, I know, will only act as a temporary fulfillment until the release of the full Mac version by Google.

How to prevent both users and bots from registering using image verification

niemi — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:00:06 +0000

So I’ve been thinking a while about joining Yahoo’s excellent answers site. You know, thinking about all the big questions in life like “which shoe-size does almighty Google Larry use” and “where can I bury my dead pixels”.

Registering for Yahoo

As far as I can remember I’ve never used Yahoo for anything. I AM the Google generation. Walking across the road, joining the darker side, was a scary thought, but when I saw the short registering procedure I calmed down.

The way they have set up their registering procedure is just about as good as it could get.

As you can see everything is where you expect it to be, divided into chunks like “Tell us about yourself…” and “Select an ID and password”. Even the less web savvy users might think “voilÃ this is done in 30 seconds”. And they would be right if it wasn’t for that #¤%)/(&=#087AAARGH”#(¤¤//!!…

Freaking spam protection!

I had used only one or two minutes entering my personal information, even choosing a decent account name. Everything went my way just until now. I saw the image representation of something that might look like text. Skewed, distorted, blurred.

Now you say, where have you been? Never seen that kind of spam protection before? Yes I have. Several times. And usually I don’t even think about it. This time I had plenty of time to think about. I just couldn’t get it right.

For example, what letters to the image above represent? If you guessed z7neG6Bz you would have been wrong. I never had a second chance, because now a new image was presented. Impossible to read. The third was even worse. Now at my fourth try I was sure I couldn’t be wrong. I probably wasn’t, but because I had typed in some wrong characters just before Yahoo had thrashed my password. So instead of accepting my, assumingly correct interpretation of the letters, I had re-type my password and then interpret yet another image.

For a moment let’s leave my Yahoo story and have a look at some other examples.

Examples of good and bad image verification

Example 2, 3. – http://google.com/

These examples are pretty similar to my Yahoo experience. The letters are skewed and the tracking (space between each letter) is set to about -150. It is, at best, very hard to guess the letters.

Example 1. – http://flatpanels.dk/

In this example from http://flatpanels.dk the letters are not skewed and the tracking is increased to make it easier to separate one letter from another. Instead a hefty grain filter has been applied. This makes it hard for machines to decode, but users without serious visual disabilities should not have any problems. The letters placement is vertically inconsistent, again this should make the bots have a hard time, but users can easily overcome this hurtle.

Conclusion

We see that Google and Yahoo uses the same hard-to-breakdown image-verification method. The image is very hard to interpret for both machines and real users. They have to do something about those nasty abusive bots, but when it happens at the cost of usability the battle against the machines has been lost.

Back to the Yahoo story. Yes, I did succeed after several tries. Not all the letters were hard to guess, but a image verification method is not good enough if only some of the images produced are readable. Back to the drawing board Yang and Page!

Testing Password Strength Using Google

James — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:59:02 +0000

Passwords are very important because with passwords we are able to protect our confidential data from being accessed by the wrong people. So that is why it is very important that we use a complex password BUT easy to remember when choosing your password.

As far as I know, strong passwords must contain numbers, letters and symbols. Have you chosen a strong password for example for your email account? Well then, let’s test whether that password is strong or not.

So how do you test it? The easy way is by using Google. I love Google since it has a lot of hidden services and hacks. Google has tried to help us by creating a new service (although not yet advertised) that will give a security rating for every password as follows:

Not secure
Adequate
Could use some improvment
This is secure

At this point, the page only shows the number relating to how secure the password is without any explanation of what it means, so bear in mind the score and refer to the legend above.

To see how secure your password is, use the form below. The response will be a number which you can compare to the list above to see how secure it is.

Original article.

Teamwork Made Easy – GoogleDocs

conartistdesign — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:00:59 +0000

GoogleDocs has got to be to be one of the most useful tools Google has released. Besides the fact that you can use GoogleDocs in place of MS Word or iWork Page, and that its free, and that you can use it on- or offline, Google has made team collaboration even easier. If you are emailed a Word file to your Gmail account, Google will recognize it and you have the option of downloading it or converting it to a GoogleDoc. Once it has been converted you can share this file with other GoogleDocs users. The files save often during during collaboration and the effects are effective live. Google also provides a Chat side bar for editors to contribute comments during a group session.

I use this entire system of working during any group project, web based or not. It provides a fast and efficient way for users to update and collaborate on shared documents. Just another service to make life better.

Don’t Miss a Thing – SMS + Email

conartistdesign — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:00:19 +0000

Just about everybody these days has a cell phone. Even more people have email addresses. So why not put them both together without having to pay more. A lot of people on the go feel they need a smart phone with email and internet capabilities just to keep up with all their work. A cheaper and easy solution is forwarding your emails to your phone via SMS. This requires no software and, if you have unlimited SMS’ing, no increased phone bill. Most email providers, in this tutorial I’m using Gmail, provide some sort of email forwarding, intended to send incoming email to an alternate address. One thing a lot of people don’t know is that your phone cones with an email address. For example, the email that goes with my phone would be 0123456789@txt.att.net. So I go into my email settings and forward my messages to that email. The email address will vary from location and carrier but the process is essentially the same. So thanks to Email-to-SMS-Gateway, you can get your email without spending a dime.

You can Even reply. This isn’t as pretty. Just look for the email address it was sent from in the SMS message (not the forwarded one). and reply using that address instead of a number.

Here is a list of the formats for cell phone email addresses: http://www.accutracking.com/sms-email.html

Google Chrome – faster and more screen estate

niemi — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:00:44 +0000

By now you’ve probably heard that Google has released their first version of Chrome.

enaresh.com
news.cnet.com
kurogane.animeblogger.net
googleblog.blogspot.com

Chrome is a browser based on Webkit just like Safari. That’s good news for designers as they don’t have to deal wth another peculiar set of HTML and CSS rules and exceptions.

Pixels for free!

The first thing that comes to mind when opening Chrome is the lack of chrome. The toolbar containing files, edit, bookmarks, etc. has been removed, the search bar known from IE7 and Firefox has been integrated into the address bar (Google has named this Omnibox) and the status bar is hidden by default and is set only to show it’s ugly face when you hover your mouse over a link. Let’s look at just how much extra space Chrome can offer in comparison to it’s two biggest competitors.

Chrome: 1663 x 930 = 1546590 pixels
IE7: 1659 x 904 = 1499736 pixels
FF3: 1663 x 867 = 1441821 pixels

To find the actual view port I took a screen shot at 1680×1050 and cropped the image to contain only the view port area. All browsers were set to their default configurations.

Chrome offers a blasting 1546590 pixels on a screen resolution of 1680×1050 pixels. That’s a mind bobbeling 7 percent more than what Firefox 3 can offer and 3 percent more than IE7.

If Chrome becomes the browser of choice we might see that extra space used to display more ads, bigger top banners and a like. With the extra space Google could fit even another sponsored link on top of the search results. Let’s just hope that doesn’t happen.

Performance

General performance seems to have increased slightly from Firefox 3, but the real performance gain is found in the way it renders JavaScript. Google’s own numbers show that Chrome are about three times faster than Firefox 3 and up to ten times faster then IE7.
blogs.zdnet.com
ejohn.org/blog/
Test the JavaScript performance yourself

The virtual JavaScript engine is called V8 and has been developed by a Danish Google division.

Chrome can be downloaded here but unfortunately it can only be run on Windows environments.

SEO for Google

Sean — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 04:43:18 +0000

With the recent Google data center updates in the last couple of months, many people find their websites no longer have the high SERPs they had enjoyed prior to the latest Google update.

Just a small heads up, as I type this, Google is in the process of yet another major update.

Holy Search Engine Optimization some of my readers and RSS subscribers might be thinking. What shall I do now?

Have no fear, there are some common starting points that if you apply these to all of your sites, you should be able to see the listings you once did as the norm.

Proper naming structure
Name your page titles with your keywords if possible
Always have a sitemap
Always include a robots.txt file
If you must use a re-direct, be sure it’s server side, not with a meta refresh tag
Don’t use hidden text
Make sure your keyword phrase is included in your H1 tags
Don’t optimize for more than 2 keywords per page
Use text links where possible
In any image, be sure to use the alt tag (describe the image, don’t use keywords).
Use hyphens, not underscores when you name a page file
Make sure your site has an error handling page
Create a Google Sitemap and submit it to them (This is in addition to a typical sitemap)
Offload all your JavaScript and CSS code (make it all off page).
Don’t forget about meta tags

Be sure to follow these simple guidelines and you won’t need to worry too much anytime Google has an update.

Attackr.com » Developer Portal for web designers, developers and programmers

Why “TAGS” Are So Critical To Improve Your Google Search Ranking

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Free Software Give-Away – Enter Today!

Enter The SUPERANTISPYWARE Give-Away

Follow Me On Twitter!

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The Primo Top 3 CSS Menu Sites & Generator’s Systems To Add A Stylish Navigation To Your Webpage

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Google Chrom(ium)

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How to prevent both users and bots from registering using image verification

Registering for Yahoo

Freaking spam protection!

Examples of good and bad image verification

Conclusion

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Testing Password Strength Using Google

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Teamwork Made Easy – GoogleDocs

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Don’t Miss a Thing – SMS + Email

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Google Chrome – faster and more screen estate

Pixels for free!

Performance

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SEO for Google

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