Feed Your Site

The web has been evolving for sometime now. The implementation of different kids of ‘feeds’ is commonplace. You might have a flickr feed that streams to your website or have your RSS feed linked directly to your site, maybe even twitter streams off site via the Twitter API. Having feeds run through your site allows search engines to see that your page is being updated whenever you update the feed. This is just one of many ways in which a feed from an off site can help your search engine ranking.

Having an off-site feed stacked with relevant content that links back to you and and your organization can pay off huge. For instance, David Mihm has the system down perfect. By having the Google getFeed API, David has managed to stream three important off site feeds directly into his website. In those feeds he writes articles about how to improve search engine optimization and search engine ranking.

The idea behind a feed is to show the world that you have a lot of knowledge about what it is that you do. If I were a baker, my feeds could consist of recipes, ingredients, and foods. By streaming a feed into your site you give your audience more opportunities to not only experience what it is that you have to offer but to become part of your ever growing web of influence.

Now you might ask, isn’t that what I have my blog for?

You are absolutely right. However a few off-site feeds might be able to increase your ranking because major search engines will see that off-site traffic, which is relevant to your business, is linking back to your site. It’s really just that simple.

Local SEO

Recently there has been a movement in the web community to SEO their clients sites for Google Maps local business center. The local business center is a list of 10 business names, sorted by search criteria, at the top of a Google search result. Getting to the top of this list is a long and hard road. This list represents the top ten businesses in a geographical area based on a viewer’s search criteria.

Ways to Improve Local SEO

Begin Your Listing ~ Its very easy. Just log into the Google Local Business Center with your own personal ID and password and fill out the form.

Relevant Title ~ Try to get a relevant title in your Google Local Business Center listing. For instance, when listing my business I entered it as ‘Unleashed – Portland Web Design and Development’.

Geo Meta Tags ~ Add Some Geo Tags to your site. This allows Google Maps to further pinpoint your business geographically.
You can read up on Geo Tags so you can understand where to put them and what information to put in them.

Complete the Listing ~ When you’re filling out the information in the Google Local Business Center, make sure you mention some of the benefits of dealing with your business. These fields are meant for customers to learn a little something about your business. For instance, I mentioned my hourly rate, whether or not there was parking available, and a little something about web design.

There are similar local business solutions on Bing! and Yahoo! Following these steps should help increase your online visibility and drive more local searchers to your business, shop, or office.

The Future is Here: HTML5

I’ve just finished writing this wonderful article about HTML5 (which will not be entirely support until 2021) and I realized that technology moves waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too fast. However, communication between people and various contents was sped up with the beginning of the ‘word-wide-web’, so its up to us as developers to stay ahead of the curve.

I think there are some really great new applications for web and web browsing (both on and off-line) to warrant a gradual shift to a new web standard. Although, most of us don’t really have the time to stay ahead of the constantly moving curve.

So stay sharp developers, search engine optimizers, and designers, the future has arrived and we have to make the time to keep up with it.

Really Useful CSS Tools

If you’re even the most novice of web designers you know that CSS is our bread and butter. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are what we use to apply graphics and layouts to XHTML, PHP, and .NET. I learned how to write CSS by hand however, there are some pretty amazing tools that can help you with your coding:

• SpeckyBoy.com: 50 Useful Tools for Generating CSS
• SmashingMagazine.com: 50 Useful Tools for Generating CSS
• W3Avenue.com: List of Really Useful Tools for CSS Developers

However, I must caution that you shouldn’t let a CSS tool replace your practical coding abilities. I’ve seen many a developer that was asked to custom build something when the relied too heavily on a tool for too long.

SEO and Wordpress: Part 3 – Links

One of the coolest things about Wordpress is the linking structure. Understanding the linking structure of Wordpress gives you an automatic advantage over your competitor’s SEO.

For instance, this post is placed under several categories which are listed below. Search engine crawlers (bots that search your site for content) can navigate through these links in order to find relevant information and compare that to search engine criteria. Not only are the categories for each post listed under each specific post, but Wordpress has a dynamic sidebar (not shown on this blog) which will update your pages, categories, Blogroll, and Tag Cloud.

Blogroll? Tag cloud? I know, I know, I was confused at first as well. The Blogroll in your sidebar is a list of links that you wish to display. Say, for instance I was an electrician, my Blogroll would consist of electrician parts suppliers, electrician resource sites, etc. These relevant links give search engine crawlers a chance to see what your site is connected to. If you are a part of an interlaced web of links (both on and off site) this will tell the crawlers that your site is a place where relevant information can be found about your industry. This is great for Search Engine Optimization.

The Tag Cloud is a little different from the Blogroll. Wikipedia has a great technical description for a Tag Cloud, but for the lamens I’ll break it down into something simpler: A Tag Cloud is a list of links (or ‘tags’) that are relevant to the data produced by your Wordpress blog. For instance, my blog’s Tag Cloud would consist of ‘web design, web development, interactive design’ etc. This will also help crawlers in determining the legitimacy of your Wordpress in a specific industry compared to your competition.

Lastly, the best kinds of links are the kinds of links that come from other sites in which search engine crawlers have deemed a viable source of information in a specific industry. Say for instance that my electrician blog had its links posted on the largest electrician resource center on the internet. Major search engine crawlers would say ‘Hey, this Wordpress site is full of great information and other great sites think so too. He must be a really great electrician.’ If other sites have your Wordpress link on their site, that is a huge step in the right direction.

I hope this helped clear up some of the clutter surrounding linking in a Wordpress format and how it can help your business by having better SEO.