Archive for the ‘web design principles’ Category

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SEO for web designers who use FIREFOX

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Below are SEO-related Add-ons for your Firefox browser—that can make your link building and search engine optimization  easier and simpler when searching, browsing and comparing.

SEO Blogger
SEO Blogger allows you to find the most sought-after keywords for your post without ever leaving your blog editing screen.

a4seo
An extension for the webmaster interested in SEO.

RankQuest SEO Toolbar
RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensures the popularity of the site.

SEO Workers Analysis Tool
Allows web designers to perform a basic analysis of the page in your browser with a single click. The results from the SEO Workers Analysis Tool are structured into the following useful groups: General status, meta tags

SEO monitor
Information for SEO monitor users displayed in statusbar.

DeeperWeb – Boost and Customize Google Search
Easily navigate through Google search results using a fast, simple and useful Tag-Cloud technique. Use our Topic-Mapping-Technologies for quick access to answers, news, videos, blogs, Wikipedia and more.

Flagfox
Displays a country flag depicting the location of the current website’s server and provides quick access to detailed location and webserver information.

KGen
KGen (Keyword Generator) is an extension that allows you to see what keywords are strong on visited web pages. Than, you can retrieve them for social sharing (tag filling) or webmastering/SEO.

MetaTags
This sidebar displays page meta-information (metatags, links, etc.) Has automated search engine submission menu. Features include: Watches currently loaded Web page and automatically updates the sidebar. Displays metatags, links

SearchStatus
Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

Google Semantics
This tool helps interactive copywriters to get synonym for the keyword during your search on Google n which helps for better SEO using Google own Synonyms also referred as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) n is a vital element in Search Engine Optimization

Niche Watch Tool
SEO extension provides web developers and web designers the technical information required to beat your competitor websites in serps.It gives you backlinks number, indexed pages, keyword occurrences on the page, page rank, all in anchor,

(Advanced) SERPAnalytics Google search
SERPAnalytics is a new seo tool to analyze SERPs. This plugin allows you to search in Google and analyze the obtained results in SERPAnalytics.

SenSEO
SenSEO is an extension checking the most important on-page-SEO-criteria and calculating a grade of how good your site fulfills these criteria.

SeoQuake SEO extension
A Mozilla Firefox SEO extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization(SEO) and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of

SEO Toolbar
Displays ILQ and other important SEO numbers.

SEOHAND
SEO services: Track sites placement at Google and Yahoo for any keyword. Watch Google PageRank (PR), Backlinks, Saturation over time. Graph and table presentation of the data.

DigMyLink
Reports the URL, Title, Description and Content of any link as you hover over it. Is supports any page you happen to be on. It does this by reading into the pages info without actually browsing to the actual page with little or no wait

Smart PageRank Toolbar
A small, simple, and powerful. It gives designers quick access to powerful SEO tools. It also includes the Alexa Rank and Page Rank (trademarks of Alexa and Google respectively).

SEO Link Analysis
Enriches the link data in Google Webmaster Tools & Yahoo! Site Explorer by showing the PageRank of the linking page, the anchor text user and whether the link is nofollowed or not.

Seostatus
This extension show Google PR and Yandex TYC in statusbar. Information can be load automaticaly or by click. Also highlight rel=nofollow and noindex tags. Numerating Google search results.

to.ly- URL shortener
URL shortening via to.ly service, one of the shortest URL services available. Shrink any long URL with a single click and use it in blogs, twitter or email. To.ly for Firefox is based on the service to.ly and uses SEO friendly redirects

Highlight My Site
Highlight your favorite sites in Google search results!

StomperTools
Featuring SNRanker, a visualization of Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live for a specific query term using SVG. See how you rank! Useful for search engine optimization (SEO) assessment as well as exploring a topic.

Knofollo
Knofollo gives the web designer the ability to see “nofollow” attributes in hyperlinks. This is a simple tool with incredible possibilities for the webmaster. Knofollo effectively makes Firefox into a powerful Search Optimization Tool.

Fill Form
Web Directory Form Filler for Firefox – Submit to Directories in Seconds

SEOpen
Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization. Including google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page

SEO Toolbar
Displays ILQ and other important SEO numbers.

Foxy SEO Tool
Offers tools for search engine optimization (SEO), web traffic and page analysis for webmasters and web professionals.

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SEO for interactive copywriters – Part 3

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

We have posted before about SEO for interactive copy writers and web designers, but this time we are talking about the things NOT to do for SEO Copy writing.

1. Don’t shove as many key phrases into the copy as humanly possible.

 Which pages land at the top is decided through a series of calculations far more complex than any simple ratio. When you overload copy with keyphrases you sacrifice quality and user experience. Don’t hack up sentences and stuff them un-naturally with search phrases

2. You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors. Balance between writing good, quality content that will keep your visitors interested, want to hare the information and keep coming back for more and keeping sure that your keyword densities are proper and pages are designed well for search engines rankings.

3. Don’t use keyphrases that don’t apply to the page. 

If you operate a site about web design, don’t try to force a search term about web development into the copy just because it pulls a lot of traffic. (A) Unless you sell, web development, it won’t be applicable. (B) Even if you manage to get the page ranked well for the phrase [web development], once the visitor clicks to your site and realizes you have nothing to do with web development, they will leave.

4. Don’t use misspellings and correct spellings on the same page.

 Sometimes we understand that misspellings will come up in search engine results but, it makes for a poor user experience for your visitors.

5. Don’t use keyphrases the exact same way every time.

 There are lots of ways to use keywords in copy, not just one. In order to sound natural, get creative with your keyphrase usage. One way is to break up phrases using punctuation or using conjugations of words. Since search engines don’t pay attention to basic punctuation marks, you can easily write something using the search term, while the punctuation such as periods and commas are omitted in the spider’s eyes.

6. Don’t use all types of search phrases for every situation.

 Long-tail keyphrases should be reserved for pages deeper in your website that get more specific than on the home page. Broader terms are typically best for a home page.

7. Don’t neglect ALT tags/image attributes.

These tags are the ones associated with images on your pages and they carry a good deal of weight especially if the image is used as a link. The ALT text counts the same as anchor text in a text-based link.

8. There’s a method to the SEO copywriting madness. The idea is not to get as many different keyphrases onto a page as possible. Rather than having 12 different search terms used only one time each, you should use two to four keyphrases (depending on the length of your copy) per page. The title, META tags, ALT tags, other coding elements and on-page copy need to support each other as far as keyphrase use goes. Your goal is to let the engines know that you have original, relevant content about a narrow topic.

 Pick two or three terms which are closely related and use them several times each along with mentioning them in your tags.

When your copy writing, web development and design follows these SEO guidelines, you’ll find your copy flows much better, is more natural-sounding and ranks higher.

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Web design fonts options

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

New techniques coupled with new Web browser capabilities promise to elevate web design typography from its current monotonous state into an actual creative discipline, and this might happen more quickly than expected.

This problem for web designers is dealt with either by making the most of the few fonts we have, or by entirely replacing our heading-text with images. Replacing and creating a few text header images is only okay when there are a set number of headings, but what about when the website is updated every day or even several times per week ?

Web Safe Fonts

Windows includes around 16 fonts and Macs have a little over 30.
Web design has suffered greatly, with the same 5 fonts being used over and over and over.

There are many tools out there to tackle this problem, but they are not widely used considering the number of web designs out there.

Download-able Font Services

Both Firefox and Safari now include the ability to download the two most common font file format types Open Type (OTF) and True Type (TTF) and Opera will soon follow suite. The only hold out, is Internet Explorer, which currently holds the majority of the Browser market.

• Kernest: Uses a link to tag to an external CSS file, which includes the @font-face rule sourcing a file specific to the browser type of the end user.
• TypeKit: Uses JavaScript to embed the font-file directly into the page.

Font Replacing Tools

sIFR 3
(my personal favorite because it appears to be SEO friendly)
A free web design tool for replacing text with Flash text images. It is useful for displaying fonts that aren’t generally on a Mac or Microsoft computer.

Cufón
This aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR. Cufón consists of two individual parts – a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript.

P+C DTR
This allows you to take a standards-based (X)HTML web page and dynamically create images to replace and enhance page headings using only PHP + CSS.

FLIR
This solution dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. The generated image will be automatically inserted into your web page via Javascript and visible to all modern browsers.

SIIR
The SIIR program serves to basically change dynamic text on your website into generated images with any font you choose.

DTR
A pretty old JavaScript and PHP technique by A List Apart.

Typeface.js
Instead of creating images or using flash just to show your site’s graphic text in the font you want, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the font installed locally.

IFR
By using a dynamic Flash movie, some slick JavaScript and well-structured mark-up the same consistent branding can be achieved while greatly reducing production time and preserving the cleanliness of the mark-up.

PHP+CSS DTR
PHP+CSS Dynamic Text Replacement is a JavaScript-free version of the Dynamic Text Replacement method originally created by Stewart Rosenberger. This is the P+C DTR version with word-wrapping and the ability to use inner tags.

STR SwishMAX Text Replacement
Similar to sIFR in that it uses Flash movies to replace text in an HTML document. STR does not, however, use Macromedia Flash to create the movies. STR uses a combination of Flash, CSS and Javascript, leaving the markup semantical and minimal.

CSS Image replacement [static]
Several text image solutions were developed in 2004 and continue to be developed with .php, ASP, Java servlets and other server-side programming.

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Internet facts today. Including social media and online advertising

Friday, July 24th, 2009

4 facts about Social Media and Internet Marketing Today

• Twitter doubles in size every 90 days. It is estimated that there will be 50 million people by December 2009

• Facebook has 350 million users and adds 350 thousand new ones per day

• You Tube has over 75 million videos which is more than ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX Combined

• People aged 18-34 spend 40% of their free time in social media

Relying less on print ( numbers and report comes from webpronews )

The majority (92%) of advertisers are using Internet advertising in their media campaigns followed by print advertising at 88 percent, according to a new LinkedIn Research Network/Harris Poll.

At the same time, less than half are using radio advertising (46%), television advertising (46%) and mobile advertising (39%).

Among those advertisers who are using each of these types of media, there is a difference in the level of usage since last year. Three-quarters of those who use Internet advertising (74%) say they are incorporating it more often while 69 percent of those who use mobile advertising are using it more often compared to a year ago. Unsurprisingly, the largest drop is with print advertising as half (49%) of those who use it are using it less often compared to a year ago while 41 percent are using it the same amount.

Of those who use Internet advertising just 14 percent say they use it in a standalone campaign, while 54 percent say the use it in an integrated campaign with other media and 33 percent use Internet advertising in both types of campaigns equally.

Four out of five advertisers who use Internet advertising use it as a branding device (79%) and two- thirds use it to drive information gathering for an offline transaction (65%). Slightly less than three in five advertisers (58%) use Internet advertising to drive online transactions while 57 percent say the use it to promote community around their brand.

source: webpronews

With all this online advertising – we need to be creative

As advertisers, we desperately need to find creative ways to represent our brand online. We should, for the most part, rely on no-interruption based advertising and viral marketing, but when we need to place online ads – we should keep a look out at the below stats:

80% of internet users say they find ads that expand on the page and cover the content very frustrating while 79 percent say ads where they can’t find the close or skip button are frustrating. Three-quarters of consumers (76%) find Internet ads that automatically pop up very frustrating while two-thirds (66%) say ads that open if they are “moused over” are very frustrating. Three in five consumers find both animated ads that automatically start playing and ads that play music and/or have loud soundtracks to be very frustrating (60% for both).  For us to be successful, we will need to come up with more creative and engaging ways to connect with the consumers.

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