SEO, or search engine optimization, is one of those things that everyone is talking about these days. In my experience as a web developer, I have heard countless complaints to the tune of : ”The site looks great, but why do I not come up when I type _______ into Google?” This happens all of the time. I will try to address this question in a general and simple way.
First, let me say this. The people at Google are constantly tuning their search engine to do the absolute best job of finding what people are searching for. That sounds simple, but go back and read it again. It’s a huge clue. Yes, there are certain design techniques and some tricks you can try to get your site ranked higher in the search results pages, but never forget that Google’s goal is to deliver the BEST and MOST RELEVANT content to it’s searchers. I think many people overlook this, and focus on the technicalities of getting ranked better instead of focusing on providing excellent content.
Secondly, the ranking of your site depends on some things you can control and some things you cannot. It does help to have your site be standards compliant. You cannot control how many competitors are selling the same product/service in your area. The more saturated your market is, the harder it is to stand out.
One huge thing you should understand is that Google’s current algorithm for ranking a site is based heavily on what sites link to it (and how those referring sites are ranked). That means if your site is linked to from the likes of CNN, Fox News, and Drudge Report, then chances are, your Google PageRank is higher. Google is guessing that the amount of traffic coming from more trusted sources is a good indicator that you’ve got something worth of seeing. Even cross linking with lesser websites can help.
Finally, I’ll say this. You may have to wait awhile, invest time in blogging/arranging links, and writing good content. The fact is your site still may never show up where you want it to. Just remember, being ranked in Google organically is FREE and they will rank you as they see fit.
There’s always paid marketing in the sponsored section of Google if you must be at the top. You’ll just pay some, but does that really surprise you? I’ll take some time to explain search engine marketing in a little more depth later.
If you’ve spent time browsing the web, you’ve probably come across these three letters. But what do they mean?
RSS is commonly translated: Really Simple Syndication. It’s used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. This is great for publishers because it gives them a great way to syndicate their work to other websites and end users. It’s great for end users too, as it lets people subscribe to updates from many sites and see all updates aggregated together in a standard format.
Different operating systems and browsers implement RSS differently. If you aren’t sure how to get started, here is a good resource.
You can check out the Angel & Associates RSS feed here. Bookmark it if you want to be updated automatically in the future.
I’ve just downloaded the WordPress 2.8 beta 2 and it’s looking good! I haven’t played with it too much yet, but one outstanding feature is the ability to search and add new themes from within your wordpress backend. No more downloading themes, expanding them, uploading them, then activating them. WordPress just became a whole lot easier to use out of the box.
Click here to download WordPress beta 2.
I discovered Flutter the other day . It’s a fairly new product, but it looks extremely promising. I used ExpressionEngine a little at my last job, and it was okay. I wasn’t too impressed with it though, considering you have to pay a per-site fee. That, and there was a ton of EE only functions and tags to learn.
Flutter promises to bring some of the nice features of ExpressionEngine to the WordPress scene, absolutely free. That’s good news, I look forward to experimenting with the plugin in the near future.
Here’s a video showing how easy it is to set up custom write panels:
This post is just for test purposes, but while I’m at it, I may as well explain a bit about how we’re going about constructing this site. We’ve decided to give WordPress a shot as our CMS of choice.
Using a content management system saves a lot of development time when building websites. Think of it as starting with a skeleton that many people have contributed to, we then create our own “skin” when designing, and put the “flesh” of actual content like this.
Skeleton > Skin > Flesh – Don’t forget.
The new WordPress installation was a success. Moving on…