photo credit: prakhar

I was reading an article today on Anywired today on 7 Signs of SEO Scams and it made me realize that there are still stack of people hiring so called SEO experts to get their site up high in the search rankings. For example guru’s that say they will give you a “ton of inbound links to your site”, which as you may be aware that incoming links are one of the MAJOR factors in Site Authority, but it is not the amount of links you have but the “quality” of links. These “quality” links take time to build, if you are creating quality content then the quality links will come.

I was reading a few of the comments and it got me thinking that although there are millions of sites out there outlining what you need to do to get your site to climb up the rankings in the search engines and appear on the front page of Google, web site owners are still expecting to much to soon. Unless you have an Authority site already that you can use as leverage or you can use a friend, collegue etc’s Authority site for leverage and get indexed by the spiders then things are not going to happen immediately.

Now I don’t claim to be an SEO expert, in fact far from it! but I have done quite a bit of reading about this and have undertaken a few simple things that I have no doubt have helped me with some of my sites to get them to rank better in search engines and stand out from the crowd. Over the last few weeks a site I run on Australian Rules Football ranked number 1 and 2 in Google for a particular game that was going on at the time! Now I thought that was quite an acheivemnt and it certainly bumped up the traffic volume which is what we are all after.

Things You Can and Should Do Now

Get some Keywords into your Page Title, for WordPress users, you MUST install the All in One SEO Pack If you have a static site that you have built in Dreamweaver then it is a must that you change the Title of each of your pages so they are not the same, that way you can target different keywords on different pages.

Another couple of things that are often overlooked are META Descriptions and META Keywords. I have found that using these on each page and keeping you main keywords amongst them works well. H1 Tags are also important and if you can get a keyword or two in there then even better!. Images!!!, again an often overlooked thing for beginners starting out with a wesite, get into the habit of naming your images and also putting in a descriptions an ALT tags on them. Another little tip I picked up is to link to internal pages from within your own site for example if was to mention AFL Football on my other site some where in an article I would link that anchor text back to the home page.

After implementing some of these changes you need to be patient! Don’t expect things to happen overnight, things alone and give the search engines time to crawl your site, it may take a couple of weeks before you can see any significant changes.

Once again if you would like a hand installing the ALL in One SEO Plugin, with optomizing your site or any other solution you find here then Contact Me.

Daniel Anderson
Budding SEO Guru

Ok so I have decided to design my first Word Press Theme for release. Rather than set up a test install on this website I have decided to install Word Press on my Windows Vista Box here at work. Yes you can install it on Windows Vista and hey guess what it actually works. It’s great, it work exactly the same as a hosted version, there is no messing around with FTP, you can hack and change things, test plugins etc etc.

So if you are a Word Press user then your really should consider doing this. This is how you do it.

1. First grab this program called XAMPP Lite, you can download it from here.

2. Install the program, now with Vista it is recommended that you install it outside of the Program Files Directory. I chose a separate drive for my install.

I chose not to install Apache and MySQL as services in the next step, but if you want to install them as services then go ahead and place a tick in the boxes.

4. The Control Panel then launches and you can start MySQL and Apache.

5. File Locations that you need to know about.

Ok now that the install in complete and MySQL and Apache have started the home directory for the web server is located in the htdocs folder in the location that you installed XXAMP. In my case the location is D:\xampp\htdocs. If you go to your browser and type in http://localhost you should get the XAMPP Slash Screen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since publishing the articles on Creating a Contact Form in Dreamweavr CS3 using PHP and also recently the article on Creating a Contact Form in Dreamweaver CS3 using ASP, I have received a flood of emails telling me how helpful they were (Thanks).

So I have decided to release an E-Book on the topic. The E-Book is called “How to Make a Working Contact Form for your Website”. To purchase a copy, click the link on the right side of this page.

The E-Book covers a few topics including Creating Contact Forms with both PHP and ASP technologies and also styling your forms using CSS.

For the beginner Dreamweaver users there is also a section on setting up a site in Dreamweaver.

Don’t Forget the Q&A section that I will be starting as part of the Web and Blog Tips Newsletter, Ask me a question via the Contact Page and I will respond via the Newsletter so that other can benefit as well

WordPress users should be aware that there is a new version of WordPress that has been released Version 2.5.1 is now available. Version 2.5 was a massive upgrade so there was always going to a follow up as Daniel over at Daily Blog Tips pointed out. You can check out the release note here.

If you want to easily upgrade your WordPress installation then this plug in is a MUST HAVE. The Word Press Automatic Upgrade Plug In.

All you need to do is extract the files and then upload then to your Plug In directory and activate the plugin. Go to Manage > Automatic Upgrade and follow the instructions.

Well worth the 30 seconds it takes to complete the upgrade and also beats doing in the manual way like outlined on the Word Press site.

Get More Tips by SUBSCRIBING to My Web and Blog Design Tips Newsletter at the top of the page.

photo credit: Erik Charlton

As you may have seen at the top of my site I have an opt in form for my Web Design Tips Newsletter. If you haven’t already signed up then just pop in your name and email address and you will receive my tips directly into your Inbox.

Thanks to everyone who has already signed up and I hope you are finding the tips useful in your web or blog design efforts. To make things even more related to you guys and gals I am going to introduce a new feature that I think you will find quite helpful. I want to get some questions from you guys on anything to do with Web Design or Blog Design, from CSS issues you may be having or how to center a div to How to set up a Wordpress Blog and tweak the design to make it different from the standard themes.

Is There Anything You Would Like To Know?
So if there is anything you would like to know then simply visit my Contact Page and Post a Question. Then, if you haven’t already pop your name and email address into the form at the top of my site and I will respond to the question as part of the Web and Blog Design Tips Newsletter. The newsletter will come out weekly (or there abouts) so you will keep updated with tips on a regular basis.

So Go Ahead and Sign Up and then Ask Me a Question.