by WebKeyDesign | Jan 4, 2006 | WordPress
Here is something which I wanted to do with WordPress for a while now. In the sidebar, I wanted to remove the ecommerce seals for the SSL certificate and PayPal from the main blog entries and only have them display for the WordPress Pages. This is where The WordPress Codex comes in handy and explains how WordPress Conditional Tags can be used to display content based on what page the reader is currently viewing. There is even a code sample for the sidebar.
In my case, though it was really simple, I just added the html code for the gifs into a php section, similar to this:
<?php if (is_page()) {
echo "<img src="http://www.site.com/logos/paypal.gif" />";
}
?>
However note, that this code will not work! If you notice, that the echo statement uses double-quotation marks and that the html code does as well, you will realize that in order for this code to work, you have to escape the quotation marks in the html by using the backslash.
Therefore the correct code would look like this.
<?php if (is_page()) {
echo "<img src=\"http://www.site.com/logos/paypal.gif\" />";
}
?>
The is_page tag is used in this case to mean that if I am on a WordPress Page, then include the html in the echo command. To add more html code, I would just add another echo command, making sure I enclosed it in quotes, and that I escaped any quotes in the html with a backslash, and finally in PHP, you have to end each command with a semicolon.
For further information on conditional tags see the WordPress Codex.
by WebKeyDesign | Jan 3, 2006 | SEO
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short), is something which many new web designers do not learn, but which is nonetheless important to the success of most web sites. SEO is really all about marketing your site. While you can market your site the old fashion way by using word-of-mouth campaigns and traditional advertising methods, the online marketing methods are all about search engines and the traffic that they can bring to your site. SEO can encompass many techniques and depending on your subject matter, the process can vary significantly. The first thing to understand is that SEO results can vary, because the search engines constantly tweak and change their algorithms and databases. It is pretty safe to say then that no one technique will work indefinitely. This is why SEO experts customize their methods so often.
It is best to think about the SEO process before you start your web site project, but this is not always possible. The following tips should help though, even if your site is already completed and active.
HTML Content
The most important SEO tip is also the most obvious, namely great content. People have to want to read your content to begin with, and so anything you can do to make your content more interesting, more accurate, more enjoyable do it!
Next you will want to extract the key words from your content. Your content is usually about something, try to narrow down (summarize) your content into one phrase, or pick out certain repeated words that best describe the paragraph or section of your content. You should then use this phrase (or keywords) as a heading for the section, or in the title tag for your html document. In HTML, there is a title tag that goes in the HEADING section, and then there are the heading tags H1, H2, H3,… . You want to make sure that you use these to accurately describe your content.
Once your content is nicely keyworded, you need to make sure that your site follows web standards as much as possible. Using valid XHTML matters because, the search engines will be able to read your site that much better. Having clean and valid code is easier to read for the search engine bot, and so if you can cut down the size of a web page by using CSS, then you should use CSS.
If your web site content is generated instead of static html pages, you will need to modify your script or program to generate the content with a search engine friendly url. In WordPress these urls are referred to as permalinks. Search engines like to have uncomplicated urls for indexing, so you have to accommodate them by using a shorter friendlier url scheme for your site.
Link Campaign
If your site is Flash based, search engines cannot read the text in Flash animations, and so you must either have plain html text to describe your flash sections, or you must have an extensive linking campaign. Search engines can figure out what a site is about by reading the content, and secondly by seeing what websites point to your site. In the case of Flash sites, the links become more important since the content is not readable.
Regardless of whether you use Flash or not though, a link campaign should be part of your overall SEO strategy. The more sites you have linking to you the more prominent your site’s ranking becomes in the search engines database. You should though avoid link farms, (sites that automatically copy your link to hundreds, perhaps thousands of other sites). Google, Yahoo, and MSNSearch have all optimized their searches to no longer include these sites or worse, can penalize your site for using them. It is best to do a natural linking campaign where you manually submit your site or email a fellow webmaster requesting a link. Many directories allow free linking or reciprocal linking (where you must also link to their site in exchange). As you naturally build up links monthly, the search engines will calculate these new links pointing to your site. In the case of Google, your Pagerank will improve within a few months. A reasonable goal is to add 10 to 12 new links a month to your site.
Monitoring Search Engine Optimization Results
SEO Shortcuts
You will want to avoid using unethical seo techniques, but there are a few SEO shortcuts that you can use. One is Google’s Sitemap, which allows webmasters to submit an XML based sitemap to Google directly. This way the search engine knows all the relevant links to your site. You will need software to create the sitemap formatted file most likely, but you can build the file manually if you have the time. The other shortcut is to actually use an advertisement campaign to drive traffic to your site. This means paying for the traffic, but if your site is ecommerce based, then you might have to do an Adwords campaign anyway. However, you should still include a link campaign and other SEO strategies to help increase traffic.
Further SEO Information
You can find information on linking strategies and other SEO topics on WebMasterWorld.com and DigitalPoint’s Forum.
To learn more about web standards check out any of the books in our WebKeyDesign Store.
For possible linking partners check out our Links Page.
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 29, 2005 | Webmastering
With all the talk of Google Analytics and Mint, it was easy to forget about about Tom Dyson’s tiny Peastat. If you need quick stats without a lot of graphics and without having to login to some other site, then try looking at Peastat: A small Python based script, it gives you plenty of information and it does it quickly.
Peastat is divided into four sections. The top section is a quick summary, while the next three sections are what most webmasters would be interested in. The Recent Popular Pages, tells you what pages are the most popular right now, the Recent Refferrers clues you in on what sites are sending traffic your way, and last, the Recent Popular Search Terms give you the all important key words that vistors are using to find your site.
Learn more about Peastat on WebKeyDesign’s Forum.
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 28, 2005 | WebKeyDesign
This week I added a new section to WebKeyDesign: The WebKeyDesign Store is an online shop for all those books that you need to read when you first start learning web site design. I figure that the store would help make WebKeyDesign more popular in general with our site visitors and search engines, and secondly it comes in handy for refering friends and clients to yet another source of self-help. Many times I get asked about how to learn HTML and other web technologies like PHP and MySQL, and usually I can recommend a book or two on the subject, but I always end up having to look up my recommendations on Amazon.com, so I figure why not just make an Amazon based web store? This week, I got around to putting something together that works.
The WebKeyDesign Store is powered by Associate-o-matic’s Amazon Shop script. This is a PHP based script. Most of the other Amazon scripts that I found were based on Perl, but I chose Associate-o-matic based on their Lite script which is commissioned based. Most scripts cost around $99, and their look leaves a lot to be desired. Although I did find BlueLightSoft’s AJAX based Store scipt interesting, I decided against it because it is still in testing stages.
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 27, 2005 | News & Trends
If you have a blog and care about your content, you definitely need to read Om Malik’s post on Wholesale Blog Plagiarism. Apparantly Om Malik’s popular Om Malik on Broadband Weblog has been for a long time the target of plagiarism, otherwise known as splogging. Sploggers have been using the RSS feeds from Om Malik’s site to republish his content word for word on their site. The main purpose of this is to of course make revenue from the advertisements of the splog site. Although splogs and scrappers sites do sometimes improve the original website’s pagerank, the lost ad revenue may be more important to bloggers than any pagerank improvement. When it comes to Om Malik’s blog, his popularity I would think would make his content not really suitable for splogging, but obviously sometimes sploggers do not really think these things through I guess.
In general bloggers may need to start considering just how much is their content worth and if RSS feeds should be curtailed to only include post summaries instead of the entire post. But even then, scrappers can use any combination of Perl and PHP to copy any content they wish, so the war against splogging is not going to end by turning off RSS feeds.
The irony of course is that many bloggers see themselves as non-commercial entities that spread information for free, but the minute they realize that someone else is making money off their labors, the converstation takes quite a different tone. However, can you really blame them? In Om Malik’s case, the site’s content is a literal copy, word for word; this makes it not only plagerism, but outright insulting.
