What is PageRank?

PageRank is something which the search engine Google has made very popular. It is a number score that Google gives to each web site on the internet. This is also the reason why many sites are spammed with links to other sites to increase those sites’ PageRank score. It is why you sometimes get emails from people you don’t know offering to help optimize your site.

Google constantly refines their ranking system and the parameters that determine page rank have never been publicly available.

If you would like to increase your site’s page rank, the first thing to do is go to Google’s Add Url site. Here you can submit your web site to Google.

Yahoo also has their own submission form.

If you are using a blogging system like WordPress, you should research how the system outputs meta descriptions for your pages. For WordPress, adding something like this to the Header Template’s should help:

<meta name="description" content="SiteName is a site for talking about widgets.">

Having a simple and user-friendly permalink structure in WordPress is also important.

For more information on search engine optimization see SearchEngineWorld.com, and make sure you read their Guide which is helpful when starting a new site.

WordPress Quicktags Buttons Broken

If all of a sudden your Quicktags buttons no longer insert tags in your WordPress Write section, then the problem could be related to one or more WordPress plugins that you have installed.

I started having problems with the more button, as well as a couple of other quicktags that my other plugins added.

I traced the problem down to the Contact Form plugin, which has an option to enable it’s own quicktag button. If I disable just the quicktag and not the plugin, all my other quicktag buttons now work, including the ones that my other plugins added!

If you are having a similar issue with WordPress, try disabling one plugin at a time to see which one is causing it.

Favicon.ico, Logos, & Google

I took some of my own advice from ToDo List For New Web Sites and put together a favicon.ico file. If you are using Safari, you might have to clear your Icons folder, which is at Users/YourUserName/Library/Safari/Icons. Mozilla and Firefox should load the favicon fine, while IE won’t show it at all unless you have bookmarked WebKeyDesign.com.

While working on the favicon, I came up with a new logo too, but since 16×16 pixel limitations of the favicon would not show it very well, I decided to work on the logo later and see what else I can come up with later this weekend.

Some of you might have noticed that some pages have Google Ads and others do not. Essentially anything having to do with support of our customers is free of advertisements. Everything else, like the online tools we have made available, tips, and tutorials have some advertisements. About the most difficult thing I have found with the Google Ads is that they don’t fit into the standard template I have for the site, so I have had to go with smaller ads. Most WordPress sites that use the standard Kubrick template I would think would have some problems using the wider ads in general. Perhaps Google will offer different sizes in the future or will come up with something that can be more customized for the Kubrick template.

Speaking of Google, our site is still showing up with a pagerank of zero and it will not be changing any time soon. It seems Google does not give you a pagerank unless your domain has existed for more than a few months, something like 4-6 months is what the expected delay is. In the mean time WebKeyDesign will be growing.

Our next project in July will be a new forum. We have a test forum up, but I am not really happy with the forum software, so I am waiting on Invision to release their new version, this summer.