SEO and Link-Building Strategies

SEO is a black art or at best an inexact science where the rules change all the time. This said you might even think that it's not worth bothering with it at all but when SEO is done effectively and you get on to the first page of Google for your relevant keywords the rewards are unlimited. Not being on the first page of Google is increasingly considered as a major embarrassment by many companies, Managing Director's increasingly demand top ranking from their website.

Anyway because SEO is such a difficult area we as a Web Design company no longer provide in-house SEO. When clients require Search Engine Optimisation we either out source it or better simply provide the contact details of competent companies. Status Media are one of these companies they use a range of SEO techniques both on website and more importantly off-website with link building strategies including use of Web 2.0 including Twitter, Blogs and Facebook.

Status Media are a link building company uk who have successfully improved ranking even for companies whose in-house web designers had applied every already commonly known SEO technique without success. They use a complex combination of proven link building tactics which deliver top three rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

SEO also requires keyword optimisation and very close monitoring of results so that it can be noticed when a particular Adwords campaign is weakening. Sometimes time of day placing of Adword campaigns can be critical. The bottom line of course is ROI (return on Investment), increased ranking, increased visitors and most importantly increased sales (it is quite possible to achieve high -ranking for keywords that bring little qualified traffic.

Many companies have lost a fortune with ill-considered PPC campaigns failing to optimise keywords, have a proper strategy, failing to create effective landing pages which causes very poor sales conversion not even noticing that they've exceeded their budget without increasing sales.

FireFox Web Debugging Tools

I normally work from home as a technical web designer anything PHP,MySQL,Perl,ColdFusion,CSS,JavaScript,XML etc etc and think myself pretty up to date, well for the past few weeks I've been working on a contract with another programmer Hanif and he's showed me the Error Console in FireFox which lists and indicates HTML,CSS and Javascript errors, when I said how useful I found that he then showed me the FireFox add-ons FireBug and web Development which I found sensational.

What I'm trying to say here is how useful it is to co-operate with other experts and also of course how wonderful Firefox is

Filezilla Best FTP Client

After paying for and using WS_FTP for years until they ruined it with a disastrous new GUI, I turned to FileZilla which was very good but lacked the old WS_FTP's wonderful feature "Remember current local and remote" directories, very useful when working on large multi-directory websites. But not now the latest version of FileZilla incorporates "Bookmarks" which allow you to save and subsequently return what ever directories you specify; eg you can name a bookmark images or css and then go directly to the relevant directories.

ALSO you can specify "Use synchronized browsing" which means that changing a directory in window causes to change simultaneously in the other!!!

http://filezilla-project.org/ and it's free, isn't open source wonderful!!

Solve Your Techie Problems at stackoverflow.com

I was told that http://stackoverflow.com was now preferred to Experts Exchange probably because it's totally free. I certainly got an answer to my MySQL problem in less than 15 minutes.

eg

Hi I have a table with one record per person and per item of clothing

so

peter, jumper,blue
peter,trousers,green
sue,dress,green
peter,jumper,red
gordon,jumper,green


I want to write a query to select all people with green jumpers but only if they have no other color jumper

So in the above case it would ONLY select Gordon not greedy old Peter

The solution provided by lc was a sub select or multiple select query

SELECT *
FROM myTable AS t1
WHERE t1.clothing = 'jumper' AND t1.color = 'green'
AND NOT EXISTS(SELECT *
FROM myTable AS t2
WHERE t2.person = t1.person AND t2.clothing = 'jumper'
AND t2.color <> 'green')

XAMPP or WAMP

I've been using WAMP for my one-stop Apache/MySQL/PHP/PHPMyAdmin install.

Recently I've been introduced to XAMPP which also has installs for Linux and Macs etc

In fact I had to XAMPP as it was a requirement for the project I was working on, I can confirm that it was absolutely painless to install, I think I just had to choose which directory I wanted to install into. The Admin dashboard seems to have less functionality that that of Wamp but it is too early to say more.

Just How do you Create More Ideas?

Choosing Your Web Hosting Provider Wisely
You may know the feeling, you have a brilliant idea for a website and before you know it you've bought the domain and got your hosting; takes just a few minutes. Like many things if it turns out you were too hasty and hadn't got hosting with the facilities you require it is usually very difficult to reverse your decision.

This problem is getting worse as the variety of features offered by hosting companies is constantly increasing. The main decision is usually Windows or Linux Server as a lot of the other features are dependent on this. So do you want ASP or PHP scripting?, what type of Database Access or MySQL?, do you want password protection?, do you want cheap hosting or 100% reliable uptime? do you want to resell the website? Would it be cheaper to get your own server? Do you want pay yearly or monthly?

I'm with Hostgator but didn't understand at the time that I needed the reseller option so that I can resell websites I create and hand them over to the new owner as a completely independent website ie not sharing my web space.

If you are getting the idea that there is a lot to consider then why not try the following website web hosting choice ? This goes though the options in a clear and concise fashion. They list my favorite provider Hostgator but I'm not up to date and JustHost is the current hot web hosting company.

FireFox Overtakes Internet Explorer and my Frustration with IE8

Sometimes I think my frustration with Microsoft is irrational just my jealousy of their success blah blah and then they come along and remind me why.

Anyway to qualify FF3 has overtaken IE7 in Europe, but of course IE still leads all versions. This is mostly because although all the savvy users have FF there are millions of Mom and Pop users who simply use the pre-installed browser on their PC.

Anyway I updated to the latest IE8 beta as I need to see sites I create in IE as well. Anyway IE8 simply refuses to see the Internet although it was OK at first. I tried to downgrade but it wont let me, I cant be fagged to uninstall this time I may just say goodbye IE it wasn't nice knowing you (I've got it on other PCs if need be)

The FIRST EVER Web Page by Tim Berners Lee

http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/

(It's not very exciting by the way)

Two Programmer's Traps

I was writing some PHP and inadvertently wrote '\r\n' for a carriage return for email when it should be "\r\n". The first case produces an unwanted 'literal' string of 4 characters whereas the second produces the the desired control characters and is seen as two characters.

The second trap I fell into was reading some XML if there was only one data element (in this case image names) then it returned a variable if there were more than it was an array, pity it doesn't default to forcing the first case to be an array with just one entry.

Is Wolfram Alpha Search Engine Doctor Who's "Bad Wolf?

Google revolutionized search by actually listing the sites that you were most likely to actually want. Before Google I remember that searches seem to throw up practically random lists of sites with very low relevance.

What Wolfram appears to offer is to actually answer your query intelligently, ie not simply to point you at a site which might contain what you looking for, but just give the answer... kind of frightening really

Is it something to do with Doctor Who's "Bad Wolf"

....