A Sound Design http://www.sounddesign-ni.com Web Design, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation and Online Advertising Wed, 27 May 2009 06:05:01 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 en hourly 1 What is the ‘nofollow’ attribute? http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ASoundDesign/~3/8NYDmZD8ssU/ http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2009/05/01/what-is-the-nofollow-attribute/#comments Fri, 01 May 2009 16:52:16 +0000 Jeremy http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/?p=41 There are many web directories around that offer free links. This often seems like a great idea. However, you may be unaware that many of these use this attribute when providing free links.

So what is it and why should you be bothered?

According to Wikipedia

“nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.”

A link using the attribute rel=”nofollow” is not completely useless, visitors can still visit your web site through a link using this attribute, however you will be losing out when it comes to link popularity and search engine rankings.

What can you do about it?

First check out if the directory you are thinking of submitting to is using this attribute for its free links. If it is, pay for your listing if your link submission is mainly about building up Link Popularity.

If it is more about just being found on the internet then your free link may be useful even if it has nofollow.

At the end of the day a free link is a free link. If you have the time to submit it then go ahead. I have been amazed at the traffic that has come from weird, seemingly unknown directories.

]]> http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2009/05/01/what-is-the-nofollow-attribute/feed/ http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2009/05/01/what-is-the-nofollow-attribute/ Totally Free Directory http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ASoundDesign/~3/Za-9yr9_wMc/ http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2009/04/06/totally-free-directory/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:20:38 +0000 Jeremy http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/?p=39 Yep! Just couldn’t live without putting together another Web Directory. This time it’s totally free, which is why I called it Totally Free Directory. From this you can probably guess the URL for the site, but in case you haven’t it’s www.totallyfreedirectory.com

It’s really free to submit your own web site or blog so why not do it now and build up your site’s Link Popularity.

]]> http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2009/04/06/totally-free-directory/feed/ http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2009/04/06/totally-free-directory/ Importing Word Documents Into Joomla http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ASoundDesign/~3/qJe8h4r5Q4w/ http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2008/12/02/importing-word-documents-into-joomla/#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:46:07 +0000 Jeremy http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/?p=40 When it comes to adding content to your Joomla site it’s likely that you may want to add articles that you have already written earlier, or you may be responsible for publishing content that a colleague or customer has written. If so, it’s very likely that your content will be in Microsoft Word format. But because Word has it’s own style formatting to control settings such as italics, bold writing, headings etc. when you cut and paste it directly into an article in Joomla it might not come out as you intended when you look at the page on your site.

For example, when I cut and pasted a table containing some data it displayed the following at the top of the page before the data:

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:”"; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

( etc. )

The reason for this is that Word has its own formatting stylesheet and so does your Joomla site. The Joomla site tries to display the content according to its styles and so does the imported Word document.

So, how do you get round this?

There seems to be 2 possible solutions:

  1. Change the editor that you use for adding/editing content. This means buying a Joomla extension such as the WysiwygPro 3, advanced WYSIWYG editor. While this won’t break the bank at around $50 it does mean shelling out some more cash;
  2. The Free Option - remove Word formatting before you add it to your article.

So, if you’re going for Option 2, here’s how to do it:

  1. Open your content in MS Word;
  2. Open up Notepad in Windows. Do this in Windows XP by going to Start - Accessories - Notepad.
  3. Now use CTRL + A on your keyboard to select all the text in your Word Doc. Then use CTRL + C to copy all the text;
  4. Go to Notepad. Now press CTRL + V to copy it into Notepad;
  5. Now use CTRL + A to select all that you have just pasted into Notepad and then CTRL + C again;
  6. Go to your Joomla article and press CTRL + V to copy it into it.

Volia! You now have an your content in your article completely unformatted. Now all you have to do is re-format it according to the styles in your Joomla template. You can do this using the controls such as Bold, Italics etc. in current Joomla editor.

OK, so it means going back over the whole article and manually adding formatting again. Well, it is a free option and sometimes free = hard work!!

Hope this helps someone.

Note:

This article assumes that you are running Microsoft Windows XP. Apologies if you use Linux or other operating system. I don’t so I’m not familiar with programs in other OSs.

]]> http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2008/12/02/importing-word-documents-into-joomla/feed/ http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2008/12/02/importing-word-documents-into-joomla/ New Downloads Page http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ASoundDesign/~3/7IqjDjWVWGo/ http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2008/05/25/new-downloads-page/#comments Sun, 25 May 2008 13:01:03 +0000 Jeremy http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/?p=27 I’ve added a page to house all the downloads on this blog. At present there is one, a PDF file of the post ‘Guidelines for Planning Your Web Site‘

See the Downloads page for more.

]]> http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2008/05/25/new-downloads-page/feed/ http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2008/05/25/new-downloads-page/ A Useful Lists of Pings http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ASoundDesign/~3/_hJ-aoBTyLU/ http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/2008/05/03/a-useful-lists-of-pings/#comments Sat, 03 May 2008 18:38:46 +0000 Jeremy http://www.sounddesign-ni.com/?p=42 The thing I like about blogs is their ability to inform popular sites that you have added new content without you having to do anything manually. For those of you who don’t know this is done by sending a Ping.
This has the potential to bring you instant traffic as people browsing sites like Technorati can see what is fresh content on your blog.

I’ve done a bit of research and have come up with what I think is a fairly comprehensive list of the most important services to ping. Add this to your blog admin area in ‘Settings - Writing Settings‘ and then ‘Update Services‘ at the bottom. Paste the list in there. (That’s the path for Wordpress blogs. Not sure of other blogs).

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

Please add a comment if you know of others to add.

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