The design of a website can be an important factor when optimizing for search engines. A web site needs to be designed effectively in order to take advantage of a SEO campaign. Web site designers can keep in mind a few points when designing a website for the dual purpose of attracting more users and increasing page rankings:

1. Amount of Content: The amount of content a website has can be a major impact on search engine rankings. Search engines focus on content, so It’s crucial to include information about each and every aspect of your topic or company. A good idea is to incorporate free resources to attract more visitors.

2. Avoid usage of Dynamic URL’s: Dynamic URL’s are long and often consist of special characters and randomly generated numbers or letters. Pages consisting of dynamic urls are automatically generated by the database or Content Management System. Search engines will not give a high priority to them while searching for a given query. The solution to this would be to include more static pages in your site. A good internal linking system can also lead to more pages of a web site being indexed.

3. Selection of a proper URL or domain name: The basic rule for high page ranking is that while selecting a domain name, one should choose a business name or the brand name. Domain names provide you with the opportunity to include as many keywords as possible. But at the same time very long and complex urls should be avoided. Also if changing the existing domain name or url you should be careful to redirect your old domain correctly to avoid losing the any value your old domain had.

4. Updating content of websites regularly: The content of Web sites should be continuously updated in order to encourage more visits from search engine spiders, which can improve rankings. Stagnant content may even decrease the popularity of a web site. Older web pages are less likely to include content with searches for recent events or products. It is generally a good idea to create a section of your site devoted to news related to your company or enterprise, or provide users with frequently updated blog.

5 Avoid using Flash: Web spiders used by search engines for indexing function much similar to a typical text-based browser. However, they are often not able to read the text embedded in Flash. It is a common mistake to embed target keywords in flash. As a result they are not easily able to rank well. The solution should be to use flash only when you can not achieve what you are trying to do with another format. However, with more recent versions of flash modern search engines are getting better at indexing and ranking content.

6 Title and Meta Description Tags: Search Engines give lot of importance to the title tag and meta description tag of each page. So including your keywords will help. Also it easier to gain more traffic from search engines faster if you are targeting less competitive keywords.

Gagandeep Singh, is working as web designer and SEO for a Vancouver Web Design Company which provide complete web development solutions in Vancouver.

Best Social Sites For Link Building

Hub Pages is a great option for link building. You need to build your profile to have a ranking above 74 before your links get nofollow taken from them. This isn’t hard if you plan to have more that 4-5 hubs.

Squidoo is a good option. You can create a lens on any of your niche topics and embed follow links back to your main sites.

Both these sites give you tools to create great media rich content, and is ideal for link building.

Best article sites For Link Building

The best options for building links using articles sites are:

E-zine - The articles can rank well in Google, and links in the resource box will carry a good amount of strength.

Go-articles - Another good option link building, articles can rank well in Google, and the links well worth your effort.

Tips for build linking on these sites

Articles on the above sites can rank quite well in Google, and the links can carry a lot of value, but for you to get the most out of them, you need to do more than just write content and hope. Good readable content is a must. Read other hubs and lenses and see what content is performing well.

Here are a couple of hubs I have created to give you an idea of the sort of level expected. Both are only very new though. I didn’t put too much effort in to either of them, as I find it easy to write about MMO topics.

• Make Money Online Today
• Make Money Online For Free

Other thoughts

A good strategy for building quality links to your site is do more than simply create content on these sites, but to create content which links to your site, then build links to that content as well. A few links from social bookmarking sites will help your hubs, squidoo’s and articles to perform much better, and give much more value to them.

But what about spam messages that aren’t so obvious?

Anyone who has dropped by this blog before will know I am a big fan of the plugin keywordluv. I feel it brings more comments, and thus content to my blog. As a result I get plenty of comments from other webmasters looking for targeted backlinks to their sites. There are dozens of PR3 and Pr2 pages on this blog when you can easily get a backlink to your site, and that backlink can have any text you want in it…within reason.

Now comes the reason why I am writing this post. What about people who want targeted backlinks from your blog, but they want lots of links, and they want them fast. This sort of person doesn’t really want to read your content. They don’t want to think of a meaningful comment to add, they just want to drop in and dump a “Generic comment” with their anchor, then move on. The faster the better. Now to the untrained eye these comments can look like legitimate comments. They normally look something like this: “Great post, bookmarked, will be back later”, or “fantastic article, keep up the good work”. Neither of these comments even suggest the person has even read the title of your post, they may not have even visited your site. The comments could apply to any post.

So, if you want a backlink with your choice of anchors from this site, you need to read the article and add to the content to my site. Nothing comes for free. Add a meaningful comment or I will flag it as the spam that it is.

This is very interesting for two reasons. 1) It suggests Google is tracking comment numbers on blogs. 2) It is likely that if they are tracking comment numbers that it may be or become part of their ranking system for blog posts.

I love the thought of this, because I have no problems getting comments on this blog. It might also explain why some of my posts rank rather well for some good terms despite not really optimising them much for the terms. An interesting thought anyway.

Thug Bunny Vector Tutorial

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Cow Vector Tutorial

Killer Bunny with chainsaw Vector Tutorial

Sports Car Vector Tutorial

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Fox Drawing Vector Tutorial

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Master Painting Vector Tutorial

Torn Wallpaper Vector Tutorial

Mini Vector Tutorial

Product Ad Vector Tutorial

Wood Grain Vector Tutorial

Vintage Shirt Vector Tutorial

Bitmap to Vector Tutorial

Simple Banners Vector Tutorial

Character Shading Vector Tutorial

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Swirls Vector Tutorial

Creating Characters Vector Tutorial

Tree Vector Tutorial

Retro Emblem Vector Tutorial

Wordpress is my favorite application. I love it. I use it both as a blogging platform, and as a CMS for sites. I love the ease in which I can create professional sites, and the options of I have in the way of free and premium themes. I also like that there are 1000’s of plugins to add functionality to my sites.

When it comes to Wordpress themes, I consider myself an intermediate user. I can alter aspects of other people themes to my liking, and I know what the structure of a Wordpress theme looks like: PHP files, what roughly to expect in each one + a CSS file.

However, I hadn’t ever considered that I would have the skill to create a Wordpress theme from scratch. That is until I read this book. So if you are like me and you fancy yourself a bit of a part time designer / coder but need a little more guidance, then go for it, this book will really help your in your goal towards creating your own Wordpress theme from scratch.

What’s in this book?

It serves both as a good reference material for someone learning theme design and a good cover to cover read for someone who wants to try creating a theme using the example provided.

What you will need to know?

A bit about Wordpress, how to install themes and what theme files look like and some basic CSS. Essentially this book is for visual designers who are used to working with the common industry-standard tools like PhotoShop and Dreamweaver or other popular graphic, HTML, and text editors.

An Approach to Design - Rapid Design Comping

The author of this book Tessa Blakeley Silver, works through a design method referred to as “Rapid Design Comping”, which is a method of design where essentially you design visually in a graphic editor such as Photoshop. This is a professional design method, valid for any designer.

Step by Step approach

The guts of this book is a walk through giving the actual steps to make a professional theme. The author uses the creation of a professional newspaper type theme to illustrate her example. Along with a generic process that could be used to create a standard CSS based web template the author delves deeper into the specifics of designing for Wordpress, with information about “The Loop” and how to separate your theme into template files for Wordpress.

What I think about it

I am very happy to have this book in my collection. It gave me the resource I required to step away from other people themes, and design my own from scratch which really felt like a great achievement. The book is well written, organised and very relevant. I love this sort of thing, and this book will be kept as a resource material for some time to come.

Buy this book now from Packtpub

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I received the strangest email from the Google Adsense team an hour ago… Santa Search Tips. Basically it is a simple game designed by Google to help you understand some of Google’s search basics. The site is a .co.nz, so it is possible that the email only went out to New Zealand Adsense publishers. It is all good stuff. I have gone through the pain of finding all 15 of the tips for you:

Tip #1 If you’re unsure…

if all your pages are being seen by Google, search for your site’s address after the command “site”, ie site:yourwebsite.com. When you see your pages in the results, check your snippet content and page titles. Include information that matches the product or category of products on a particular page. If anything is missing or you want more details, you can also use the Content Analysis Tool in Webmaster Tools.

Tip #2 Did you know?

if you upload new products faster then Google crawls your site, you should submit a Google Sitemap to include a refresh rate.

Tip #3 Remember to…

label your images appropriately. Don’t miss out on potential customers because of [001.jpg] instead of [NintendoWii.jpg] Images Search is one of the largest search properties out there, so take advantage of it.

Tip #4 Make sure you…

manage your Sitelinks. Your most valuable links may not be the ones that Google chooses as Sitelinks, so remember to remove any that you don’t think will benefit your users.

Tip #5 Don’t forget to…

check for error and keyword traffic in Webmaster Tools. See our diagnostics checklist.

Tip #6 It’s important to…

serve accurate HTTP status codes. If you’re permanently out of a product, serve a 404. I you have permanently moved a product to a new page, serve a 301. The more we know about your old pages, the better.

Tip #7 Consistency is key…

if your website directs customers to a brick and mortar store, make sure you double check you business listing in Google Local.

Tip #8 Take a few minutes…

to test the usability of your checkout process. Ask yourself if a user can get from product page to checkout without assistance? Is your checkout button easy to find?

Tip #9 There’s no doubt about it…

users and search engines like fresh content. We recommend original product descriptions or a product review section on your site.

Tip #10 Have you thought of?

reading our recently released SEO Starter Guide?

Tip #11 Would you like an overview of our top tips?

Watch our Tutorials for Webmasters.

Tip  #12 You can always…

find out what information Google has about your website in Webmaster Tools.

Tip #13 For even more tips…

get the latest updates from the Webmaster Central Blog.

Tip #14 You can always…

answer your other questions in our Webmaster Help Center.

Tip #15 It’s never too late to…

ask your last-minute questions in the Webmaster Help.

Connect Content is a network for web masters like you and me to get relevant anchor targeted links to our web content. I have been using this service to promote some of my niche sites and articles since it’s private beta launch and and want to offer readers an opportunity to join also.

Connect content is not free. It will cost you $12 a month or $120 a year.

What will you get from this network?

You will get targeted links and direct traffic to your content. You decide what content to promote, what anchor terms you want to promote and other web masters will promote your content on their sites. The harder you work promoting other web masters content, the more your content will be promoted by others.

The end result will be more search engine and direct traffic to the content you promote, which is worth much more to you than this network will cost to be part of. You will also make genuine connections with other web masters, just like you, trying to promote their content to make more money from their sites.

Is this selling buying Links? Will I get in trouble from Google?

No this isn’t selling and buying of links. You don’t have to link to or promote any sites you don’t want to. And no one has to promote your sites if they don’t wish to. This network is simply a medium to share with other webmasters the content you have which you want targeted anchored links to. You are under no obligations what so ever to promote any particular content. RT the creator of the site has gone to great effort to develop a network that is both useful to web masters and that abides by all of the Google quality guidelines. So no, I wouldn’t think you will get in any trouble by Google or any other search engine for promoting your content on this network. However, as with anything, these things are often some what of a gray area, and nothing can be guaranteed. Having said that, I am using the network myself, so I have confidence that it is not in any breech of Google’s quality guidelines.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up and try this puppy out: Invite 

1. Keywordluv is a Wordpress SEO plug-in that really will help both you, and the people that leave comments on your blog. I have been using it for 5 months. Comments have gone up in a huge way since I have started using the plug-in. The advantage of extra comments are that they add new content to your pages, and search engines like this. And more comments also make you site look much more popular, and appear to be widely read. Some people might argue that SEO-wise this plug-in might have more of a negative impact on sites using it because of all the the outbound links you end up giving. My experience is that the added comments are far outweighing any negative affects of the outbound links. Bluehat SEO talks about The Diminishing Values On Outbound Links,  which adds to the argument that extra outbound links don’t have an overly negative affect on the ability of a page to rank well. 
2. With good reason there is a fair few amount of people searching for keywordluv blogs to comment on. All those people are searching for the phrase “This site uses Keywordluv”. So I wanted to add this as the title of my post to try and rank well for the term. Lets see how well I go.

So if you want to kick start your blog, I highly recommend downloading and using this plug-in on your Wordpress blog. It really is a big deal.

To find out why people want to leave comments on keywordluv blogs read my post on How to Earn Money Online.