Taglines

I had been looking around for new ways to get ideas for designs. I've stumbled across something that suits that purpose perfectly, Taglines.
It accesses Flickr and finds images that are tagged with certain words, and displays them for your viewing pleasure.
Check it out.

What kind of things do you use to get your imagination going?

Weboptima: An overview

Intermission: Outdated Content

I was thinking, the internet is really just one big time capsule.
If you look at the information there is to get, so much of it is outdated, it's insane. The only real use anyone would get from that is for a high school assignment on [insert topic here].

To think that I'm going to be a part of adding to the craziness that is the internet kind of makes me cringe for that reason. I mean, I still remember my first webpage. Why is this still up? Why did I even make this? Back in the day, there were loads of pages linking to other sites. Funny thing was, there were link sites, linking to link sites, linking to link sites. Madness. What's even more bizarre is that these sites are still up. The internet is huge! How many of those sites are irrelevant? How would one determine them to be so?

I've lost count of the amount of times where I'd go look something up for creating a website, and find something so old, it's useless. Thing is, to the average beginner, they would not be able to tell the difference between what is useless, and what is not.

We should have an internet clean up committee. Anything older than a certain amount of years, which hasn't been maintained in so long, which also is on a topic which is incorrect or outdated or irrelevant should be destroyed.
Gone.
Save the web.

I should start a movement.
Or is that out there?

What do you think should be done? Something like this?
How do you think we should clean up the web?

Wireframes are your friend

When designing a website, it's very important to think before you leap. Preplanning and testing a site should be a requirement when working on a site in order for it to succeed. Sometimes the graphics and the colour can get in the way. In order to test a site's layout properly and have the person not think about the design aspect while doing so, wireframes should be used. Just planning out the layout of the site, placement of everything, showing where everything will go using nothing but black and white colors, and boxes with text. This article at Muiomuio.com shows the technique and how this designer goes about it. It's an interesting look into wire frames, and just might help get you started.

Blogger template help wanted

While I'm on blogger for this wonderful blog, I'd like to find a template which is more, you know, valid to base my template off of. I made the mistake of altering one of Blogger's templates for this site, and that template was created in 2006 (or something along those lines). Ouch.
So, I need some help.

It's MUCH different than what it was, but since I don't understand much of the xml code in it, and haven't learned how to alter things yet, it's got loads of errors in it, and that makes me sad as I am trying really hard to have a compliant blog.

If anyone could give me a hand on where to find resources on making a blogger template which is recent and such, I'd be very grateful.

Someday, when I finish learning about CMS and such (when are you ever done learning??), I would like to switch to wordpress. I am thinking about moving this blog over on the blogger platform to my site, so that I can do an actual, proper redirect when the time comes, and my search engine stats won't suffer much. I realize they're not that great yet, but I've done an awesome job in 3 months, and while I think I could do it again and it would be great practice, I don't want to lose whoever I've managed to get while I'm here.

So, yes. Send those helpful hints my way, if you can. I'm sure it'll help out other people as well.

Avoiding common SEO problems

With SEO, you will make mistakes. It's inevitable. You just have to learn from them, and from other resources. Just use the right keywords the first time, take advantage of alt tags and title tags, and make sure you have proper and clean code.
This article lists the the mistakes you could make and ways to avoid the problems.

Visual Learning - Kodak.com critique

I believe that you learn more through observing other people's work and seeing what you like and what you don't like. I am going to take this time to look at kodak.com, being sure to look at every detail I possibly can.

First Thought

On first sight, it looks rather clean, professional, functional. You can automatically tell that the site is related to the images as that is the main focus of the page. Seeing as it is Kodak, obviously the relevance is that those images are taken with Kodak products. They worked hard to pick good images that draw the viewer in and hit right at the core in some way.

Audience/Purpose

The primary audience of this site is photographers of all skill level. This site is trying to get new photographers in to buy their products, professional photographers to think of what they could have instead of what they already do, and would-be photographers to actually step in and discover what there is. The business isn't really trying to get big companies to use their site. They want the consumers to come in and buy. If this were a b2b site, they would not make it so personal (eg. giving tips on photography). On some parts, tehy seem to have an identity crisis though, as there are family oriented areas. While that's all fine and dandy, when you have a target market, you should probably stick to it.

Information Architecture/Navigation

The organization of the links on the main page does a great job. It shows exactly what the customer wants to know when it comes to photography, with the more important information at the top. There is a gallery to exhibit their product, a store with a list of products in an order that makes sense and in categories that actually work, a tips and projects center link with useful information in a logical order, and help. Having help on the top is rather logical as if the consumer wants help with something, they want help NOW.

I don't really understand why they have news items in a menu along the bottom. Sure it keeps items out of the way, but it has the look of the menu on the top which makes it seem like there's more to see, when really, there isn't.

Usability

I will write something for this when I know what to write. Drawing a blank right now.

Construction and Design

I find the site to be overall well designed. With the main focus of the site being images, the darker background is a great idea. Black is typically used while editing images to get a better sense of colour. It could also represent a dark room, something more traditional when it comes to photography. Everything works well. The fonts aren't too small and actually work well with the site. I don't really like how when you go into the site, the layout changes from area to area. A little change is good to let someone know where they are, and it succeeds with that, but a little too much change and a customer could start to wonder if they've changed sites. The menus change, the colour scheme changes, and the overall visual look is different. It's not to say that it's terribly horrible, but I did find it a little confusing. On some of the pages, there are huge flash movies which take up the entire page. These flash movies all have sound and are visually appealing, but I find it annoying the way they are so huge, and are the main part of the page. As far as SEO goes, those pages wouldn't do very well as flash movies are hard to index content. Also, the flash movies aren't that great. Somewhat tacky, actually. It looks like they were done by an amature and that's not brilliant.

Content Quality/Appropriateness of Writing

There isn't much focused writing on parts of the site. The main page has little to no writing, although what little writing they do have is keyword filled. Specific things people would look up in a search engine are used for their menus and that works out really well. Their content is mostly image related, but whatever images there are, are high quality, and really shine. Some of the areas focus on user sharing images. User generated content keeps the site interesting and has people coming back for more. That's great that they managed to fit something into the site that allows the users to interact.

The Big Picture

Overall, I find the Kodak.com website to be okay. They put a lot of thought into the organization of their content, the designs of the site are very professional and tidy, everything is high quality and allows the user to interact and to learn. There is so much knowledge available on the site, and so many reasons to keep coming back for more if you're an avid photographer. While the random layouts on some areas is a little confusing, that doesn't really get too much in the way of the experience. They seem to have an identity crisis, and should probably make up their mind who they are, or have different areas focused to different target markets instead of trying to paste it in there.

Webdesigner's Success Guide - Free E-book!

If you've always wanted to take those web design skills and use them for your own business instead of someone elses, this book may be for you.

Web Designer's Success Guide is the definitive guide to starting your own freelance Web design business. In this book he gives designers step-by-step instructions on how to achieve many skills needed in order to go Freelance.

Take a look! It's an interesting read, and it's free!

AdWords - A little about CPC

And now I bring to you an experiment in CPC.

Here are the results of looking up my keywords from the previous post with a budget of $20/day targeted at the USA and Canada:

Keywords	Estimated Avg. CPC	Estimated Ad Positions	Estimated Clicks / Day	Estimated Cost / Day
internet marketing	$5.20 - $6.74	1 - 3	0 - 1	$4 - $6
search engine optimization	$7.05 - $9.65	1 - 3	0 - 1	$2 - $3
web site design	$4.78 - $6.22	1 - 3	0 - 1	$2 - $3
web traffic	$4.76 - $6.05	1 - 3	1 - 2	$6 - $8
website traffic	$4.26 - $5.48	1 - 3	0 - 1	$2 - $3

These results make it easy to figure out how much would be spent, and how much of a result I would get for my keywords. Now, say if I wanted to figure out my budget for my ad if I were to get 22 clicks per keyword a month. For that, you would add together each CPC result and multiply the result by the amount of clicks:

5.20 + 7.05 + 4.78 + 4.76 + 4.26 = 26.05 x 22 = $573.10
6.74 + 9.65 + 6.22 + 6.05 + 5.48 = 34.14 x 22 = $751.08

This leads to a budget of $573.10 - $751.08 for 22 days.

Now, people usually would like to get more for less. These results above were without an estimated CPC entered. What would happen if an estimated CPC of $1.50 were put in? As it turns out, the ad position number went up, and there were more estimated clicks.

AdWords ranks each ad based on a combination of the ad's CPC and the ad's click through rate. So, if a business created an irrelevant ad with a high CPC and it doesn't generate clicks, it's slowly moved to the bottom of the batch. This enabled business with a lower CPC to rank higher at less cost. So, the best combination would be a balanced CPC, along with top notch keywords. With the keywords themselves, don't use anything that the competition is using. Try to find the most unique but specific and popular keywords or phrases to gain the attention or the right audience, and get the most possible exposure. With a lot of thought and research, you'll be well on your way.

AdWords - Best Keywords

On this blog, it would be beneficial to see how I'm going with my keyword direction.
So, I've been trying to find the best program or site out there that would help me find my top keywords. The one I've decided to go with is Google AdWords site, chosen because of the options it has available for the user for the low, low price of FREE. There are other options out there, but this will be the one focused on today. I'll be using a couple of articles as guides including this detailed article at Barry Wise to help me with discovering my top 5 keywords.

So. I enter my website into the field allowing Google to pick keywords from my site and let the marbles fly. This is what turns up:

Looking at all the keywords available, I can tell that they are all very popular with AdWords and that it would be next to impossible to pick them just with that. The ones that are somewhat unique don't have enough information available to make any kind of decision on them.
So, looking at the list, I'd be looking for something with a high global search rate, with a search rate of something close to that number to show that it hasn't gone down at all in popularity within the past month.

I'm thinking my best bets are:

• search engine optimization (823,000 & 823,000) - even
  
• website traffic (201,000 & 201,000) - even
  
• internet marketing (1,830,000 & 1,500,000) - +330,000
  
• web site design (673,000 & 450,000) - +223,000
• web traffic (301,000 & 201,000) - +100,000

I was tempted to choose website marketing (673,000 & 135,000) over internet marketing at first, but then noticed that internet marketing had far more people searching that term. While website marketing had a better return, I thought the higher search amount and still positive return worth the risk.

I've noticed that there are little to no programs out there with KEI results for keywords. Arguably, KEI results make it easier to find the best results for your site, so it's a little suprising that Google wouldn't provide such an option for anyone using their tool. Then I remembered that they're probably trying to get users to use their products to their benefit, and it would only really benefit Google if users used their paid products to complement the free options. This keyword search has a bigger empasis on AdWords and helping you with that, rather than figuring out what would be best for your site. While that is unforunate, it is still useful for that reason. It was really easy to use and extremely helpful. The ability to download your keywords as a textfile or csv file for other use is great as well. It was a great way to discover that my site is still on track, although if I were doing more with this, I would have picked more than 5 keywords to work with.

Website Marketing (and more) Books of the Free Sort

Web design books are very useful. Especially when you have access to them for free.
Although many online sources don't allow you to save or print these books, that would be the point: if the book is there, you're more than likely going to keep coming back for access, or purchase a copy of it. Very smart marketing.

But that is a post for another day.

Here is a list of free, useful and relevant web books:

• 101 Ways to Promote your Web Site
• Speed Up your Site: Web Site Optimization
• Web Analytics an Hour a Day
• Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
• Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP
• Professional Javascript for Web Developers
• Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization
• Web Analytics for Dummies
• SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible
• Website Optimization
• Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce
• Marketing Through Search Optimization
• Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP
  

Keywords Dos and Don'ts

When it comes to keywords, you don't want to be making any false moves that would cause you any trouble. There are good ways to use them, and there are bad ways.
This article shows many of correct and incorrect ways of using keywords, and gives some pretty good advice. Definitely worth a read!

Portfolio Website Major Overhaul Complete!

I have finally finished the redesign of my portfolio website and I am ecstatic! This site is over a years worth of planning. It might not look like much, but so much work went into it.
Everything describes a little bit of my personality, which was my goal. I wanted to find a unique way to display my work that I haven't really seen before, and while the concept itself has been done, the look has not. This would have to be the best site I've made yet, and I am excited to see what other improvements I can do to it as I learn more. I would not have been able to finish it without everything I've learned, and we'll see if the new SEO tips will help at all.

While it's not the greatest plan ever link-wise to create a one page site, I was planning to do more with it later on. Like for instance, I'd like to try out a link page using delicious someday, come up with things that I can share with other designers, that kind of stuff. It may all have been done before, but not by me, and that could bring something different.

Critique and compliments greatly welcomed. I'd like to hear what other kind of things I could do during the alteration time.
And now, back to homework.

xhtml is dead. long live xhtml!

The code wars are over. HTML5 WINS! But don't stop using XHTML 1.1, it's still valid: http://snurl.com/mit78

Intermission: Useless but trippy Javascript

We interrupt your useful reading to show you something either really funny or annoying, depending on your humor.
Go to a page with lots of images. Any page. I'll wait.
...
Ready? Okay.
Insert this Javascript into the address bar:

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24;
x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200;
DI=document.getElementsByTagName("img");DIL=DI.length;
function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style;
DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+"px";
DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+"px"}R++}setInterval('A()',5);
void(0);

Enjoy.
Code courtesy of this post.
And now back to our regular design posting.

10 SEO myths debunked - iMediaConnection.com

Not everything you hear about SEO is true. This article will tell is just one of many that will tell you what and why about ranking.View

SEO Barriers - Inadequate Inbound Links

A lack of popular inbound links is a problem when it comes to good SEO. Without a healthy number of high quality links that point back, you'll be at a huge disadvantage. Promoting your site to build inbound links is one of the most important ways to increase page rank. There are many ways this can be done:

1. Use XML news feeds to syndicate content to other sites
2. Register feeds with news aggregators
3. Write articles on topics for other sites and have a bio link to your site
4. Create useful content properly, in ways that work for the web.
   
5. Publicize new content with press releases.
   
6. Get listed in major directories under appropriate categories
7. Utilize social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace
8. Get links from industry websites and discussion forums
9. Use "high end" link exchanges, partner with others, and exchange links

Do these important things and you will be well on your way to a higher search rank, and getting out there. The easier it is to find you, the better your site will be.

Keyword Placement in HTML

After discovering your all important keywords possibly using tools like these to help, you should immediately take advantage of them every way you can on your page. Search engine spiders search code as well as content, and it's important to keep that in mind while creating your site. This is why it's important that you research your keywords in the creation process of your page. Here are some of the most important areas:

1. 
   <title> tag:

   <title>Web Animation and Design - Georgian College</title>

2. 
   Heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>):

   <h1>Georgian College brings education to life</h1>

3. 
   <strong> and <em>:

   <p><strong>Georgian College</strong>
   brings education to life</p>

4. 
   Link Labels:

   <a href="http://georgianc.on.ca/"> Gerogian College
   - Your College, Your Future</a>

5. 
   File Names (images, external css files, etc.):

   photoshop_tut.pdf

6. 
   Alt Attributes:

   <img src="orange_habiscus.jpg" alt="The most beautiful flower
   brought from the gardens in Ottawa />

7. 
   Table Elements (<th>, <caption>, <summary>)
   


8. 
   <acronym> and <abbr>
   


9. 
   The first line of the first paragraph on the page
   


10. 
    Meta description tag
    


11. 
    URL of your pages

Of course it's important to scatter keywords in the content of your page as well, but the more keywords you can fit onto your page naturally, the better your page rank will be later on.

Technorati - is anybody home?

Technorati.com sounds like a great place - in theory. You claim your blog as your own, and you get access to a wealth of helpful tools that will help you be found. Easy access to your site means more people coming in. The site makes it out like you'll be rolling in viewers in no time.
Thing is, what happens if it doesn't work?

My site I'd attempted to "claim" on technorati. What happened? An error message:
"The URL you provided is invalid. Please check the URL and try again."

Invalid. What? How?
I'd tried different combinations to see what the problem could be, and they were all rejected. Considering that this site is up and running (which you can see since you're here and all) I'm pretty sure it's quite valid. I'd looked the problem up. Turns out that the problem isn't unique, and that there are loads of other people like me out there, and all within the past half a year. That makes this quite the new problem. I would email someone at technorati to see what's up, or ask for help in their forums, but apparently that does nothing for anyone else. It seems as if this site was someone's pet project as it's services are free, and they're finally bored of it. And now loads of people are left hanging.

For me, this isn't a big loss. There are other ways I can advertise my blog and I'm quite willing to do these things, but for the owners of technorati they might want to do something and soon, because they're losing people by the boatloads. That site used to be a necessity if you had a blog. Now? Well, what good is a service you can't even use?

UPDATE: Got through! My blog now exists. Huzzah! Still doesn't excuse the problems they've been having, but it's a step in the right direction.

On the topic of "interesting content", be careful what you write

It is really important to make sure your content is interesting to help with findability. Research and make sure it's correct, relevant to the topic at hand, and that it has something to give to the user. And maybe legal would be nice, too.

I came across this article on a Microsoft site of all places about 32 cool things you never knew you your technology could do. One of the things listed was to take Apple's OSX and install it on a netbook, which if you read Apple's agreement, kind of goes against it. Actually, the article also talks about bootlegging to get the os to install, which is kinda illegal. Apple has a history of being really angry with people who use their os like that. So, this article being an interesting topic of conversation would draw many people to it, and it being on a Microsoft site, the gulible people would think it trustworthy. I predict the article will not remain online for long... at least not in the form it's in now. It's already drawing a lot of press to it, and not all of it is good either.

Important lesson: think about what you write.

Building a Findable Blog - Content Sharing is your Friend!

Going around the web, you can see that many blogs offer a way to share content. When it comes to findability, users sharing with other users is the easiest way to get your site out there.
Of course, you have to think about writing good, useful and interesting content for this to happen because nobody wants to share what they don't like.

In order to create content that people find worth sharing, first and foremost, stay on topic. Your user has come to your blog for a reason and probably doesn't want to read something irrelevant. If you trail off track, make sure you come back. Stick to the ways of writing for the web, write in short relevant bursts, and maybe give the user something to offer. Users LOVE when free stuff is involved. Try creating a template, writing a piece of code, making a game and sharing it with everyone.

On the bottom of your posts, make it easy for users to share. Remind them that you're worth sharing with the world by leaving links to del.icio.us, digg, twitter, facebook or any other sharing tool you can think of. If they know what it is, they will use it. Get out there as many ways as you can by making everything available.

Building a Findable Blog - RSS and your Blog

RSS streamlines communication between publishers and readers. Since RSS has had a popularity surge, webmasters have been experimenting and using RSS feeds to deliver content in new and innovative ways. An RSS feed is one of the easier ways to get people to return to your blog. There are so many people out there who do not want to constantly load up a website or search through it, so having something they can subscribe to just makes it that much easier. It is important to convert as many people as possible to subscribers.

To start with, having an icon which is visual enough that it will be noticed right away. Make it stand out. It doesn't have to be incredibly different from your theme. There are many different icons available, or you could create your own.

Using services like FeedBurner for your RSS feed helps as well. Insert your feed link, and the will optimize it for a variety of formats. The entries are tracked so you can see how many people are joining, can have advertisements to earn you money, and earn you advertising through the Pingback service.

Building a Findable Blog - Improving Findability

Findability is one of the most important things when it comes to blogs. With blogging for the web, if you're not found, then you might as well stop writing unless you're writing for yourself. With being found, the higher up you are on search engines like Google, the better you are. Fortunately things like keywords, linking, and archiving by topic can really help with that when done properly.

Most blogs are set up to be alerted if they are linked to. If you link to their related articles of interest, they automatically link to you in the comment showing who linked and where. If you take a look at the comments section of this article on Tutorial Blog for example, you will see an example of trackbacks on the bottom. The more links you get, the more people come. The more people, the higher your stats, and the better you do.

Keywords help by reaping in search referrals. As you write, the more often a word appears, the more you may appear to be an "expert" of sorts for that topic. When people search for certain keywords, if it appears more on your site, you'll have a better chance of being found easier as you'll appear higher up in the ranks. When you archive your posts by topic, you increase your keywords as well as help people get around easier, making it a multi-purpose technique for organization. Any way you can fit a relevant word onto a site, whether it be by an image tag or organization technique, it all helps. For help in coming up with keywords, one could always refer to different keyword tools, or research what the relevant market is looking for.

Free keyword tools

Keywords are very important when it comes to SEO. The more you seem to know, the more likely you are to be found. Write content that contains intelligent content with relevant keywords, and you're on your way to success! But if you don't know how to find those keywords, there are tools to help you. Some of them may seem to do the same thing, but they offer different features or give different answers, so play around with them.
Here are some of those tools:

Free Keyword Suggestion Tools

Keyword Suggestion Tool for Google

Keyword Density Tool

Search Engine Optimizer - Keyword Density Tool

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Heading tags and how to handle them

When it comes to SEO, an important thing to keep in mind is your heading tags.
You know it actually does something other than give your heading a placeholder.
You could use anything to make a heading look different from anything else, which brings about the purpose of these useful tags.

In search engines, a robot is on the hunt for keywords and headings are a very good place to get them. But how does a search engine know what a heading is if one only uses or some other form of emphasis, using CSS styling to make it different? It doesn't!
Which is the reason why it's so important to use those heading tags instead of any other tag when you want to emphasize what a heading is. The search engine robots are looking for those tags in order to understand what your page is about and to gather important keywords for indexing. Headings are great places for keywords. Take advantage of them. For a useful resource as to how to organize your headings so that the more important things appear first, check out this link at CSS-Tricks.com.

The lightblub of discovery has turned on

I've come to a discovery.

This is a rather obvious one as far as the web goes, so brace yourselves.

For the longest time I've been struggling to figure out the difference between Web Standards and Web Content. That completely shows in the first post I wrote where everything is somewhat mushed together and nobody really understands what I'm talking about specifically. But see, at the time I was thinking that they were one in the same, and such as it was, totally became confused on which was which. How? Well, I didn't really understand that Web Standards was about the actual main languages that we use to create a page. I thought about the concepts in how I understood the words, and never really read much about the individual concepts until this semester. A little light reading has cured me from such thinking.

Even how I think now isn't completely clear. I have so much more to learn, and I'm so fascinated by the idea that the web is controlled by such intricate things such as languages, and their optimization depends on things such as how much a word is used on a page. I wish to discuss what I learn more as I keep learning them, so after I read about a subject in more detail, I'll write about it here to share what I've discovered.

So, forgive me for being such a newbie. I believe we've all been at this point at one time or another.

Roadmap to Web Success

For anyone wanting to know the basics of having a successful website, WebAssist has a series of free PDF's online called the Roadmap Series: Your Guide to Web Success.
Very interesting read. Contains topics from SEO basics, to site planning, web hosting and more. Check it out!

Inbound Marketing

An interesting video on combining social media, blogs and SEO to help you be found on the web.

What are web standards?

An interesting video on web standards and why you should care.

SEO Extensions for Firefox

It isn't easy understanding how to get everything working properly for a higher rated site in Google or other search engines. It would be nice if there was a tool of some sort to help out with that. Fortunately, there are tools which can help, and they are readily available and easy to install as a plug in for Firefox.

Here are some of those Firefox plug-ins that can help you with Search Engine Optimization:

SeoQuake - A Mozilla Firefox SEO extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization (SEO) and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly, save them for future work, compare them with the results, obtained for other, competitive, projects.

Web Developer Toolbar - Has many indispensable features for both Web development and SEO. It allows you to easily manage cache, cookies, referrers, JavaScript, CSS, and much more. For example, you can disable CSS on a page with Ctrl-Shift-s. You can quickly disable cookies to see how a site changes with cookies off. You can show alt attribute text on the page. And much more... The Firefox Web Developer Toolbar is an essential tool.

Search Status - Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other SEO tools. It also allows you to view rel=nofollow links on page

RankQuest SEO - Provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensures the popularity of the site. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO

Google Symantics - This tool helps to get synonym for the keyword during your search on Google n which helps for better SEO using Google own Synonyms also refered as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) n is a vital element in Search Engine Optimization and article writing

The Story of Web Standards

Web standards is beautiful. It gives form, function and consistency to design across the browsers, and it makes content king, which is as it should be. If nothing were consistent, we would lose our viewers, and nothing is more important than they are. Web standards is like cake at a birthday party: a necessity. Everyone would leave without it.

Thinking back to the olden days of the web (think early 1990's), it was like nobody had ever dreamed of standardization. Anything was possible and everyone wanted to get there first. It wasn't "all for one and one for all" but "all for me and give me money". Madness and chaos reigned free, nobody played along with anyone, and the biggest were out there for nobody but themselves. SEO? What was Search Engine Optimization then? Nothing! The tubes of the internet were in tangles, and there was no Firefox, Safari or Opera to save the day.

I would like to thank Microsoft and Netscape for being the pain-in-the-butts that they were at the time. One must see chaos to appreciate the goodness of what they have. It would have been nice to avoid the inconsistent design, the "This website is only visible in Internet Explorer 5.0+" messages, and maybe even the entire existence of AOL, but somehow that seems like a right of passage. Without that, we couldn't fully appreciate that those days are done. While what we have now is far from perfect (in many ways, still reeks of pre-1998. Oh the horror.), it is ten billion times better than what it was. Without this, we would not have thought of the need for web standards.

Web optimization, you are my hero.
Keep up the good fight! You can only move forward from here.

Read more about the history of web standards here.