When your site is up and running, it’s all good but if you don’t have any traffic, all your efforts will be in vain. There are many free and paid ways to drive traffic to your site and one of the best is through SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Quality Content Makes or Breaks Your SEO Efforts

For SEO, quality content is the first and crucial step. If you don’t have quality content, you can try pumping up your traffic with SEO tricks but this will never bring you the desired results. Therefore, before you start with SEO tips and tricks, make sure that you can regularly provide high quality content.
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As a current owner of a website, I have discovered its not as easy as people make it seem. Its a common misconception to think that creating a site is easy. You need to make sure that your layout is easy to understand and friendly to the user. The interface colors and placement of items is highly important. The more important the information the farther to the top of the page it should be, the less important information should be placed lower on the sites pages. Some of these tips are no-brainers, others may be new to you. Either way, you should always keep them on your mind when developing a website. Continue Reading

There are many reasons to use mod_rewrite to create informative, useful URLs for your website. Most dynamic websites use some form of PHP or ASP to pull the data from the database and often times use that data in the URL as a string. This is not only a potential security flaw, it also gives the user and search engine alike a very uninformative destination for your website.

Rather than have your page selling a baseball bat as http://www.mywebsite.com/product.php?id=32 that would take you to sales page for the bat, it makes much more sense to have that URL be http://www.mywebsite.com/bats/louisville-slugger-cobra.html. While both of these URLs might take you to the same page, the user will know exactly what the page has on it when going through his history or if he emails it to himself or writes it down. Continue Reading

Sometime Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seems to have morphed into a mystical creature. Most people, even those who design and develop websites for a living, know they need it, but don’t know exactly what it is. They have been feed so much rheteric and sales speaches that they seem to have given up on SEO long ago.

Well, you shouldn’t. And if you have, I’m here to help you rekindle the love affair. While there are definitely concepts that can’t be covered in a short article and many that can really, truly only be done by professionals, there’s plenty you can do to give you a leg up and get more search engine traffic for your sites and your clients sites. Continue Reading

By Justin Bezanson

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a term that is thrown around a lot. In fact, SEO is becoming a career which makes sense when you see how many poorly designed and marketed sites are out there.

SEO is a topic of heated debate among some designers and marketers which has introduced terms like whitehat (good SEO) and blackhat (bad SEO).

Stop right there. Whatever you have heard about SEO in the past…forget it! If you’ve never heard of it…good. I am going to tell you what you need to know in order to design a site that has good markup and tops the search engine results. Continue Reading