As a webmaster, a lot of my clients ask me to add Twitter and Facebook like buttons to their websites.  Clients see statements like, “Find us on Twitter” and “Find us on Facebook” on TV commercials and magazines figuring that they have to be part of this trend without really understanding it.  Public relations cause the masses to do things without solid proof as to the benefit of doing so.  Sadly, if people are inundated with a brand, a product or a service via advertising they mostly think is something great.   It reminds me of a friend I caught singing product jingles while shopping.  We are so influenced by media and advertising that it becomes a subliminal force in our lives. 

The fact is, according to the Drudge Report (http://www.scribd.com/doc/62013838/2011-Q2-Outbrain-Content-Discovery-Report) and Outbrain   (http://blog.outbrain.com/2011/04/outbrain-content-discovery-report.html), that people will click through to a website in a search result from a site like “Google Search” much more then clicking through to a site url which is Tweeted on Twitter or linked to on a business Page on Facebook.  So, I would not abandon the efforts of raising the SEO value of a business website over increasing your business presence in social media accounts.  Social media was never meant to be used to push businesses.  It is a way to stay in touch with family and friends. In fact, most people think it is uncouth to push a business on social pages.  So, I would do so ever so sparingly. 

When a person clicks the Twitter button on a webpage the page URL is then tweeted in their twitter account to all their followers.  Some of their followers will read the Tweet and few will actually click the link in it. The same thing happens with Facebook Pages. On a Facebook Page you have to go to the info page to view the URL to the actual business website. And again, very few people click that link to visit the main site. 

There are two ways to use Facebook links on a website.  One is to promote a Facebook Page for your business and the other is to promote the webpage the share/like link is on.  I always tell my clients to promote their actual website over a Facebook Page because driving traffic to your main website will increase its popularity, hence its SEO value.  It would make sense to increase your main site’s popularity if more people click through to sites using search engines over social media sites.  I suggest that time is better spend increasing the SEO of a website then dividing your attention and efforts amongst services with little click through or conversion to actual sales.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions,comments or need help with any of the later items.

First, write a website subject related article of 300 words. Article writing is a great way to create one-way links back to your site on high PageRank pages that have subject and keyword similarity to your own site.  Hence, article writing creates great SEO (Search Engine Optimization.) 

Things to do when writing an article: 

• Have an attention grabbing title.
• Make sure that there are keywords and/or key phrases in the article.  The later should be done in a way so as not to alienate the reader because of keyword stuffing. Read the article written without the thought of adding keywords and then add a couple if needed.
• Cite references and sources.  Example: John Killertop, in his book The Art of Article Writing mentioned “the main mistake article writers do often is not proofread their articles before submitting them.”
• Proofread before submitting, check grammar and spelling. 

Things not to do when writing an article: 

• Copy text from your website. The later will create a duplicate content penalty in the search engines and cause more damage then good. http://www.copyscape.com/ is a great tool for checking webpage originality in regards to SEO.
• Do not submit the article to more then one article site. 

Submit the article to sites like http://www.goarticles.com/, http://www.technorati.com/, http://www.squiddo.com/, http://www.ezinearticles.com/ when you are satisfied with the content therein. The article can go on your own site if you don’t plan on using it on an article submission site. The 300 word base amount is a good rule to follow when writing blog post. 

Some article submission sites make use of the rel=”nofollow” tag in their source code.  The later method causes the submitted article not have the SEO value that it could have without the use of the html tag.  The url http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php actually lets you know if the article submission site uses “nofollow (NF)” and/or if you have to pay to submit. 

Notes:  There is a “Word Count” option  in the ”Tools” menu of Microsoft Word or Works if you need to know how many words are contained within an article.  Do not forget to put a link back to your site when you fill out the author information box.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions,comments or need help with any of the later items.

As always, I am on the lookout for information to make a web designer’s job more efficient and to have better quality with search engine optimization foremost in importance.  The use of mobile phones have increased the importance of designing sites that are cross platform friendly besides being just cross browser friendly.  The machines web designers do their work need to be secured, spyware and virus free at all times because of the transfer of files to and from clients and web servers.  Clients have to easily be able to send us huge gigabytes worth of files. 

Here are some links to services and information: 

• Access your pc remotely for free: https://secure.logmein.com/ 
• Free spyware remover: http://www.superantispyware.com/
• Antivirus for droid mobile phones: http://www.mylookout.com/
• Free great antivirus: www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download
• Send large files up to 2 gigabytes for free:www.dropsend.com
• HTML5 is the new mobile phone friendly web designing code. www.html-5.com/metatags/index.html
• Optimize your website for mobile: http://help.hubspot.com/articles/Best_Practice/How-to-optimize-your-website-for-mobile

On another note, there are some great tools for web designers to check the SEO of websites that are regular or based on wordpress applications. With the right information we are armed with the information to make educated decisions and a better the web experience for our clients and viewers. Check out the information that can be viewed by using the tools at the following two links: 

• http://www.bloggrader.com/
• http://www.websitegrader.com/

Please use your judgment in regards to how you use the later information. In the process of maintaining my Multimedia Web Designers Blog I have noticed in the past that links may die, become out-dated or change the information that was there when I wrote this article.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or need help with any of the later items.

The latest Google algorithm change has made the load time for a website an important factor in regards to its SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and ranking. How fast does your website take to load in a browser window? Basically, your site should load in a browser window within 3 seconds. 

I have been asked by clients many times to put heavy videos or flash galleries on the homepage of their websites. I always advise against doing the later.  It is always a great idea to optimize every image before putting them on a website. I use Adobe Photoshop “Save for Web & Devices” feature under the “File” menu option. I optimize to 50% and notice very little difference in quality between the original image and the optimized one.

The following are some tools to check your website’s load speed:

• Test network connectivity to a server: http://tools.pingdom.com/ping/
• Test DNS servers and settings for a domain name: http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/
• Test the load time of a web page http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/  

In this ever increasing competitive battle ground called the internet it is important to take all things in to consideration and to take the steps necessary to stay ahead of the rest of the pack.  Websites are never done in terms of content.  Content needs to be updated in order for a webpage not to be labeled an archive by the search engines and loose ranking in the search results. Content needs to always be unique and have no copies elsewhere on the web, hence you loose ranking due to duplicate content penalties.  Websites need to be updated in order to stay current and up to date in regards to SEO and search engine algorithms. Slow continuous growth always wins out in the end.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or need help with any of the later items.