Design by Dooley http://designbydooley.com I design custom websites for small businesses and non-profits. Sat, 19 Nov 2011 22:45:22 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 How to Improve your Site’s SEO http://designbydooley.com/2011/11/how-to-improve-your-sites-seo/ http://designbydooley.com/2011/11/how-to-improve-your-sites-seo/#comments Sat, 19 Nov 2011 18:54:27 +0000 Dooley http://designbydooley.com/?p=202 What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a web site in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid search results.

Content-Based Tricks to Improve SEO

Optimize your SEO!
CONTENT IS KING – In simple terms, the more times you mention a keyword within your web site’s content, the higher up your site will appear in a web search

Organizing your Content

  • Identify your Audiences. Visualize yourself in the shoes of your audiences, and think about the information they would like to find on your site, and how they might navigate your site.
  • Step away from the computer. Sit down with a pencil and paper and draw out your site plan to visualize how all of the pages are connected to each other. This will help you save time once you begin building/revising your web site.
  • Organize content using hierarchal headings (i.e. Heading 1, Heading 2) not only makes your content appear more usable and organized to your web audience, but it also helps Google and other search engines to effectively crawl through your web site.
  • Provide text descriptions for your web images. Using ALT (alternate) text and titles for your images will also help Google and other search engines effectively crawl through your web site.
  • Meta Tagsshould be inserted into the HEAD of the code in your web site. These tags provides “behind the scenes” information about your web site.
    • META Description: Provides a short description about the content that is found on your site.
    • META Keywords: Keywords and phrases that represent the content on your site.

Semantics

  • Organize content using hierarchal headings (i.e. Heading 1, Heading 2) not only makes your content appear more usable and organized to your web audience, but it also helps Google and other search engines to effectively crawl through your web site.
  • Provide text descriptions for your web images. Using ALT (alternate) text and titles for your images will also help Google and other search engines effectively crawl through your web site.

META Data

  • Meta Tags should be inserted into the HEAD of the code in your web site. These tags provides “behind the scenes” information about your web site.
    • META Description: Provides a short description about the content that is found on your site.
    • META Keywords: Keywords and phrases that represent the content on your site.

    Meta Data example:

    <HEAD>
    <TITLE>Title of your Web Page: Bicycles are my Friends</TITLE>
    <META name=”description” content=”All about bicycles and why they are great.”>
<META name=”keywords” content=”bicycles,friends,bikes,pals,riding bikes”>
    </HEAD>

    Tech Tricks to Improve SEO

    Google Site Registration

    Google adds new sites to its index, and updates existing ones, every time it crawls the web. You can add your site manually using Google Site Registration. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url

    View of the Google Site Registration form

    View of the Google Site Registration form

    Google SiteMap

    Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site it might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process. Read more about Google SiteMaps at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156184

     

    Example of a Google SiteMap

    Example of a Google SiteMap

    Robots.txt

    A text file that you can add to your site to prevent search robots from visiting specific pages on your site. Usually used to block visitors from searching private directories on your site. Read more about Robots.txt files at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156449

]]> http://designbydooley.com/2011/11/how-to-improve-your-sites-seo/feed/ 0 I love Free Fonts! http://designbydooley.com/2011/09/i-love-free-fonts/ http://designbydooley.com/2011/09/i-love-free-fonts/#comments Thu, 15 Sep 2011 23:27:00 +0000 Dooley http://designbydooley.com/?p=196 Font SquirrelI love free fonts! Don’t you? There are SO many free font websites out there, and so many of them stink!

Font Squirrel is my latest one-stop-shop for free fonts lately. They have all different formats: True Type, Open Type and even @Font-Face kits to install fonts for your websites. (I never thought the day would come!)

 

]]> http://designbydooley.com/2011/09/i-love-free-fonts/feed/ 0 Denial-of-service Attacks http://designbydooley.com/2011/09/denial-of-service-attacks/ http://designbydooley.com/2011/09/denial-of-service-attacks/#comments Mon, 12 Sep 2011 04:56:56 +0000 Dooley http://designbydooley.com/?p=184 Website down? Don’t know why?

Your site may have been struck by a “denial-of-service attack.” Yep, there are people out there without anything better to do than hack your web server and take down your web site. What can you do? There are a number of things that we can do to combat these types of attacks.

CloudFlareCloudFlare

CloudFlare is a free service that protects websites from hackers and spammers. CloudFare also optimizes the delivery of web pages to provide visitors the fastest page load times and best performance. It also blocks threats and limits abusive bots and crawlers from wasting a web site’s bandwidth and server resources. Learn more about CloudFlare.

If you have experienced a denial-of-service attack and need assistance, contact me and I’ll help you to get your web site back up and running in no time.

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