Minutes

If you work in the web industry or you have a website of any sort you will need to learn about SEO sooner or later.

In SEO they refer to lots of things which you might not understand. Here is a list of 10 of best known terms you will need to learn.

1. SEO
Better start with what SEO is, this stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is the act of optimizing your site to achieve the best results for your website in the search engines.

2. Title Tag
The title of the page, this is what will be displayed on search engine result pages so make sure you put keywords in here.

3. Meta Tag
Used to tell the search engines more information about the page such as description field and keywords.

4. Search Algorithm
This is what the search engines use to work out which web page best matches your keywords in a search.

5. SERP
This stands for Search Engine Result Position, so if your site has a high SERP then your website will be displayed nearer the first page of the search results.

6. Keyword Density
This is the percentage of a word in your content. The higher the keyword density for a certain word the more likely the page is going to be about that keyword.

7. Web Crawler
This is what the search engines use to crawl all the websites on the web and index the content.

8. Duplicate Content
The act of having the same content on different pages. Since the Google panda update they have cracked down on duplicate content, it will now put you lower in the SERP for duplicate content.

9. Canonical URL
If your website has multiple URLs which have the same content the canonical URL is used as the master URL for the content. This is so the search engines won’t index duplicate content and just the master URL content.

10. Robots.txt
This is just a file which will explain certain information to the search engines that crawl your site. You can tell them not to index your site or not to index certain parts of your site. You can even use it to direct the search engines at your sitemaps.

From paulund.co.uk

Mike Fleischner Business, Design, Technology, Web Traffic

Interesting article about SEO ranking factors that will surprise you:

SEO is a fast changing discipline.

What worked 5 or 10 years ago might be completely unnecessary these days or even bad for your site’s ranking.

Thus leading search industry publications publish the most probable Google ranking factors each year. Nonetheless many webmasters prefer to stick to the past or follow wrong advice from bloggers who just repeat SEO myths.

In recent years, Google has not only included lots of new media types into Universal search results; it has also added numerous ranking factors while rethinking many old ones.

I made a list of new or current ranking factors that get underestimated by webmasters and neglected because of this. At the same time, I included those often old school ranking factors webmasters tend to overestimate the power of. These may not work anymore, or may even hurt your site in Google’s search results.

Read on to see what helps — or hurts — your rankings.

Mike Fleischner Business, Technology, Web Traffic

Summer is on its way in North America. The days are getting longer, the weather’s warming up, and people are spending time outside. And nowadays, most of those people have a cellphone handy.

Startups in the long-simmering QR code market are hoping that the change in season, along with what they say is a “critical mass” of smart phones, will finally bring QR codes, barcodes that lead to URLs or information when scanned, into the mainstream.

Read more here.

UPDATE: This related article is also interesting: Quick Response Codes 101: Applications in Print Marketing

Mike Fleischner Business, Design, Technology

Mike Fleischner Design, Technology

Good article about getting visitors to come to your site, with techie and non-techie suggestions.

Plus, bullet six mentions our favorite design firm:

“Be creative and innovative. Send your extensive mailing list an e-blast that is more than just a recitation of the fact that you have a new site or microsite. Clockwork Design Group, a graphic design firm in Massachusetts, created a Flash animated e-blast announcing its new site for the Boston law firm of Sherin & Lodgen. The design costs to create and e-mail out the inventive blast, according to Clockwork’s president and creative director, Vanessa Schaefer, were significantly less than a similar printed mailing would have run.”

Mike Fleischner Technology, Web Traffic Traffic