Category: Search engine optimization (SEO)
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Can you get me ranked #1 on Google?
This is a common question. Here’s Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, with part of the answer… What I can do for you: 1. Make sure your site is technically structured in such a way that helps Google and other search engines find out what your business is about. 2. Do research to find…
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SPAM ALERT: “Domain Notification – This is your Final Notice of Domain Listing”
Watch out for this email spam that looks like a domain registration! It comes from “Domain Services” and the subject line is “Domain Notification – This is your Final Notice of Domain Listing” – and then your domain name in capital letters. Inside is this alarming-looking message: Note: It looks urgent. It looks official. However,…
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SEO Trends
Gone are the days when you can put your desired keywords in a meta keyword tag and expect them to work with the search engines. Google especially doesn’t look at meta keyword tags, preferring to analyze the text on the page itself to determine what the page is about. It goes back to the days…
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How much will it cost to build a website for my vacation rental home or cottage?
The quick answer? Maybe you don’t really need one. Why is a web designer telling you that? Shouldn’t I be trolling for your business? Not at the expense of selling you something you may not need. I love building vacation home websites. It’s almost as much fun as taking a vacation. However, the cost of…
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Flashy isn’t always best. Keep it simple.
(UPDATED IN 2017) In 2010, I redesigned two websites for companies selling office furniture and supplies. The previous versions of the websites made extensive use of Flash and JavaScript. Some of their biggest customers (e.g. government offices) operated behind a security wall that banned JavaScript, and workers could not use the site or see any…
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Spaces, underscores or hyphens in file names?
Document names are best written with hyphens or underscores rather than with spaces. Otherwise, some browsers insert a %20 for the spaces, which is harder for search engines to read. Hyphens have been found to be the best, at least for Google. Thus “Current widget price list 2010.pdf” becomes Current%20widget%20%price%20list%202010.pdf. The search engine sees “Current”,…