Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO by Jaimie Sirovich, Cristian Darie
Publisher: Wrox (April 16, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0470100923
ISBN-13: 978-0470100929
From url canonicalization to link bait, Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP hits all the SEO basics a php programmer could need. Billed as a book written for the php developer or tech-savvy marketer, this book attempts to debunk a few myths and protect you from the black arts of black hat seo while offering up a healthy dose of code examples and tool suggestions. Read the rest of this entry »
The 10 Commandments of Search
An excerpt: “And all the webmasters perceived the thunderings of an update, and the changing of their PageRank, and the voice of the engine, and their rankings sinking; and when the people saw it, they trembled, and stood afar off.”
Ever wonder how to SEOify your Wordpress install? Here’s the code I used in my Wordpress theme to use custom fields for description and keywords meta tags. The down side to using this method is that you have to modify it for any new customized meta tags you want to use. I really only wanted to customize the description and keywords meta tags, so this worked out great for me. Read the rest of this entry »
Today, I presented Web Basics for Artists for Maureen O’Hara Ure’s ART 4980 001 Senior Studio Seminar class at the University of Utah. It was fun to meet all the students and hear about their artwork. My presentation covered the following topics:
HTML & CSS Basics
Web 2.0
Optimizing Graphics for the Web
Personal Web Pages on home.utah.edu
Other Free Website Resources
Setting Up with Your Own Domain
Key Points
HTML can be created using a simple text editor and free resources from the UofU.
On the web, images are measured in pixels. The dpi of an image is pretty much irrelevant until ink hits paper. Small file size is important.
There are many free resources for posting web pages, blogs, pictures, and media online.
To setup with your own domain, you need three things: 1) domain name registration, 2) web hosting, and 3) web pages.
When setting up a web page, keep search engine optimization in mind from the beginning. For example, add your bio to Wikipedia.
If you decide to purchase web design services from a freelance designer or an agency, be cautious and just make sure you are comfortable with the service agreement you enter into.
Many studies have been done on the value of paid versus organic search engine optimization. In September 2006, WebSideStory reported paid search was only a slightly more efficient 3.4% conversion rate for e-commerce when compared to 3.1% for organic. iProspect reported that about 60% of all users click organic versus 40% for paid. OneUpWeb concluded that users are up to six times more likely to click on the first few organic results as they are to choose any of the paid search results. What do all these stats tell us? Simply where to start, not what to rely on. Read the rest of this entry »
A prolific illustration of web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes, Michael Wesch’s viral video “The Machine is Us/ing Us” is about structured data in a nonlinear, digital world. In this case, the medium is the message. Media is changing as we use it just as the text in the video changes as you read it. In the video he writes, “Who will organize all of this data? We will. You will. We are the web. We are teaching the machine. The machine is us.”
As I have been recently afflicted with a fascination for usability and accessibility and how they relate to search optimization, I found this definition posted by Joe Clark absolutely hilarious:
I am officially a Web Directions North affiliate. What a fantastic resource! If you’re a web developer and you haven’t heard of Web Directions… you have GOT to check it out.
Workshops will cover Ajax and Javascript, CSS, Microformats, mashups, standards based web design and development, accessibility, web app development, XHTML and HTML and more. Top that off with two optional days of skiing and boarding at Whistler, and Web Directions North is 2007’s web design and development event not to be missed.
Often, web developers turned database designers begin their coding endeavors by picking up whatever snippets are printed in the O’reilly title at hand or whatever Google throws their way. Building a database-driven website is easy. Making it fast is not. A little attention to schema, indexes, query optimization, and benchmarking could give your app the performance boost it needs to reach greatness.
Benchmark to measure success
Get familiar with the EXPLAIN command
Know how the storage engines differ
Narrow, non-redundant indexes are better
Smaller data types are better
Fewer reads = faster results: Use the query cache for read intensive apps
Design Simply is the portfolio site of Sheri Bigelow showcasing web design, photography, and code. I am partial to PHP/MySQL, XHTML/CSS driven sites. I advocate web standards & accessibility, and I am a WordPress Evangelist.
