Social Bookmarking: The SEO Quick Fix

Posted on Aug 28, 2007 by Rick to SEO, Social Media

Nothing in optimizing a site for search engines happens quickly. The final result that most are looking for when optimizing a site is higher search engine rankings, and those can take months to develop, and the rest of your websites life to maintain.

Social bookmarking has allowed for a relatively quick fix in the SEO world. It does this by offering someone looking to optimize their pages a way to quickly build links and alert search engines of fresh content.

Bookmarking is the new force in inbound link building. Now instead of just creating link bait in terms of optimized content and waiting for someone to stumble upon it, you can break up your link bait into little packages and take it to your audiences door step. You are able to tell those linking to you what the content is, why it is important, and what keywords are related to it through the use of tags. Compelling content is still a must if you want to capture the exponential traffic and inbound links possible with social bookmarking, but now you do not need to have a large amount of traffic flowing through your site to get the links pointing to you.

Most social networks have a high PageRank with Google, and they are being spidered on almost a constant basis. This allows for your content to be indexed faster, and thus your valuable content can be seen by more people in a timely manner. This is key if you have time sensitive content you are trying to use to draw traffic. It is also important for search engines such as MSN that use a site’s “freshness” as a factor in their algorithm.

When all is said and done SEO is just a series of strategies to make sure your website gets the most traffic it possibly can. For this end result social bookmarking offers a quick fix. It can offer an instant stream of traffic, and give you fuel for a future of inbound links that will help increase your PageRank and search engine rankings.

Tags: social bookmarking, social media marketing

Creating a dynamic RSS Feed using PHP and MySQL

Posted on Aug 24, 2007 by Taylor to Technology Trends

Ok, I know that there are plenty of classes, functions, pre-built scripts out there that will help you create an RSS feed to use with your website, but I have built my own and I will share it with all of you. This RSS page, will do a couple of things.

1. Grab the Title of your Article, Grab some Description, Grab the Link to your article and so on and so forth.
2. If by chance, any part of the article is in spanish, it will convert anything with an accent to regular letters so that the feed can actually validate.

You can check out the code here:

* Please note that in order for this to work, the server needs to know that it needs to look at this code that processes as XML…so place the RSS files into ONE folder…call it feeds or rss or something of that nature and edit the .htaccess file and place this next line of code in it:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .xml

————————-
All you have to do is change the parts needed, and rename it to whatever you want.
————————

<? header(’Content-type: text/xml’); ?>

<? echo “<?xml version=\”1.0\” encoding=\”iso-8859-1\”?”.”>”;
?>

<?

$today = date(”D, j M Y G:i:s T”);

/*print (’<?xml version=”1.0″?>’);

*/

$rssdate = date(”r”);

print (”

<rss version=\”2.0\” xmlns:dc=\”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\”>

<channel>

<title>TITLE OF THE FEED </title>

<link>LINK TO ACTUAL WEBSITE </link>

<description>DESCRIPTION OF THE FEED </description>

<language>en-us</language>

<pubDate>$today</pubDate>

<lastBuildDate>$today</lastBuildDate>

<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>

<generator>YOU CAN PUT YOUR COMPANY NAME </generator>

<managingEditor>EMAIL@YOUREMAIL.COM</managingEditor>

<webMaster>EMAIL@YOUREMAIL.COM</webMaster>

“);

// prepare HTML text for use as UTF-8 character data in XML

function cleanText($intext) {

return utf8_encode(

htmlspecialchars(

stripslashes($intext)));

}

//Will Get snippet of Return Row depending how many words you want.

function ReturnSnippet ($string, $howmany)

{

$currString = explode(” “, $string);

for ($wordCounter=0; $wordCounter<$howmany; $wordCounter++) { echo $currString[$wordCounter].” “;
}

};

# Required to Connect to DB to get the information

# Opens DB Connection OR PLACE THE ACTUAL DB CONNECTION HERE.

require_once (”DBConn.php”);

$db = opendatabase();

# this function will gather all the information from the Authors table and
create a drop down of writers.

function BuildRSSFeed()

{

$sql = mysql_query(”SELECT id, categoryiD, title, body, datepublished
FROM tablename WHERE categoryID = ‘the id of the category you want to see’
ORDER BY id DESC”);

# THIS FOLLOWING FUNCTION WILL ACTUALLY CLEAN UP THE ACCENTS

function cleanUpAccents($str)

{

$patterns = array (”&aacute;”,”&eacute;”,”&iacute;”,”&oacute;”,”&uacute;”,”&Aacute;”,”&Eacute;”,”&Iacute;”,”&Oacute;”,”&Uacute;”);

$replace = array (”a”,”e”,”i”,”o”,”u”,”A”,”E”,”I”,”O”,”U”);

$stringReplaced = str_replace($patterns, $replace,$str);

return str_replace($patterns, $replace,$str);

}

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql))

{

//Tue, 03 Jun 2003 09:39:21 GMT

$today = date(”D, j M Y G:i:s T”);

//$text = cleanText($row[body]);

print (”

<item>

<title>”);

$articleTitle = $row[title];

$title_accent = cleanUpAccents($articleTitle);

$title_final = $title_accent;

echo ($title_final);

print(”</title>

<link>http://www.yourdomain.com/whatever.php?id=$row[id]</link>

<description>”);

$text = ReturnSnippet ($row[body], “10″);

$text_accent = cleanUpAccents($text);

$finaltext = htmlentities(strip_tags($text_accent));

echo ($finaltext);

print (” </description>

<pubDate>$row[datepublished]</pubDate>

<author>EMAIL@EMAIL.com</author>

<guid>http://www.yourdomain.com/whatever.php?id=$row[id]</guid> #
this is a Globaly Unique IDentifier – meaning just put in the link of the article
thats NOT going to change.

</item>\n”);

}

};

/*

<?=htmlentities(strip_tags() );
include(’xml.php’);

$xml = XML_serialize();

*/

echo BuildRSSFeed();

print (”

</channel>

</rss>

“);

?>

Tags: MySQL, php, rss

Client Content – The Challenge of Making It Fit

Posted on Aug 24, 2007 by Damien to Web Design

From time to time you’ll be asked to do the impossible when it comes to using your design skills. This may leave you shaking your head but as a design service provider it’s your job to make the client happy. What do I mean by impossible? Let’s say you’ve got a horizontal banner ad to be place on local website portal and the client sends over the needed artwork to get the job done. Right off the bat you realize the imagery simply won’t work. It’s a huge vertical image that if used in the horizontal space will look like nothing more than a couple color blocks. or it will only be visible on one side and not all the way across. We as designers know this won’t work but it’s up to us to educate the masses as to why (as if common sense wasn’t that common).

In my experience it’s usually one of the following examples:

Vertical image in a horizontal space
Horizontal image in a vertical space
Too much content for the room provided or allowed

Though they sound like common sense most clients aren’t really thinking about how it’s going to work. They’re thinking about what content they want and they expect you to make it work, or else find a viable alternative. The challenge is then giving them exactly what they want. The only real way to do this is clear communication with the client and some basic client education to keep this from happening in the future. Instead of simply saying “no, this won’t work” offer helpful alternatives and options. You’ll be seen as someone who’s willing to work with it instead of another person to butt heads with.

Simplicity

Posted on Aug 22, 2007 by Jonathan to General

Simple websites are easy to use, easy to understand, and nice to look at. In my opinion most websites are filled with too many complicated ideas and have way too many paths / options available to the user. To me, any path that leads the user away from the goal is a distraction and should be depreciated.

What seems to happen during the collaborative stages of development is that many ideas are added to the original set of ideas. It would seem that a website featuring many great ideas would be a great website. If well executed, a collaboration of great ideas can (in some cases) become a great website. On the other hand, projects featuring too many ideas often turn out confusing and not as effective as the simple ones.

Heres an example:

Lets say you needed to get to a friends house for a BBQ. He lives all the way across town and you need to be there in an hour. I would probably prefer to get one set of directions and probably from mapquest.

Another approach would be to call some friends and get some opinions on how they would navigate across town. Who knows maybe somebody knows a shortcut? Or a route thats more scenic? Is there road construction? Wait, maybe I should call Steve, he grew up in that area. By the time your done with this approach, the chances of getting lost on the way to the BBQ are tripled.

I know this example doesnt necessarily apply to webdesign and the collaborative process but I think it helps my point.

Simplicity as a result of a creative process is “the ultimate sophistication”, as Leonardo da Vinci said. Achieving simplicity is a difficult task, especially in webdesign. Here you have designers with one set of opinions, clients with another, technologists add another twist. Then to top it all off – SEO plays a factor.

In order to make sure your website is effective, its important to identify the goal of the site and make sure that goal doesnt become depreciated.

Tags: website usability