We almost all know that building a good system of links to your website is very important to your success with ranking on a search engine.

It is important to realize that there are good links and bad links. You don’t really want to make the search engines regard you in a bad light so it’s vital to remember that when you link to someone or place your link on someone’s website with a comment that it needs to be relevant and not just a ploy to get a link.

Natural link building takes time and needs constant attention. Unnatural linking will immediately make you suspect to the search engines, and you don’t want that.

Let us go through some things you might want to try to get back links.

Let’s briefly look at what the best kind of link is that you can get. You want high ranking links. So what are the highest ranking links? Authority links are of the highest order. The highest rank is a 10, and the sites listed here are Google, Adobe, USA.gov, Facebook, CNN, and a few others. Try to only get links from 5 and above. Reciprocal links are not the kind of links you really need. The one way links are worth a lot more than any others.

So how do we get links?

The first thing you need to do is make sure that the links are actually relevant to your website. Try to concentrate your search for relevant links to things that are totally on the same wave length as your site.  If you are making a website about chocolate make contact with other websites in the same industry. You are more likely to get links if they have a blog, and you make a relevant comment in their blog and leave your website address.

This way you have a way of contacting them, and they know you are also interested and it could be the start of a new relationship in industry. Do not spam them. Make a relevant comment that is well researched and of interest and is useful to the audience. When you start getting a request to do guest posts make sure you both do them and do them well. This is one of the best ways to get noticed on the internet. Make sure you tag these articles well.
Do a search on line for any comments relevant to your subject matter that has blogs. Use these to find places to post to. Make sure the posts are current and not from 2006 or something like that.

You need to make sure that your website or blog is of high standard and not just thrown together. People have to want to link to you. They won’t want to link to a substandard website.

The keywords and tags you put on your website are of paramount importance. These do matter once the search engine finds you and you need a few links and website posts to get them to find you. The best kinds of links are those that are automatic and from people who find you, and like your work.

A few years back, what you can find on the footer of a page were things like Privacy, Terms of Service and contact.  Nowadays, things appear to have changed just as the way blogging has changed the way a website will work and how it will interact with you.

Nowadays, it appears that a blog or a website is almost required to talk back to you when you post a comment.  Any minute now you are going to see a talking website. It’s in the near future. There are already instant messengers. Why not a talking answering website?  In the meantime though we have a huge change in the way footers work. Here are some more examples.

I have had a few laughs with some of the ones I have looked at recently. I have laughed about some of the website names too. People are becoming so inventive with names.

John Cow

Jason is all about internet Marketing. And his area at his footer is no exception. Here he has his social area with all his social links. Next to this he has listed his various tools which he uses for marketing. Alongside are his recent blogs. And the last of the four footers is the terms of service, the about and the disclaimer, etc. All of these items are really musts in any blog or website. They cover you under the laws that are in existence.

I love Mac Apps was next

Here again we have a 4 part section, but it is slightly different to the previous one as it is presented with a gray background. This appears to make it recede a bit so that it’s like an after thought. James is a Mac user and concentrates his blog on Macs and their Applications. The footer section has the 4 divisions the first being on his recent twitter Tweets. The second is his “about section” where you see his brief Bio and his photo. Next you are asked to ask questions basically as he asks for a suggestion. The last section is the subscribe list with the various links like RSS twitter and email. It is a neat list with one failing: When he was setting up the background, he didn’t realize that not everyone opens to a full page, so the background image disappears on the last bit with the smaller screen. If the background had been white this would not have showed up.

Productive Dreams

Productive Dreams is the baby of Gopal Raju.  The footer he has created has a dark background and a faded almost indistinct script. It is divided into 6 areas with items like friends, categories, recognitions, sponsors and an area for his main hosting company, which is Convax
Take heart and look at them from new eyes.

I was scrolling and strolling around the internet just viewing various blogs with an overview of the designs and in particular, looking at the inventive footer notes some sites have. Several had absolutely no footer at all which surprised me. Not a scrap about privacy or the legal stuff or even a contact section.

It surprised me in two aspects, one why are they even there if they don’t want people to know about them and two the fact that they have got on to the net and put a website, blog up, but know nothing about the laws of the world.  Most of the time these items appear in the footer, although the footers have got more inventive over time and host a great deal more nowadays.

The fact remains, they need to have them somewhere. I looked at the footers to try to check out the nicest ones I had seen.

I am going to share a couple with you and hope they stay up long enough for you to enjoy too.

Spoongraphics

Created and written by Chris Spooner this British site has an interesting footer in that he has created three separate graphic behind the three columns each with a paper feel but with an interesting touch in design. I sat looking at it for a while trying to figure out how he did it.  He writes about Photoshop stuff most of the time and also does tutorials on digital stuff. Interesting website all round. Thanks Chris for the views and ideas.

Bcandulo

I found this an interesting use of footer.  The normal information isn’t given here but what they have done is make this into a very clever use of a contact form.  Brad Candullo gives his contact info plus a way of contacting him using a contact form and a full resume for download. It was a very clever way of doing a whole lot in a little space.

Web Designer Wall

I really enjoyed the way Nick La had set this footer out. The writing on the top gave it an intimate touch. He set it out in a three part and the first two had that intimate look I mention while the third one was a no nonsense straight forward message about who he is and what he does. It is all backed with a background image that gives a light touch to it. Very well done Nick!

Sam Rayner

Sam Rayner is a young designer in Britain, and he has some interesting ideas. The footer he has used is a sort of add on to the page but in a blended color format. It is in actual fact a five part add on, but it gives the appearance of being in three parts. It shows another link to his portfolio, which is situated next to a vertical link to recent projects. Then comes a link to his Amazon monetize link with a second vertical link to items he considers worth checking and more of the books from Amazon taking the last space.

As everyone knows the ways to get ranked in search engines means you need to have your SEO on your website done correctly.

Failure to do this mean you end up not getting ranked or you fail to rise in the ranks of the engines because the spiders that are sent out from the search engines do not pick up the relevant information.
This can be tedious work if you have to do it manually and every bit of help you can get in this direction should really be utilized.

Every now and then, we get a boost to our battery of plug-ins and this has happened again. SEO Booster Pro has come on the market in a better shape and form. What SEO Booster Pro does is make a lot of that tedious manual work more automated for you. One of these things is tagging.

This is a plug-in for WordPress that tracks visitors coming to you from various search engines and automatically analyzes what keywords they used to find you and starts using that as one of your promotion key words. You must realize that Google with their famous Google slap can alter things with any changes they make to their algorithms, and you might have to return here for the updated version. This is one of the downfalls of any system that is reliant in any way on Google. Once the update is installed you should find your keywords once again return to their high position. Search Engine Page Results (SERP) are shown for the relevant top results for your incoming traffic, and it shows what keywords were used.

You can set this tool to show you what you want to analyze as far as data is concerned.

It’s a good idea to stay up to date with the SEO Booster Pro website by joining their RSS Feed so you can receive relevant updates.

Basically, what this product does is take over a lot of the search engine optimization for you.  Search engines judge your site taking in certain factors. These factors include things like how many back links you have and where they come from.  The higher ranked those back links are, the more credit you get. Another thing taken into account is your Page rank. Key words change on search engines all the time. It sounds amazing but new combinations of words are still being put into the likes of Google and Yahoo, which have never been used before. The use of this SEO tool is fine in that although it is a tool and does things faster than you could by hand, it is still on the same wave as a manual effort and won’t put Google’s back up in any ways. They change things all the time to keep using all guessing in any case.

Internal linking and tagging is important and by using the same tag on your own page about things that have a similar subject matter and are internally linked are all things that help you.

Finding news things for your blog can sometimes be difficult I know there are days when I sit here and go completely blank with what to talk about. To find out what to talk about often needs feedback and comments from your visitors. It can be like a host talk on a radio where you get no one talking back to you. I really have huge respect for the ways, those guys can find something to talk about out of thin air. It seems to me a remarkable gift.

I was looking for something to tell you that would be useful as tips for bloggers.

One thing you really need to do, is make sure if you have had made previous comments on the subject, make sure you tag those comments and back link to them. These both help the visitors and the search engine spiders. Make sure you allow comments as this keeps the conversations going and extends the subject for you to be able to reply to it as well.

There are several places that you can submit your articles besides putting them on your blog.  One of these is Blog Carnival. Here you can submit your article and with luck you might even get it on the feature list. Although you might not get a lot of traffic from it, you are getting your name out on the web and linking back to your website.

There is a bloggers directory that you can join as well. This won’t give you much traffic, unless you manage to get into their blogs of the week listing, but at least you are on their list of sites.

Remember all these sites have to be enabled. It’s not just a case of joining them and expecting them to list you. Go back in once you have joined and make sure you enable your website on their listings.

The main place you will find good traffic will be Twitter and Facebook. And this is done by finding blogs that have similar interests to yours and following them on Twitter. Make sure you visit their sites and post comments that are both helpful and in response to an article or two that has been posted. Intelligent and helpful blogs will soon get you followed back to your own blog. This also means that you will be found by the search engines. Ensure that your posts are well tagged, and that you leave your info like your email and your web address when you do your comments. Technorati looks for tags. In fact, that is how they pick up posts. If the website is on a blog that is WordPress then make sure you have the Technorati enabled so that WordPress automatically pings your new blog.

It’s a good idea to also connect to Google Friend Connect.  It’s Google’s answer to Facebook, and as it is Google it will be well searched for info for any links. Just as YouTube is used by Google so you can use Google Maps and place your name on there with your website as a place to find you.

If you develop things for websites be they plug-ins, widgets, websites or programs there are a few resources on the internet that are must haves in your bookmarks. You will be referring to them again and again so you might as well make of them all early on in your time on the net. There are several that do articles on all sorts of subject both to teach you about subjects as well show you the latest in themes. These can be extremely helpful to you.

The first of these is Smashing Magazine

This website magazine is gives you excellent articles as well as themes. They discuss all sort of subject but my favorites are always those that refer to WordPress and the themes they give away for free.

Flashkit

This is a 30 day Trial of Flash kit
But they also give you good tutorial information about various other sites that you can go to, to learn about flash. You might well want to join if you are interested in Flash and how flash works and also to find out more on how to do certain things.

Still with Flash but this time Kirupa.com

This is also a site devoted to flash. There are three different forums on the site one for Flash CS4, another for Flash CS3 and the last for action Script 3.0
There are several sections where you can find various articles of interest.

Php.net is next

Php is used for a lot of different scripting on the net and almost always has some function in a website. It is important therefore to have the link handy so that you can refer to the latest advice and releases available. Currently PHP 5.3.3 has been released. One of the good things about PHP is that it can be embedded in HTML.

Java always has a place in our lives on the net

Here there are several items we need to take note of such as jQuery.
This is a simile Library type programs the enables you to do various things on your site. It’s another whole new language to learn. But luckily there are several plug-ins available to WordPress users that enable you to plug an item in and use it without having to learn the actual language.

Mezzoblue

Here we have several articles on various across the board subject to do with web design. The posts are unfortunately not that frequent but when they are they usually have something worthwhile to impart.

Dynamic Drive

Dynamic drive is a website devoted to all of the webdesign subjects. Here you have a total across the board list of items to look at from an online Favicon Generator to a button maker. One of mine is the email riddler. This creates your email address so it can’t be picked up to be spammed to.

The image section gives you so many things you can use for image enhancement it almost requires a section on its own to describe it.

WordPress is one of the greats as far as a platform is concerned and so say over 25 million other people. The list of users is growing daily and the reason must be obvious to see. It’s easy to use and almost everything you need is there at the touch of a button. If it’s not installed in the basic program it is available as a plug-in or widget. One of the problems with it is however that because it is a broad based platform it has to accommodate everyone and as a result the platform as a whole can have many functions you might never use. When this happens it’s a good idea to customize the admin area to enable it to load a whole lot faster.

One of the things you can do is use hooks: Either actions or filters

A full text on the matter will be found on WordPress under hooks but we will run through a few of the basics here.

Actions hooks happen when a particular thing happens in the basic core of WordPress. This sets up the scenario to set a sequence of events into action.

Filters are what WordPress sends into action when it modifies text to send it to the servers or to the database. This can be changed using an Api Filter with an add_filter() function. The complete rundown of this is under Hooks and Filters on WordPress.
What is about to happen is that these are going to be used to remove unwanted fields in your WordPress admin panel.

Let us start with the functions.php

Open your file and let’s start. First do a test. Put in the follow code

The result should be print of Hello world. Now remove the code again because we now know it works.

Now its time to disable widgets one the Dashboard

There are several widgets there that we will never use and it might be a good idea to get rid of as many as we can that we are sure we won’t use. This will speed up your load time considerably. Go into the Dashboard setup area and we will then proceed to disable a number of them. First we use the Unset () function to take out the ones we do not want shown.
Now  add_action() by using ‘wp_dashboard_setup’ to begin with in your functions and then named remove_dashboard_widgets, in the  second place.
This is the code you need to use.

All the full instructions are available on WordPress under removing widgets.

In total WordPress comes with twelve std. widgets. To disable any in a theme you need to drag them back from the sidebar in order to deactivate them.
Any that you have changed in order to use a third party widget in place of it can be deactivated.

Uncluttering the menu

Some menu items might never be used and its time to clean them up. Some on the top of the list can be removed using the code below.

In addition you can disable sub menu items as well with the following code

You will be able to find your submenu items in the admin/menu.php sub area.
That should clean up a lot of your dashboard.

When you are a blogger you are there for one of two reasons. One is to express your opinion. The other is to make money. When you are there to make money one of your main objects is to get a large following and to be well thought of both by your followers and by the search engines.  That sounds a little on the hard side to do but, in actual fact it’s not as hard as it sounds, if you follow the “keep straight” simple rules.

Always give value. Be honest and up front and grow your reputation.
When you are blogging don’t tell someone that something is good just to make a commission. In fact if you aren’t happy about using something yourself you shouldn’t be trying to sell it.

Keep your site up to date and simple to navigate.

One of your best tools here is WordPress. It’s simple to use and has an enormous resource of free tools for you to plug-in or use as widgets.

Decide what you are going to be selling and choose an appropriate name for your domain name and then register it with Hostgator or 1and 1. Now create your account with wordpress.org. You do this by filling in your name and address as well as your email.  Write up a small description to tell them what you are going to be blogging about.  You will need to choose a nickname to use to log into your account as well as a password.

Now you can set up your site using you theme and whatever else you have decided upon and start organizing your self to start blogging. When you first start it’s a good idea to keep to a schedule and blog at least three or four times a week or more if you can so your stray visitors will see something fresh regularly.

Search through the rest of the blogs and find one that has similar interests to you. Log in and join them and when you have something constructive to say make a post. Not an inane post like “I like what you say” but actually add to the post. This way you will build up a reputation for being a real person with a positive contribution to the area.

Your first post on your own blog can be down by clicking on your link in the dashboard that says new post. Once you have written up your post make sure you save it or it will be lost and you will have to start again. Make sure you set the site up with a thought out theme. There are plenty of free ones available on WordPress.  Put up your site name and your logo if you have one. Do put up an about page on one of the static pages. People always read those as they are interested in what you are about as a person. Add a bit of the personal here as well like a photo or two. Write up something to make people connect to you.  Be sure always to check both your spelling and your grammar.  It is also a good idea to get an account at copyscape.com and check your post isn’t duplicating someone else’s prose on the net. Never copy someone else’s work and post it to the net. Once you get into the swing of things and start having regular visitors you will find you have people responding with comments of their own which will make the blog pick up momentum and make it more interesting for all of you. If you have a cell phone that will work interactively be sure to set it up so you have pages that work on the cellphone and you can update from there.
Include your twitter and facebook links so that you are interlinked and this will also increase your visits.

Mostly people concentrate on the well known and well advertised plug-in to enhance their WordPress. This person tells that person about a really good program which they have tried and it becomes a favorite by word of mouth. Sometimes there are programs out there that are just as good if not better and because they aren’t given the right kind of introductions they tend to get neglected. Today we are going to take a look at a few of these and give them a little of the attention they deserve.

Custom Query String

How many of you have struggled to get different posts on different pages. You want only two or three on the main page and many more on different pages of you blog. Well it’s not easy or it wasn’t until this plug-in came to light. With this you can organize what goes on what page with little to no problem. If you want 15 on one page and three on another that is totally possible.

Meta Tags

For years we have carefully described our key words etc in meta tags. Well it’s made a little easier for us with this plug-in. There are four different configurations that can be done to enable the meta tags. It uses inserts the correct meta tag according to the post you are making.

Clean Archives Reloaded

Cleaning up your archives is important if you don’t want to use up major resources. This plug-in uses Java and both expands and contracts the archives listed by month and makes your server much lighter on queries.

Exec-PHP 4.9

If you are running static pages you need this plug-in as it enables you to run php on html pages. This is an extremely stable plug-in and has a huge amount of well documented information available to explain exactly what this plug-in can do for you. Quite simply, though, if you want to have some dynamic function on a static page this plug-in will allow it.

Redirection

This item is very useful especially for SEO as it redirectors when someone inadvertently leaves out the www.  It’s something that helps when you SEO a website. The amount of items this plug-in does easily for you like redirect a visitor according to whom it is.

WP Chunk 2.0
The download takes some finding so make sure you check the name. Basically what this plug-in does is condense the URLS into small sizes. You can even tell it how many letters is the maximum.

Keyword Plug-in

Keyword get plugged in with this little plug-in and it was written for WordPress 2 but it still supposed to work. There are full and detailed instructions on the site.

WP Cache is the last on our list

This one increases the speed of your access and storage of your web pages making the making them into static pages by replacing the PHP. All this makes for faster timing of your loading and serving and its less strain on the server.

All these are worth a look at and I think you will be pleased with what you find.

Well I have been breaking a few of my own lately so I might as well egg you on to be a conspirator. You know what it’s like. You need to stretch your boundaries. Kids do it all the time to see how far they can get away with things. I think the rebel in us never really leaves. Sometimes it just gets subdued for a while. I love breaking rules. I was a born rebel. I am beginning to think that Megan takes after me in that way. Often I see that rebel peeping out. She can really try her mother’s patience some days.

Well today we are going to break some of those unwritten rules of web design.

When can you use a horizontal scroll bar?

Well you can and you can’t. I must admit I was very frustrated on a recent bottle site until I found the scroll bar at the bottom stretched way over. You see they never told me. Now if they has said scroll right I would have checked.  Actually it was a brilliant site once I found out how to navigate it. I am sure there is a way to make it move right if you insert a click somewhere.  It is a rule that can be broken successfully though. Benek has done just that.
Another website that has done this effectively is Stephane Tartelin who has done it to display the gallery of graphic art on the website.

How many type faces should you use?

It is said that too many wear out the eye of the beholder. But in actual fact if used as a combination to become almost a graphic design of their own, they can be very effective. Links LA has done just that.

Can you have too many colors?

Overpowering amounts of color can put some people off. But if it’s done with care and discrimination it can be very effective. Matt Mullenweg used a WordPress theme as his prior theme and that had muted colors but many of them. It is available to view here. His current theme is far more bold but still full of lots of colors.
Travis Isaacs uses ever color in the rainbow and then some but it blends and harmonious.

Do you stand out like a sore thumb?

People tell you not to make yourself and your intentions obvious. Personally I like to know within those 30 seconds or I don’t stick around. That said there is something of a tease in the following websites that did make me wait to see what made them tick. Take a look at Cerotrees and see what you think.
It was different.
Peter who is a London web designer made a splash. He broke two rules, the horizontal and the fact he was different.

One more rule to break today

Easy navigation

Some of them aren’t so easy but it intrigues you enough for you to stick around. One of these is Kasulo.ws . I actually didn’t find out what the site was about but I enjoyed clicking and waiting to see what would happen. So in one way it succeeded but in another it didn’t.
The next site was very clever although it was slow in loading. Speed of loading is very important and sometimes websites forget that not everyone has unlimited bandwidth. The immediate section came up but the rest took a little time. Eventually I figured I was meant to click on the tiny writing on the left. Once I did that I was away. Photographer Alvin Tang is the owner.

Well we broke 5 rules there. I will be back with more.

Top of the morning to you all, today we are going to be reading a book. I have been reading a lot of fairy tails lately. I had forgotten most of the, and it was like coming back to old friends. The wishing chair was always a favorite of mine and even as an adult reading that one to my daughter, we got very involved in making our own wishing chair journeys.

Megan’s imagination runs riot and we land up in all sorts of lovely places. We have been to India to visit the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China. I still think those kinds of books make a child’s imagination really work.

Digging into WordPress

Well, my imagination was set working with a book received recently in the form of Digging into WordPress.  It is written by two very knowledgeable fellows, Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr. I have long been an admirer of Jeff’s work and always read his articles for new info. He usually sends me on a search for more.

The book is fairly lengthy and encompasses a great deal. If you are a rank beginner the first couple of chapters will set you on the path to totally understanding WordPress, as it is hosted on your own website, by the WordPress.org group. Do not confuse it with WordPress.com.

The two authors really do dig deep into the where’s, why and wherefores in this book. They cover such areas as using WordPress as your content management system and with the aspects that you can do and how best to manage it. SEO that bane of most of our lives to try to reach that front page of Google is handled here with a lot of detail I had never thought of. They take you through how to find the best plug-ins for your needs. Not so much how to make your own, but then I don’t think they are aiming for those very knowledgeable coders out there. Rather they are aiming for the ones like me who probably would never attempt it. I know too many plug-ins make your site slow to load but it sure is a whole lot easier than learning a new language.
One thing I was very interested in was the section on how to control Spam. Spam is the one thing I hate. I really can’t see what pleasure those characters get out there in using web sites as garbage cans. If I can find new ways to combat it, I will be there boots and all.
Keeping up to date with your maintenance on your blog is covered, and it’s something everyone should take to heart. WordPress gets updated for a reason. That reason is usually to combat the baddies out there, so it makes sense to keep your blogs backbone up to date.

They cover customizing WordPress for yourself, how to set up various elements of WordPress to suit your situation, which is the best way to treat RSS feed. The tricks and tips in this book are worth their weight in gold to both a beginner and one who have a little more knowledge. If you eat sleep and drink code, you might not realize what a gem this $27 download is to us mere mortals. It is also available in a spiral book form at $67.

Let me get back to Digging deeper and deeper.

Website chat widgets are a very useful resource in enhancing website interaction. They are widely used and offer excellent real time feedback opportunities. Precisely, experts have cited them as being incredible solutions for increasing user engagement while growing community participation. If it is a business website chat widgets are recommended since they promote direct contact with potential clients as more sales can be derived from the interactive process.
Certainly, many questions can be asked as to how they are essential to web site production. Furthermore, the curiosity may exist as to how chat widgets are added to the site if there is none. It is very simple. More importantly there are many free widgets that can be used when integrating this feature into a web design.
Available in contemporary science and technology stores around the world are chatango, meboo.me; JWChat; Cbox and MiBrew web messenger. There are many more, but in this article the writer will focus on the five which are listed first. What they are and how life on the internet is enhanced when logged into a website furnish with Chat widgets are some answers, which will be attempted.

1. Chitango

Chitango is a uniquely customized web chatting room with amazing interactive features. The user options are immense. A major advantage Chitango offers its users is that each visitor can have his/ her own avatar. It is a masterpiece in the computer technology science industry when considered in the sense of web designing infiltrations. Importantly, users have full access to individual graphic illustrations while in these chat rooms.

2. Meebo.me

This chat widget is a byproduct of Meboo.com. It has its peculiar web audience affinity being a Web based IM Platform service provider. Distinctively Meboo.me can be applied to Typepad or blogger which ever is the user’s preference.
A remarkable advantage of Meboo.me chat widget application worth highlighting is its compatibility with Gtalk, Yahoo messenger, AIM and Face Book. This feature really lends to its immense popularity within the industry. As such, it one of the most used widgets since users are allowed to interact using their Gtalk, Yahoo messenger, AIM or FaceBook registrations.

3. JWChat

This device is considered an Ajax Powered chat script, which interacts only with JavaScript and HTML. Despite this apparent limitation JW Chat is still rather advantageous in many respects. Therefore, being able to interact only with JavaScript and HTML domain is really its distinction, which esteems it above chat widgets in the industry.
Distinguishing features are a traditional orientation with sounds notifying users if messages are unread and as well as emoicons distinctly displaying pictorial facial expressions.

4.  Cbox

Cbox can be considered a merger between traditional features of Desktop IM Chat widgets with Social networking elements. It contains a rather precise user interface which is the client based. JavaScript and HTML are the supportive programs to which it is oriented for accommodating functionality.

5. Mibew Web Messenger

Mibew Web Messenger is also called the Open Web Messenger. Predominantly, it was intended for live chat feature but can adapt to alternative methods of Wed widget interactions.PHP and MySol are the two the two scripting languages to which it is most compatible.