Archive for the 'Search Engine Friendly' Category
Building a Shopping Cart
By 2007, 77% of Internet users over the age of 13 — about 131.3 million people — will shop online. This video-based CD-Rom tutorial from Lynda.com, helps give you the tools to harness this market effectively.
Using an in-depth case study and other varied examples, Lawrence from Lynda.com, demonstrates how to seamlessly create and incorporate a shopping cart and back end to support online customers. Building an Online Shopping Cart covers everything from the general concepts of e-commerce to the nitty-gritty of setting up and customizing credit card and order processing features. The training also covers security, customer privacy, building a store, and developing and integrating customer service and policies.
To see some free excerpts from the video-based CD go to Lynda.com
Web Marketing 2.0
If you’re like me, then you are probably tired of hearing the word Web 2.0 passed around the net like a buzz word on steroids. Google alone currently shows 126,000,000 results for the search term “web 2.0″ at the time of this writing.
However, although this term may be overblown, it does have significant influence on the current changes taking place on the Internet. Most importantly, it has many implications for the online marketer.
Wikipedia has defined social search as the following:
“Social searching is the latest innovation in the search engine industry. Sprouting from web2.0 concepts like folksonomy or social bookmarking it gives the user the ability to interact with the search engine and promote what they feel are the relevant results. This is a user based approach website relevancy as opposed to the traditional webmaster based approach”
We are currently seeing a multitude of social search engines exploding onto the Internet’s virtual landscape. Sites like Digg, del.icio.us, and MySpace are attracting millions of users. Read more
Search Engine Friendly Definitions
In every profession has its own set of terms, that on the outside may not make sense (remeber the first time you saw the term WYSISWG?). We have pulled togther the top level terms that you, as a graphic designer, shpuld need to know. I like Clement Mok’s quote: “knowing HTML is to the web, as kerning was to layout”- same for creating search engine friendly web sites.
Alt Text The text that is displayed when the mouse cursor is held static on an image. It is primarily used as a place holder in case the image on the web browser is unable to load.
Anchor Text The text/copy written on the web page that works as a link.
Back Link A link from another page which links to your page. It is also called an inbound link.
Below The Fold Part of the web page that cannot be seen without scrolling the page.
Flash & Search Engines
Creating a site using Flash is great for making web sites interesting, informative, and fun to explore. But you may be hesitant to use Flash out of the concern that the Google, MSN, Yahoo! will not be able to find your site after all, what good is a well crafted web site if nobody can find it? Read more
Defining “Search Engine Friendly”
Creating a good user experience is a graphic designer’s top concern when developing a web site. Communicating the client’s message and exetending their brand is also a big task. But as the old saying goes about “a tree falling in the woods,” what if you built a great web site and nobody came?
Creating a balance between graphics, technology, as well as creating a site that is search engine friendly can be daunting. In this article and over the next few months we will explore the different aspects of designing a web site that is well designed not only for humans but for search engines, too.
DFW SEM Meeting- What you should know about SEM
Tonight is the monthly meeting of the DFW Search Engine Marketing Association. So, WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING?
Search Engine Marketing is “the act of marketing a web site via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings, purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities… Search Engine Optimization is the act of altering a web site so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. In the past, has also been used as a term for any type of search engine marketing activity, though now the term search engine marketing itself has taken over for this.”
Brett Tabke from Webmaster World (the largest online forum for Webmasters and is headquartered in Austin) will speak at the Dallas Ft Worth Search Engine Marketing Association meeting on October 16 at the Renaissance Hotel in Richardson. Admission is free for members, and $10 for non-members.
