Just a quick observation today. Graqphic design/Web design is really no different than fashion. Everything has been done before, what is old is now new and all that really changes is how it’s done and what your pair it with. Now, with the exception of color palettes changing thanks to better monitors and video cards, Web 2.0 style design resembles alot of the older stuff from the very early 90’s. The late 90’s and early 2000’s had a very industrial, futuristic look and feel to the web. I blame Flash for that. But now, Web 2.0 styles are driving things toward the familiar simplicity of web design from 15yrs ago, minus of course the technology pinnacle of the day back then, the ever annoying animated GIF.

Does this mean in 2015 the techo-driven Flash interface will make a return and we will all be forced to interact like we are in The Minority Report? Only time will tell.

Garret French and others have recently re-started conversations concerning Social Media and marketing. Two camps of though have been proposed, which you can read more about at the links above. I myself find I am in camp 3. I, unlike most web developers, began in print design, a more traditional marketing medium.

Camp 3 is simply this:
Social media was once the truest form of online journalism/news/sluething/diaries/etc available. Drudge being a great example. Fark.com still being one of the truest sites out there. Big time marketers saw potential in social marketing(Blair Witch Project being one of the first) and decided to utilize it, no different really than product placement in movies and television. American Idol is nothing more than digg geared towards wannabe pop stars as opposed to blogs/news. If you watch American Idol(which I don’t past the embarrassing audtions), you’ll see Coco-Cola cups in front of each judge. Now, informed comsumers see two types of content simultaneously taking place. The first bit of content takes place via the judges, contestants, interviews and montages. The second piece are the product placements. Now, no one feels that the product placements taint the other content on the show, they simply co-exist. No one would be disappointed to find out Simon is really drinking coffee, Randy is drinking Pepsi and Paula is drinking liquid Valium. We understand why the cups are there and their intentions and we are not alarmed, offended or tricked by this.

Now, online social media is no different. We, as consumers and average Joe’s, understand what is taking place online. We don’t get our shackles up(sorry, a southern colloquialism for getting upset) over the corporate placements within any social media. SNL post clips online. Does it bother us? No we understand it is there as both an advertisement for the show and for our enjoyment. Fortune 500 companies pay employees to maintain corporate blogs and they have discretion over what is posted like wartime morale officers comming down on Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam. Does this bother us? No, we take it for what its worth and move on.

Garrett is an old friend of mine, his post is worth the read as most of his client base resembles mine. Neither one of use are going to land a big Nike or Sony or Microsoft contract anytime soon. And thats great with us, we’re not going to get our shackles up.

Just a little tidbit here….Owning a website is really no different than catfishing. When people catfish, no matter what actual method they are using, they basically throw a line out there with bait and a hook and then you wait. You hope the fish likes what it sees and takes a bite. Owning a website is really no different. Millions of people own websites. There’s millions of things in that lake a catfish can eat. You put the best product out there that you can get your hands on and hope you land the fish. Bass fishing on the otherhand, you’re trying yo make the fish think it is eating something other than what you’re presenting. While there are people out there that practice such unethical methods, most websites I build for clients and my person websites are more like catfishing. Sure, you can spend tons of time researching the best landing pages the direct people to take the action you want, just like I can spends hours trying to get the attention of a catfish. But, when it’s all said and done, people, like catfish want the best thing available. In the case of catfish, it’s the stinkiest, stationary object out there. With people however, its always about quality. The quality could be in the product itself, in customer support or even in pricing.

Ok, I know this is kind of an obscure and random post, but when you are sitting by the lake enjoying time with your kids and you own a web development business, weird things pop into your head.

If you own a website, you know the importance of a good quality link exchange with another website. If you own a website and don’t know the importance of a good quality link, you should probably do some reading up on it. Reciprocal links can be managed manually where you open a text editor, add the link to your links page and upload the modified file to your server. Reciprocal links can be added to a page dynamically using a content management system. Most of us, though, use some kind of scripting that automates our reciprocal link management. A few of the great features of reciprocal link management programs are url validation, automated email capabilities, unlimited categories and sub-categories, the list goes on.

At CAD Website Design, we have a link exchange management program that requires a reciprocal link back from the requesting website. We have examined what would be a good quality link and have set our criteria for a successful link exchange as follows;

1. Links directory must be accessible from the index/front page of your website or no more than 1 click deep.
2. Website must be a quality website offering good content.
3. Your site theme should be website design, development, hosting, programming, etc.
4. The reciprocal URL must not employ no-follow attributes.
5. No link farms.
6. No third party off site link management programs (linksmanager.com, etc…)
7. Links pages must be part of original requesting URL (http://www.yourdomain.com/resources (or /links, etc…)
Do not submit site “abc” then request us to link to site “def”.
8. We do not exchange links with porn, mortgage, pharmacy, casino, lottery or other type websites.
9. The link back to our site must be as shown below.

Website Design - CAD Website Design offers professional unique website design, database programming, search engine optimization and site hosting at great prices.

Now, the above requirements for a reciprocal link don’t seem out of line to me. We want the links to be relevant, reciprocal, and accessible to a spider. No JavaScript tricks, and don’t try to hoard PR by using no-follow attributes. We don’t want to exchange links with potential spammers or bad neighborhoods either. I would venture a guess that many of you have a link exchange criteria like this one.

Even though we have spelled out the requirements for a good quality link exchange, we get a bunch of spammy, deceitful reciprocal link requests. So you’re probably asking what’s spammy about a reciprocal link request? I have a form on my website for people to submit a link request, so how can it be spammy? Here’s how.

1.The Gilligan’s Island Link Request. This is where your reciprocal link requester has set up a page on their server with a link back to your website expecting you to link back to them. Typically, these are plain white pages without any kind of template with a bunch of links thrown on them. If you strip the url of the link page to the base url, you wont find a link to that page anywhere on the site. You won’t find it under resources, partners, links, or even in their site map. That page with the link back to your site is an island and no one is going to find those links there, not even the search engine spiders. An example of one of these Gilligan’s Island pages can be found at dartdebt.com/dir/category/comp1.3.htm. The link request submitter is hoping that your reciprocal link checking is automated and that as long as your program sees that there is a page with a link back to your site, it will be approved.

2. Invasion Of The Link Snatchers. This one is pretty clever, but it still violates #7 of our requirements above. These link requesters are finding websites that link to our site that we have exchanged links with, or links from sites that may be 1 way links into our site. They will submit their url for a link back while offering up the link that they found that already links back to us. They are Link Snatching. Once again, I believe this is a ploy used in the hopes that your reciprocal linking is automated, or that you aren’t paying attention, and will approve the link based on the fact you can verify the reciprocal url they submitted to you. The funniest one of these was when the link spammer submitted a link back from one of the websites that we created

3. 1 Site Fits All. I often get reciprocal link requests from the same group of off shore developers. Apparently, these guys own more websites than they know what to do with. 1 thing that they have done is set up 1 giant links directory database using url aliasing to point to their 1 links directory. This one is used in conjunction with the Gilligan’s Island Link Request up above. Here are a few of my favorites;
deepakbansal.com/direc/comp1.htm
clearpathtechnology.com/direc/comp1.htm
bestloanson.com/res/dir/comp1.htm

You may have seen some of these slight of hand link exchange requests. You may have even named them yourself. My point is this. Do yourself a favor and take a look at the link requester and where they say they have put your link. Make sure they are actually reciprocating. Reciprocal link exchanges are great for networking, building community, increasing traffic, and the obvious seo benefit. Also, if you would be interested in a reciprocal link exchange with us, all we ask is that you follow the rules above.

In a previous article that I wrote concerning Search Engine Optimization I mentioned some of the more obvious blunders when designing your site for good natural placement.

Now, I would like to cover some of the other not so obvious areas where a web owner can make some improvements.

Additional on page factors that impact SEO that aren’t as obvious are;

• Poor code to text ratio.
• Content too far down in the code.
• Low or excessive keyword ratios.
• Low keyword prominence.
• Excessive use of tables.
• Use of frames.
• URL Structuring for dynamic websites.
• Duplicate Content/Canonical Issues.
• No Site Map
• Excessive Use of Java or other scripting.

What do all these mean?

1. Poor code to text ratio. - The Code to Text Ratio represents the percentage of actual text in a web page. The code to text ratio of a page is used by search engines and spiders to calculate the relevancy of a web page. A higher code to text ratio gives you a better chance of getting a good page ranking for your page. Not all search engines are using the code to text ratio in their index algorithm, but most of them do. So having a higher code to text ratio than your competitors gives you a good start for on-page optimization.

2. Content too far down in the code. - When designing your website, remember to try to get as much meat or substance to the top of your code just below the tag as you can. Having 300 lines of code (style information, java, etc…) before a search engine spider can extrapolate what you site is about may send them running away thereby harming your chances at good organic rankings.

3. Low or excessive keyword ratios. - Identify what you feel your visitors may type into a search engine to find you. There are many tools available for that and I will discuss them in another article. Once you determine what your most important keywords are (and I am only talking about 10 or 12 keywords or phrases here), then you should check to see what their density is. There are various debates on the exact density one should maintain to achieve optimal ratings, but I think everyone is just guessing at this point. I would find a good keyword density checking tool and check the keyword density of my competition. Use that as your benchmark for density. This tool will alert you if your density is perceived to be too low, or too high. Too low can lead to not being perceived as relevant enough while a very high keyword density can be perceived as being spammy.

4. Low keyword prominence. - Keyword prominence is a rating of how prominent a keyword is in your website and this is calculated by looking at your title, description, meta tags and other various on page factors. It is a general belief that you should use your keywords at or near the beginning of the above mentioned areas and also near the beginning of page text, sentences.

5. Excessive use of tables. - Excessive use of tables while doing your design adds additional coding to your page, dilutes the relevance of your actual content, and generally slows page load time which may not have an impact on the spiders, but sure does irritate human visitors. Lay your pages out using creative css techniques, and make sure to like to the css style sheet instead of having all of the code on page.

6. Use of frames. - Frames are just icky. Also, if you view the page source of a page that uses frames, you will notice there is very little code or text displayed. Good for hiding your copyrighted material (not fool proof though), but very bad for natural rankings and organic seo. In short, don’t use frames.

7. URL structuring for dynamic websites. - If you are looking for an advantage to the millions of other pages on the web that look like this… /index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=4&id=16&Itemid=27 Then make sure you do your homework. It is a good idea, if you are just starting your website, to rewrite dynamic urls using mod re-write and give them meaning.

8. Duplicate content/canonical issues. - Lets say you have a website of yourdomain.com Lets say we can get to your website by the following url scenarios; http://www.yourdomain.com | http://yourdomain.com | http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html | http://yourdomain.com/index.html - Each of these pages or urls are viewed to be separate urls by Google. Matt Cutts discusses this in length over at his blog.

9. No site map. - Lets say you are a spider and you are driving around and enter a town you have never been to before but you want to take in all of the sites. Wouldn’t is be great if someone handed you a detailed road map when you crossed the city line? That’s what a site map is. It is a detailed map of your site that helps spiders crawl around and find the important information sooner. There is also a consortium by the major search engines and it is located at Sitemaps.org that offers sitemap protocol and has support from Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

10. Excessive use of Java or other scripting. - I am not saying that using these scripts is bad, I am just saying put the scripting on a separate page of the site and call it into the intended page when needed. an example of that is on the home page of CAD Website Design where we rotate selected portfolio pieces on the home page. If you examine the source code, you can’t even see the portfolio script or code. That is because the code used to drive the rotating script is not relevant text and we have chosen to not include it in the body of the text.

Follow these tips when designing your website. These are all on page items that you can control and will make natural improvements in your search engine rankings.

Often we get asked to do search engine optimization for various clients who have existing websites. We will review the websites, and we are amazed at the blantant mistakes made by the previous webmasters. Some of those mistakes are;

• Using images in place of text.
• No use of alt text in value added images.
• Over use of images.
• Lack of headings tags.
• Poorly written title and description tags.

What do these all mean?

Using Images in Place of Text - Often, you will see a logo in the corner of a website with a company slogan, or a bulleted list of services on a website that are no more than an image. A search engine spider can not read the text in an image, it sees it as nothing more than an image. To see what your website looks like to a search engine spider, go to http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/

No Use of Alt Text - When writing your html and inserting images, you will probably enter code that looks something like this…Â
img src=”images/website_hosting2.gif” mce_src=”images/website_hosting2.gif” alt=”website hosting” width=”16″ height=”16″ border=”0″

Notice the alt= part. This is an opportunity to associate the image with a valuable keyword, be be aware of keyword stuffing as alt tags are intended for ease of navigation for individuals with disabilities.

OverUse of Images - This has more of an impact on the visitors browsing experience and has an impact on load time of your website. Overuse of images can dilute your keyword density as well. Remember, content is king.

Missing Heading Tags - Headings tags are used to give emphasis to certain words or paragraphs within the context of your website. This is typically done by using a H1, H2, H3 or other H tag. These tags tell the search engine spiders that particular emphasis should be put on this term when evaluating what the website is about.

Poorly Written Title and Description - This is just what it implies. A poorly written title or description of your site can have a devestating effect on your seo efforts.

Additional on page factors that impact SEO that aren’t as obvious are;

• Poor code to text ratio.
• Content too far down in the code.
• Low or excessive keyword ratios.
• Low keyword prominance.
• Excessive use of tables.
• Use of frames.
• URL Structuring for dynamic websites.
• Duplicate Content/Canonical Issues.
• No Site Map
• Excessive Use of Java or other scripting.Â

The lists above do not address all potential SEO killers. Addressing these items alone does not guarantee successful placement in SERPS (Search Engine Placement Results), but one can not have a successful seo campaign by ignoring these. When designing your website, make sure that you are observing SEO Best Practices. Doing so will make your seo campaign much easier in the long run.