Designers love beautiful websites and SEOs love optimized content and code, but neither should fool themselves, because these days, both matter.

Here is a basic rundown of his nine points:

1. SEO no longer means hiding and stuffing keywords
2. Anchor text matters, it describes the link to search engines
3. Strong CSS and design will be rewarded
4. Start with website content, search bots are dumb
5. Use the hash/pound sign (#) to help eliminate unique URL’s
6. Be careful of Javascript, make it SEO-friendly
7. Flash is okay for SEO, but still be weary of where it’s used
8. CSS for visual improvements and not hiding keywords
9. Supply links-of-plenty in the footer

Yes, it’s time to get excited about web design and SEO as an item! You of course need to be sure you follow the rules of both, but intermingling is no longer frowned upon. In fact, it is quite encouraged when it comes down to a website ultimately being successful.

Ah, the brains and beauty of the interwebs, united.

To avoid an SEO fiasco, there are some simple things you can do to your PDF to make it a website enhancement instead of a flop.

First off, I’d like to say that search engines (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) can read PDFs, and will rank them. The ranking of a PDF is really still up in the air. It’s questionable how well PDFs will do, but like with anything, if it’s optimized well enough, it’ll work its way into the SERPs.

When beginning the optimization process for a PDF, think about the SEO for your content pages on your website. What we’re going to do is nearly identical.

• Do not use an image program like Photoshop or Illustrator to make a PDF, because during the creation process it flattens it, making it one massive image, therefore invisible to search engines. Use Adobe Pagemaker/InDesign or something like MS Word. When using Word, be sure to use the H1, H2, H3 etc. tags to help optimize the text. You want it to be text/html-based to those spiders can crawl all over it.
• Use at least Adobe Acrobat 6 or higher to create your PDF files. Anything less is too primitive.
• Fill in the information for your PDF. Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Descriptions and Copyright information are important for the processing of a PDF. You can adjust these settings in Adobe Acrobat, under File>Document Properties.
• When using headlines, sub-headlines, keywords and phrases appropriate to your document, be careful not to kill your file. Too much specification can make it appear spammy to the engines.
• Don’t use too many or too large of images in your PDF. Images will make it nicer to look at, but it will also increase the file size and it slow down the load/download time. Like a webpage, if you put too many images (especially un-optimized) on it, it takes a long time to load. If it takes too long, you’ll get people canceling, and refusing to look at it.
• Make the PDF obvious on your website. Link to it from the homepage and don’t bury it too deeply in the website. Search engines have difficulty crawling things that are ‘hiding’ within a website’s infrastructure.
• Don’t name your file something complicated. Make it simple, and if it is multiple words, separate them with dashes (-). Example: document-name.pdf

Once you’ve done all of this, make it live! Put it up on your site, and let the spiders take over. It sounds a bit Arachnophobia, but this is where spiders crawling everywhere is a good thing.

Once the search engines get a hold of your PDF, it’s all about self-promotion with building backlinks, and getting people genuinely interested in what you have to offer. Try making a small banner or something and put it on your website to draw attention to it. Link to it in a few different ways on your site as well, and watch the magic happen. Remember, it’s not overnight magic, but it will take off soon enough (and surely sooner than if you didn’t optimize in the slightest).

There will always be the one-timers on your site. They come, they see, they click, they leave. It can’t be helped if you’re supplying information they are simply not interested in. But for those who are interested in your site, you can help promote your site by giving them an RSS option. Not only could they add your website to their RSS reader, but you could supply an email update for them as well. Even though there are people not that into RSS feeds, chances are they have an email, and RSS feed or not, they will connect with an email subscription (which coincidentally can be set up through your RSS feed sign-up on FeedBurner). As Michael Gray calls himself and other people who utilize RSS feeds the most, if you’re not a “techno-weenie”, you’ll likely not be interested in a feed subscription, so emailing is the way to go when keeping in contact with everyone else.

So, even though RSS feeds are almost a necessity for any website (in particular WordPress sites), don’t rely entirely on it to promote your content. You’ll have many people interested if you’re doing it right, but you should come up with other methods of bringing people back for more. Email is always a good idea. Of course you should always keep the basics of website maintenance in mind. If you keep your website well updated, then when people return in a couple days, there is fresh content and they don’t feel like they’re wasting their time. Very important to not your site be run down. Neglect doesn’t just kill plants, it also kills websites.

Sometimes black hat is actually unavoidable because you don’t know it’s going on. You have to be especially careful and observant of your site to ensure it’s not happening.

What is “black hat”? Black hat SEO is a bag of tricks to bring traffic into your website, that actually damages your site. There are many out there you yourself can avoid knowingly, but there are others out there that you may overlook, like not linking to a spammy website. However, something like this can still slip through the gaps if you yourself are not directly maintaining your site. This is not to say you should be there for every moment of your site, but you should be paying attention.

Here are a couple negatives to keep an eye on, according to Patrick Hare’s article about Black Hat SEO:

• Stuffing Keywords - Keyword stuffing is a bad idea. When popular search words are repeated several times (usually hundreds or thousands) so that search engines would see them. They’ll notice you all right, but not in a good way. They don’t like that.
• Sneaky Hidden Text - Hidden text is when you purposely hide text from the people yet keep it visible for the search engines. Making the text the same color as the background is one method, and search engines often notice when you’re sneaking around, and punish you accordingly.

Here are some more techniques that are simply not good practice:

• Duplicating Content - This sounds like an obvious one, but if you are just thinking about not reproducing somebody else’s content and are duplicating your own content, you’re doing just as much damage. Hare talks about people owning more than one domain (.com, .net, .org, etc.) and putting the exact same content on all of them. Search engines only like getting duplicate information from one source, and there’s no telling which one it will take to. Do not duplicate even your own work, your rankings will slip away.
• Purchasing Links From Bad Sites - Spammy sites are simply sites you want to steer clear of. There’s nothing, I repeat nothing good that comes out of them… except maybe learning what not to do. Buying links from them will send little red flags up in search engines, especially since most of them will be linked through identical anchor text (the words linked to your site).
• Link Farming - Also known as Spamdexing. Your site may end up in a link farm if you’re not careful, which will also damage your site. This is a group of websites all linked to one another in one big crazy web circle. However, there are websites out there you can selectively choose which ones you’re linked to and are linked to you, and those are not bad.

There are so many different methods out there for roping in readers and customers, but you have to be careful what you’re looking into or signing up for. Be sure to study everything, and if you’ve had a bunch of people managing your site, you may want to look into where your links are going and where they’re coming from. You don’t want to make one silly mistake and end up destroying all of your hard work because you get black listed from black hatting. Just remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it just might be (so do your research).

Good luck!

Do: Create a blog for your website, sharing knowledgeable information with the readers.

Do Not: Talk about personal endeavors like parties you’ve been to, or gossip viciously about people. You should also refrain from political or opinionated comments. You want people to respect you, and come to you for professional advice.

Do: Create social networking profiles on such likes as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter.

Do Not: Post inappropriate pictures of yourself or others, or talk about personal actions like drinking or being mad at someone or something. You don’t want people to search for you and find ridiculous and degrading pictures of yourself. You may not care when you first put up the pictures, but you will when someone finds them.

Do: Comment constructively on other people’s blogs to help reinforce backlinks and get people interested in visiting your site.

Do Not: Spam blogs relentlessly with material that may or may not pertain to your site. Links will be created, but this will ultimately result in your site being blacklisted as spammy. Developing good and honest backlinks is the only way to go.

Do: Add images and pictures to your website to help enhance the appearance and appeal of your website.

Do Not: Include pictures that have nothing to do with the material of your website. Pictures of your cats and dogs or baby on a website for ecommerce will not entertain people, but rather confuse them as to whether the site is legitimate or not.

Do: Consider and even use Flash animation on your website to promote interactivity and intrigue amongst the visitors.

Do Not: Put huge Flash animations on your website that distracts from the real content, or make your whole site out of Flash animation. Search engines cannot crawl these sites very well and the sites often take far too long to load for people on slower internet connections. Flash is meant to enhance your website, not bog it down.

Do: Be sure to supply at least two ways (links) to get to one place, so people can more easily find it.

Do Not: Put so many links that people get frustrated because they think they are maybe going to a different page, but keep getting shoved onto the page they’ve already seen. You also want to make sure all of these links are consistent through the site. If the text and image are linked on one page, do it for all of them. People like big buttons, and if they suddenly notice you can click the image to get to the same place, they are going to go for the big obvious image and not the little text one. This does not mean you should exclude text links, this only means it’s important to supply options to the visitor.

It’s very important to as much research on a subject as you cane before you get started. You will have a much better idea of what you should be doing and what you should not be doing if you read up what you’re planning. Think of it like bungee jumping – you need to know all of the do’s and don’ts of bungee jumping or may not make it through the end. Though not life threatening, it’s the same for SEO. If you don’t pay attention to the do’s and don’ts, you’re simply not going to make it.

People get sucked into Twitter. This monster of a micro-blogging system allows you to put down a small piece of information, publish it, and allow the world to formulate their opinions on what you wrote (or just your friends as you can make your account ‘private’). It sucks people in quickly because it’s easy and fast to read. You can learn a lot from just a few lines of text. When people are so easily consumed by what they are reading, they are very likely to return. Think of it like a source of entertainment, or like a drug. You can create an RSS feed through Twitter so people can easily keep up-to-date on what you’re doing with your website. You can even link it into your cell phone so you can be anywhere and read tweets (a Twitter entry), or send tweets.

So why is this a good tool to use? Twitter has really caught on, and with millions of people to connect to, it’s a fantastic social network to be a part of. You can spread the word very quickly through Twitter, and to tons of people at that – what a great marketing tool! How easy it is for people to learn about you and what you have to offer.

Even if you’ve just become aware of this phenomena and are still really not interested in it, take it into some deep consideration. It’s almost a bad idea to not use Twitter anymore, if you’re making a strong attempt at networking with lots of people.

Of course to each his own, but my recommendation would be to at least give Twitter a shot. If you’re not so jazzed about writing out short blogs every day, then just create an RSS feed for your website and run it through Twitter, so it runs with minimal effort on your part.

Good luck!

Just about everyone uses images on their website, but that doesn’t mean everyone is doing it right. Images make your website look nice (when used properly), and really liven up a space away from blocky colors and text.

In general, people really like pictures and graphics on their websites. Improving the image’s quality for the web makes it even better for everyone. If you’re using the right type of image, file type, and compression, you can really optimize it for web use, making your images ten times better. No matter how pretty the image is, people will only wait so long for it to load. Knowing some information about image types will really come in handy for you, I promise.

So, here we go! Types of files with pros and cons for each:

• .JPG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) - This here is your most popular file type. Alternate forms are .JPEG and .JPE. In conversation, we say “jay-peg”. When choosing your file type during the saving process, .JPG files are really the default. You can generally get away with using this format for any basic image. Ultimately, however, you want to use this for photos and images with a lot of detail. This format tends to smooth out some of the colors a bit, sometimes making blocks of solid color bleed together ever so slightly. .JPG format is much better at compressing lots of colors than something like a .GIF format does.

• .GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) - Sometimes pronounced “gif” or “jif”, this guy is nicely universal in a different way than .JPG. Where .JPG is a basic default, you’ll more likely be selecting .GIF for more specific uses. .GIF files can be transparent, completely opaque, and/or animated. This is the format that most old animated graphics used to be in, where now they are in usually in flash animations. Most animations are flash now because it is a much smoother animation, and a much smaller file size. .GIF produces decently small file sizes, but not always for animations. .GIF cannot successfully compress photos like .JPG can. When saving a photo image, a lot of the time it will look pixilated and choppy. You’re going to want this format for images with chunks of color, like some cartoon characters or menu bars. Subtle transitions in colors are for .JPG, blocks of color are more for .GIF. If you decide to use .GIF for some transparent images, keep in mind it’s going to look rough around the edges if you’re not careful, so you’ll have to play with it some.
• .PNG (Portable Network Graphics) - People usually just say the letters of this format, “P N G”. .PNG files are interesting because they produce a larger file, but are universal, almost like a .JPG/.GIF hybrid. You can’t animate with this one, but you can save photos and transparent images with it. The image is usually pretty crisp quality, but you sacrifice server speed when you use it. Also, certain versions of browsers like Internet Explorer don’t recognize transparency from a .PNG file. I don’t know why this is, but IE tends to be buggy with a lot more than just images.
• .TIFF - “Tif” format is a really bad format to use. If saved properly it has fine representation online, but can be larger in file size. There’s also a big drawback to this format because so many users have difficulty viewing .TIFF files. You don’t want to use a file format that only some people can see, you want everyone to be able to view it.
• .BMP - “Bitmap” file format should honestly never be used on the web. It is too large in file size. It slows websites down, and if you were to use a bitmap image on your site, you could really only use one of them on a page, so people could still view your page in a decent amount of time. You don’t want to lose people because your images slow your website down. You want images to benefit a site, not bog it down. However, bitmap files are actually pretty clear images. You cannot compress them, they’re nearly in a raw state, and did I mention big?

There are other file types out there, like: .PSD (Photoshop Document) and .AI (Adobe Illustrator File), but these files are extremely large (sometimes megabytes large) and unable to view on a webpage. These are your source files. No one will see these files except you and/or the designer. It is from these files that you create the file types listed above.

In Photoshop and Illustrator, there are “Save for web” options (under File in the menu) for compressing the images. You can change a lot of their settings, and you can view different variations of the images. There’s a 1-up, 2-up and 4-up, and we’re not talking about Mario Brothers. In these, you can see previews of the same image with different quality degradations to see what it looks like, and lists the file size. You then click on the image you like the best, and click save and you’re on your way. File size requirements really depend on the dimensions of your image. If it is a larger image, you’re honestly going to want to keep it under 80kb. Even this is really too large. If you have a small thumbnail someone is clicking on to see a larger version of the image, they know it’s going to take a little more time to load, so it’s acceptable to allow the larger image go over 100kb, where the smaller one might be 15kb. You’re going to have to use your best judgment on how many images there are on a page and at what size they are. Keep in mind that the more images you have on one page, the smaller you want each file size to be.

I hope that all of this has been helpful to you. It’s always been nice to me to find bits of information to help me along in my endeavors, and hope that this is beneficial to you just the same. Remember, optimizing shouldn’t stop with SEO.

If you are offering information to people, make it for free. Do not make the main source of information on your website something you have to pay for. People aren’t going to like it, especially if they know they can go elsewhere.

There are exceptions to this rule of course. There are some topics and questions that are so unique and eclectic that they are hard to come by. If you have a very specified niche that is difficult to find, you can only then really consider whether or not you’re going to charge people for the information. You have to do your research though, to know whether or not you could get away with charging. If you do charge, then don’t make everything only accessible through payment. Offer free information as well!

Free information is going to keep people around. If you supply enough content for people to taste of, you’ve really roped them in and you’re going to be more likely to get them coming back for more (and/or even making that purchase). Sell, sell, sell, by giving it away for free.

What do we give away for free and what do we charge for? Write articles on what you know. Quality, informative content that’s going to leave people wanting to learn more. I’m not saying you should write a partial article and then say something like, “If you want to read more, it’s only $5.99.” Let them have the whole thing for free! Don’t keep it from them. Be picky though, because if you’re going to be charging people for certain bits of information, you need to know which pieces to hand out, and which ones to keep quiet.

Free information/content is really beneficial when it comes to marketing yourself. You’re getting the word out about your products, bringing people in, getting referrals from other people for their friends, family and colleagues. How often have you told someone where you got something that they liked? “I got this at So-And-So market,” “I was reading an article on Someone’s Blog” or “Have you checked out ThisWebsite?” Word of mouth is an amazing marketing strategy. No, you shouldn’t rely entirely on it, but never underestimate it! Take advantage of the classic methods of spreading the word. Have you heard? The bird is the word!

If you’ve done this all right, then your customers are going to be linking your site to theirs as well. Spread the word long enough, and you’ll have a nice steady flow of traffic into your site, making money, and popping up in search results like nobody’s business.

Good luck with your content!

• What is different about the content of your site? If you have something to offer your customers that other people do not, then that is likely what you’ll focus on. Why would someone come to you if you offer the exact same thing as everyone else? Why is it better if someone goes through you? Try creating a featured section so people are drawn to what you have to offer.
• Is it easy to find everything on your site? There should be a search box somewhere, and everything should be easy to locate. If you have too many links and constantly move them around your site, not staying consistent throughout, you’re going to lose people. Customers are going to get frustrated with the navigation and leave. Keep navigation in the same location(s) on every page, and label them clearly.
• Is your site aesthetically pleasing? This is more of a design question. If your site is hideous, it may not get as many returning customers. If your content is good, people will come back, but let’s face it, people like pretty shiny things. Polish up the site. Take extra junk out that doesn’t need to be there, and make sure your colors work well together. Do you like the way your site looks? If you were your own customer, would you go back to it?
• Does it take a long time for your site to load? By long time, I mean more than a minute or two. People expect things to happen fast, even if they’re on dial-up. People on dial-up (yes, they still exist) will have more patience for websites, but if you are on a high speed connection, there is no excuse for your website taking its sweet time. Make sure your file sizes are smaller so they don’t take too long to load. Also, if you have a Wordpress page, make sure you don’t have too many plug-ins. Plug-ins will slow your site down because they will load first, and if there’s anything preventing them from loading quickly, it slows the rest of your content down. Again, people will get frustrated and leave if your site simply takes too long.
• Of course your SEO is of utmost importance when it comes to bringing people into your site that don’t know about it. This includes your social networking sites for your website. If you have clean, refined SEO, search engines will be able to crawl your site easily. The networking sites help to create backlinks, and connections with other people to encourage traffic through your website. RSS feeds are a good way to get more people clicking.

When you’re browsing through someone else’s website, take special note of all of these things. Check out the design, navigation, content, load time, and even peak at their style sheet to see what they’ve done with their SEO. What works well for the site? What does not? What needs improvement? Would you/are you going to visit again? When you asses someone else’s website, it’s easier to be critical. If you’re having difficulty deciding whether your website is running efficiently, have a friend look at it and be completely honest with you. If they get confused, chances are the rest of the people are as well.

Good luck to you!

This is a good practice to go through before you start applying to places, and conducting interviews with possible employers. Your potential employer is very likely going to Google you (I know I was), and you want a clean slate.

What were you up to in high school when you were browsing the internet and opening accounts? If you think there’s anything that could be questionable, you need to take care of it now. You want to build credibility and professionalism when it comes to being searched for, not have something awful sneak up on you. Don’t allow your adolescence to get in the way of a cushy job.

When you start looking at your results, ask yourself a couple questions:

What is the first result? Is that me?
If it’s not you, you may not have anything to worry about, unless it’s maybe some criminal record for someone. If this is the case, you want to start networking yourself in a positive light, more so than you may have already done, so the real you outranks the imposter!

What are the other results? If I were looking to employ me, would I like what I am seeing?
Depending on what you’re applying for, you probably want to make sure your results come up with something favorable for your employment. For instance, when I applied for my Graphic Design job, the top links in my search were going to my portfolio, and then some old sites with artwork that I have made. This is actually a good thing. Something that may not be well conveyed in a n interview, may be when you are Googled. Being Googled gave more information on what I could do artistically (yes, I know about SEO too).

A Google search of your name should be an extension of your character and experience. Any search for your name should really be an extension of you. Why do people search? To find out more information on their search subject. So, when someone types your name into a search box, they want to find out more about you. Flattering? Possibly. Beneficial? You should start looking at it now to see if it actually is.

Try some other search engines too. Google may be the most widely used, but that’s not to say you shouldn’t give it a shot in Yahoo and MSN too. The results will be different.