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A couple questions I get asked all the time:

Why doesn’t my site show in Google?

How do I get my site a higher ranking on Google.

Well the real trick behind this is SEO (Search engine optimization). SEO has come to mean just about anything and everything that is geared towards making your site more search engine friendly, or increasing your ranking.

Here are a few tips for increasing your ranking:

1. Provide quality content. Ask your self, “Am  one of the 10 best sites in my indestery?” If you answer no, then improve your site.
2. Don’t use JavaScript drop downs, images, or image maps for navigation.
3. Make sure that your content focuses on your keywords.
4. Make sure that your back links come from legitimate sites that are related to you somehow. Random back links will decrees your ranking.
5. Page rank is important but not that important. Don’t focus too much on it.
6. The titles of your page should have a unique keyword in the title. The company name should come at the end if at all.
7. Keep your site up to date. Switch out content on a regular basis. A blog is good for this.
8. Make sure your back links link to your key words, not “click here”
9. Focus on search phrases over terms. People will look for terms before they look for single words.
10. Design your site with SEO in mind. A flashy site is often chosen over one that is SEO friendly. Search engines can not navigate things that aren’t text.
11. Use your keywords and phrases in in the meta tags (like img alt, a title) correctly. Using them incorrectly will decrees your ranking.
12. Check canonicalization issues (i.e. www.site.com and site.com point to the same place.)
13. When you link to your home page just link to / not /index.html
14. Don’t use frames or flash to deliver content. Use Ajax sparingly.
15. For new sites get a link from another established site.
16. Try to change content 3 times a week. Blogging is a great way to do it.
17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
18. Use shorter copy. Get your point across but make sure you don’t repeat your self a lot. Search engines give higher rankings to pages with natural language on them, and lower rankings to pages that are chuck full of keywords.
19. Surround links with descriptive text. Links in the middle of know where are harder for search engines to figure out.
20. If your on a shared server make sure your not sharing with a spammer. (For example, my server is clean and I limit it to my customers so it stays clean)
21. When you register a domain, make sure you leave all the ownership info in the open. Blocking that info could hurt your page rankings.
22. Make sure your site is easy to use. This will help with link building.
23. Create some out bound links. These links will encourage others to link to you.
24. Make sure you serve quality content. Real information.
25. Email messages should be optimized as well. Gmail for instance scans and can add page ranking based on that.
26. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.
27. Links form .edu sites will give a nice ranking boost.
28. Make sure your  “call to action” is clear. I.E. Buy my product today.
29. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.
30. Respond to comments on your blog. Responding shows that you care about your business and will increase your ranking.
31. If you publish RSS feeds make sure they are optimized as well.
32. Use captions with your images, like newspapers have captions. Make sure they are keyword rich.
33. Make sure the text surrounding your images are relevant. Ranking can be adjusted for images that are not relevant to the surrounding text.
34. XML Site map is a bit over rated. If a search engine naturally finds your page you will get higher ranking.
35. Links form a high ranked sites will grant you a higher page rank.
36. Use absolute links. i.e. “/page.html” instead of “../../../page.html”
37. Surround videos with keyword rich text. search engines use the surrounding text to decide if the video is relevant.
38. In images that you want found use the keyword “image” or ‘picture”.
39. Add some social content to your site, like comments, feed back, or video posts.
40. Make sure that the server responds with a 200 OK or a 301 Moved status. Those are the best for keeping Google happy.

It’s important to note that these changes make your site search engine friendly, not marketing friendly, people friendly, or pretty. It’s up to you to decide how to maintain the balance between SEO and your other goals.

Recently a colleague of mine contacted me, saying that an associate of  his (yep friend of a friend) was trying to learn Linux, what was the best way to go about it? Because I get asked this question so often, I decided it needed an entry on my site.

So why is the article so far about Linux when the title says open source. Well, because it’s rather pointless to talk about one without the other. The open source community is different then the closed source community., and moving from Windows or Mac to Linux can be interesting if you don’t keep that in mind.

I know Linux pretty well from both the server and desktop perspective. All non-.Net code that I produce runs on Linux servers. From the desktop perspective, I only use Linux. When needed I use VirtualBox to get into a windows environment to look at web pages or develop .Net code, but other then that I’m 100% Linux. I have taught several people to use Linux and regularly provide support for clients, friends, and colleagues. Here is what I recommend for anyone trying to learn Linux.

What is open source?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into the fine points here. There are several articles on the net already about the differences and different flavors of open source technology. Basically open source software is software that you can freely download the source code for and make modifications to. It’s not perfect for everything but 98% of the time the software produced in this manor is superior to similar software in the closed source community (that was an opinion by the way). Most of the software that most of my clients build their sites on is open source. Rails, Java, Apache, PHP, Linux, and MySQL are all open source in one form or another.

Which distro?

Well I was asked Ubuntu v.s. Fedora. I chose to recommend Ubuntu. (Again opinion here) I find Ubuntu easier to maintain and use. Any Debian based system should be just about as easy, but Ubuntu has a huge community and that helps out a lot.  In server land Redhat Enterprise Linux is pretty common, but I prefer Ubuntu Server most of the time as well, unless your buying support. At the end of the day it’s 100% preference. But I do find Ubuntu really easy to use. Personally I run Kubuntu, the KDE version of Ubuntu on my  boxen and Ubuntu server on most of my web servers. In some cases RedHat Enterprise Linux, but it’s rare.

Ok, so how do I learn?

The best method I can recommend is to use it. Take all your computers and put Linux on them as the primary OS. Put windows on as a virtual machine using VirtualBox. This ensures that you will spend most of your time in Linux doing your common tasks there and only do the stuff you don’t know how to do, or that you really don’t have time to learn to do in windows. (if your a graphic artist, you might want to use VirtualBox for Photoshop in the beginning). In two weeks you will know how to do 80% of  your basic computing tasks in Linux. The other 20% will be slower to learn because it will likely be something you only do once or twice ever (i.e. setting up wireless, configuring a printer).

Um, open source?

Yeah, I’m getting to that. OK so now you have a Linux box and your sending emails and browsing the web, but you still have to use windows and VirtualBox for a lot of things. Well here’s what you do. First, make a list of all the software you had to buy. Next, add to the list any software you have to go into VirtualBox to use. Now that you have a good list, take the first item on the list and find an open source alternative. For instance if you  bought office, try OpenOffice. Install OpenOffice in Linux, and start using it. Use it for two weeks so you can get a feel for it and decide if you like it. Try this with a new piece of software every week. You shouldn’t be using more then two new pieces of software from your list at any one time. If it takes you more then two weeks to learn a piece of software then don’t start on a new one. Try to keep learning two at a time. It will keep you from becoming flustered at learning new things because you will have a week of experience on the oldest app and be in a “oh that’s cool” state  with that app. Keep in mind that the first open source alternative you try might not work for you. If your trying to replace Outlook, and try Kontact but don’t like it, try Evolution.  After a short time you will be using open source software for almost everything you do.

Keep in mind that not everything will have a working open source counterpart. Many graphic artists are trained in Photoshop and won’t find Gimp to be a suitable replacement. I still use Visual Studio 2000/5/8., and many people are so used to Quicken/Quickbooks that they won’t like moving to GnuCash. Just keep a list of the apps that there are no acceptable open source alternatives for. Look around on the web every once-in-a-while and see if someone has created one yet.

I also recommend getting involved in the community. Take some time and browse the help forums and help others out where you can. Teaching is by far the best way to learn.

I need help!

Ok, first, breath. You made a big leap. There’s (usually) no tech support number to call, if there is one there probably just going to tell you they don’t know what Linux is, or that they don’t support opening their documents in OpenOffice. That’s the bad news. The good news. Well there is a whole Internet full of information out there just waiting for you to use it.  Try Google Linux and the Ubuntu Forums to get you started. There’s help channels on irc.freenode.net. If you want commercial support, check the website of the application your using. Most offer commercial support via email or phone.

Is there a book or something?

Yep, there are several “O’Reilly books” available on Linux and open source software. Several other publishers too. Personally I don’t like them because they don’t stay current (it can be current when you buy it but 6 months later it could be out dated). But check out amazon.com and give it a try if your more comfortable.

If you have been visiting this site for a while you know that the layout has changed. I have redone the site to be more friendly and accommodating to different resolutions. In addition I changed around some of the menu structures and color schemes. I also took the time to make the project tracker resemble the main site a little more. Because of the different functions of both sites they will never match 100%, but now you get the sense that the sites are related.

At the same time I was redoing the site, I decided to get the logo professionally done. If you have been here in the last few days you know that the logo has been changing around a lot.  The final version is now up.

When looking for someone to do the logo for me, I had a few options. I have a designer on staff that could do it, I had offers from a few others I know that wanted a chance, but I decided to go with finding a pro on guru. I had never used guru before as an employer and this provided me an excellent opportunity to get some first hand knowledge from the customers point of view.

First, registering the project was pretty simple. I just stated what I wanted then filled out a few of the billing details. It took a while for my project to be reviewed and accepted (a process that ensures only serious projects make it to the pros to bid on), but once that happened, I had selected a pro and the project was moving forward in less the 24 hours.

Next, selecting a pro was pretty interesting. I had gotten 18 or so responses in the short time that I had the project open for bidding.  15 of the 18 were just copy and paste responses, so I ignored them. The other 3 were at least modified by hand a bit before they were submitted. Of the three I chose the one that had the profile and examples most like what was looking for.

Communication was pretty much the same as when I am the guru. Email or web form, both worked pretty well, however, the images would corrupt when I got them in the email (from guru), and I would have to download them from the website (bug on guru or my mail server). This was interesting considering I rarely send code via the web form and either give it out via the project tracker, svn, email, or just install it on my customers servers.

Completion of the project was pretty straight forward as well. The images were delivered in the format I requested in the project. I was asked to pay the SafePay Invoice and give feed back. And the project was done. I was able to get my new logo without spending much of my time on the project.

My over all experience was very positive and it has taught me a few things about offering my services on guru.

For my customers let me give you a few tips, as I see them at least.

• Watch for form letters. Make sure the bid has some proof that they actually did read your project. 15 of 18 of the bids on my project were just copy and pastes. Even if the pro just restates your request, that means they read it and know the requirements.
• Location is important. Of the 18 bids few were in the US. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I don’t have very good luck outsourcing overseas. Timing is odd and the conversations don’t work out very well.
• Cost was surprising. The selected bid was not the cheapest but the price did play a factor. I got bids ranging from $15 to $750. Now that’s a huge range for a simple logo. Both the high end and the low end bids told me me that they really didn’t read my requirements.
• Previous experience, to my surprise was not that great a factor. I did require something to look at (their portfolio) and their feedback on guru was important in making  me feel comfortable with my choice, but I didn’t sort by feedback, or their “quality score”. I did however look at the amount of money each pro had made using guru. Oddly enough, the vendors with really high numbers scared me off a little bit. I wanted more of a personal touch.

When all was said and done, I selected my pro based on a personal response, location within the U.S., an average cost, and their portfolio. I was very happy with my selection and, therefore, urge my potential customers to do the same.

In the the day of wide screen football, HDTV, 16:9, 1080i and 720p, why hasn’t the web lived up to it’s end of the bargain? Many, many, many websites still have a static width of 800 pixels or so. That means, to those of us with wide screens or larger resolutions, that there is a narrow, vertical strip of content and most of the web page is blank. Even those of us with smaller screens and square monitors get the margins and wasted space on the left and right.

Take a look a Yahoo and then have a look at how I see it.

Example of wasted space

See those HUGE margins. There are 690 pixels of margin and about 945 of content. Think of the widgets or data that could be shown in that 690 pixels of empty space.

Yahoo isn’t the only one. In fact most websites have gone this route. CNN, ESPN, MSNBC are all examples of popular sites that waste space in this manor.

So what causes this problem? Well to be honest, I don’t really know. But here are a few observations that I have made.

• It’s so popular that people have come to expect it. My clients ask for it from time to time, stating that its what users expect to see.
• Old or out dated sites. A lot of websites are years old and date back to before there were wide screens. This will take several years to get caught up.
• Less with more. Some sites use it as a tool to make their site “look” like it has more content. Unfortunately it’s kind of like using double spacing or a bigger font. It might scroll more, but there’s not actually any more content.
• Web Designers like it because it’s easy. Now I’m not talking about real web designers, I’m talking about graphic artists that have crossed over into the web world. The web is not Photoshop, but a lot of designers like to make it as close to it as possible.

So whats the fix? Well basically,  time. Several big sites have started using dynamic formats that expand out to fill your whole screen. More and more people are getting annoyed by the wasted screen space. In time, this combination will force web site owners to revisit their layouts and pick a more wide screen friendly arrangement. Other then that there’s not much to do. I recommend that everyone request their developer or designer use a wide screen friendly layout. Web pages should expand or contract to fit the current users monitor. After all, you have to support 800×600, 1680×1050, everything between and beyond.

Some examples of sites that have it right.

• Google
• Gmail
• Blackberry Fourms
• W3C Validator Service

My personal step: To help advance the web as a whole, I have redone my site to get rid of the static width. That was just a free template any way. I went ahead and put in the work to get my site into a dynamic format. It’s still a work in progress (for example the logo is being re-done now.), but I like the overall idea.