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I may have written about this or mentioned it: folk finding you via search engines.  How do search engines decide which websites to place higher in their listings than others? 

That’s a well kept secret that lots of folk get paid lots to try to second guess. It’s the field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This much is known: search engines value more the sites they think are more important.  So let’s start working from there.

What’s their idea of important? Well here are some things they likely consider in no particular order:
  * number of visitors
  * length of time visitors stay on a site
  * number of other sites that link to the site
  * how fresh the content is
  * how helpful the content is
  * how much helpful content there is
  * how clearly organized the site is – how easy it is to find what the visitor needs to find on the site
  * does the site provide what it says it’s going to provide?
  * how unique is it for its sector or geography or?

What other things would make your site important in the search engine’s eyes?

What else would make it important to your visitors?

Found on Metafilter (favorites of past 30 days) this, a link to the mother collection of all cheat cheats: “All Cheat Sheets on One Page Cheat sheets for web designers, programmers, and people who just like cheat sheets” www.cheat-sheets.org Enjoy.

By the way, Metafilter is a good site to ask questions of most any sort and get reasonable, civil answers. Fun to explore, too.  You can sort by most recent and by most popular over the past 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days and All Time.

Here’s most popular of all time:

Never had an Indian mom? You poor, deprived wretch! Meet Manjula.
She’ll be happy to teach you to make Naan, Rotis, Pani Puri, Vegetable Pakoras, Paneer, Raita, Navattran Korma, Palak Paneer, Pulav, Malai Kofta, Aloo Gobi, Chana Masala, Hari Chutney, Ras Malai, Gajar ka Halwa and much more! I can… almost… smell her kitchen. *sigh*
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 10:18 PM Dec 7 2008 – 50 comments [436 favorites]

Dave Almos suggested I set up the LinkedIn account.  Spent most of yesterday researching and doing just that. It’s been a kick.  I suggest getting into that as a way to getting your mind back into computers and job stuff if you need to. It’s helped me focus. I had no idea the connections I have – then there’s groups within LinkedIn to join or start.
Here’s a couple of links to blogs that helped me get set up:

First of several articles by this author that helped me get oriented:
http://www.divinecaroline.com/22279/91574-getting-most-professional-presence-linkedin

Short version of above link: http://3zeu.sl.pt

A Good overview to check once it’s set up:
http://mashable.com/2009/07/27/linkedin-personal-brand/

Good details for setting up:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/ten_ways_to_use.html

before profile makeover:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/linkedin_profil.html

after:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/guykawasaki

Oh, and the link to my profile:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/scottswebshop

Please suggest how I might improve it. Is there too much detail?  Share your LinkedIn experiences.

A teacher took me to a class on using Camtasia Studio, a new to me screen recorder tool. Maybe it was the instructor, but it is dead simple to use. The teachers use it to develop online lessons  or  tutorials  videoed directly from their desktops.

I have been working with video for first time recently when SOSL asked me to to take their DVD of last year’s walk and upload bits of it to the website for this year’s walk. I found free software (FormatFactory) to first convert it to MP4 then another freebie (Avidemux 2.5 to edit it.

All worked well but the audio came out distorted.

Discovered I could use Camstasia for this. Converted to AVI then edited. Camstasia has an export setting for You Tube where I exported it. Piece a cake.

Camstasia is not cheap ($299, $179 with education discount – I’m using the 30 day free trial) so will look at Windows Media Encorder which is free.

BTW, I’m using Windows Live Writer for the first time to post this. Assuming it posts ok, this is a keeper. Easy to write, edit, insert hyperlinks.

Writes Matt Cutts in his blog. Keywords are still important in the description meta tag as those will show up in the search results, though apparently not used for rankings. A video on Matt’s blog explains further as does an entry in the Google Webmaster Central Blog. The is more clarification in the Q&Q and comments that follow there. One says leave the keyword meta tag out to save space and increase speed; another says leave it in for insurance and possibility other engines use it. Other thoughts?

I have been researching a plan of action for getting a client’s site found via Google. Lot’s of web marketing stuff out there on things like how to use keywords. What’s Web 2.0 for reams?

Watched a video yesterday by Matt Cutts who is head of Google’s Webspam team. He does a lot of videos on common sense ways to handle SEO.

Refreshingly clear and simple.

His main thesis on getting noticed by Google:  higher quality content =>higher number of sites linking to you and how important those sites are (“Pagerank = # of sites linking to you and how important those sites are”).

His counsel: write about what you’re passionate about. Write often, then you will write well, then you will have lots of high quality content, folk will turn to you…

Here’s link to Matt Cutt’s Blog. It’s on the video “White Hat SEO Tips For Bloggers”‘ from late August.

I’m continuing to learn as much piece meal or trial & error as in an organized read the manual manner.

After fiddling around with the last theme until I liked it I read an article Chris Price at A3Webtech wrote, SEO for CMS.  He said, “The simplest way to check a basic level of quality, as ever, is to go to the W3C online validator at http://validator.w3.org and check the website’s index page.”

So I checked. Lots of errors. Lots.

I tried out the themes I had uploaded at various times: same or similar results. Went to Cutline. No errors!  Well, after all the theme shifting I did pick up a couple of html errors, mostly in the footer that weren’t there – but they’re not design errors. I also discovered some of the plugins I was using were responsible. They were there regardless of theme.

I hear arguments pro and con about the importance of validating.  Such as, “The site of the big companies who sit on the validator boards don’t validate and they work well.”  So I keep this in mind so a to not become rigid on this. I like seeing validation as an indicator of quality though. What are your thoughts on validation?

Oh,  comments on this theme?

Thanks to Gizmo’s Freeware site, a real gem.  The Web Book is comprehensive, readable 330 page book that can be downloaded from the author’s site. Free for personal use, very inexpensive for commercial.

Starts from very basic information about the web and web hosting then covers HTML, CSS, PHP, MYSQL, CMS, SEO, the whole shooting match.

Suggestion: go to the preview, widen the left panel, and click on topics that interest you.

I’ve added a link to the web book on my Website Resources & Tools page.

This post is so Technorati can verify that this blog is real and I own it. Technorati is an internet search engine for searching blogs. Registering Scott’s Web Shop Blog with them will make it more visible on the web. Here’s the code: nvqcryhswk

Here’s link to Wikipedia article on Technorati:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati and, of course, link to Technorati:http://technorati.com. A place to learn a ton about blogs.

BTW, any time I run into a new tech term or want to understand a little more about something I run to Wikipedia.

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