Got ranking woes? There are no shortcuts to building your page rank. You can advertise but doing so won’t help a lot if your site isn’t search engine friendly. Get ranking the right way. Here’s a brief overview of steps you can take right now that will help solve your problems.

Content Building

Provide Interesting Content

Why should I link to you if your site doesn’t have anything for me? Give me some reason to come back to your site and I may post a link to it. If all you offer is self-promotion I may visit once. If you can answer real questions about your product or services, if you can give me useful information about something related to your field that isn’t just marketing speak, then you will be worth linking to.

Add More Content

Do you sell blue widgets and red widgets? Rather than have a color selector, why not create two different product pages (linked to each other, of course). Use customized titles and text for each. For example, you could use the following page titles:

• Blue Widget - Make Your Vacuum Work Better.
• Red Widget - Supercharge Your Hoover

Doing so will help you rank better for both specific terms, rather than a single, more general term. Specific terms tend to convert to sales better than more general terms.

Provide New Content

If visited your site a couple of months ago and remember it you’ve done a good initial job. If the content hasn’t changed or been added to then you are now less interesting. Visitors see you that way. Search engines rank you that way. If you want a good search engine ranking keep your site current.

Use Better Page Titles

Got a term you’re trying to rank for? Make sure it’s in your page title. In most keyword spaces, this step alone will get noticeably improve your ranking. For competitive terms, you’ll need to do more. If your page title is generated from a content management system or shopping cart that fills your page titles with lots of strange symbols. Change systems. Titles should make sense to people. If they do, search engines will have no problem with them.

Structure Your Content

Notice how this article uses headings to define page sections? Search engines love that style of writing. The more you properly use heading tags, especially if you include keywords in them, the better. These are real heading tags, h1, h2, h3, etc. and not just bold or styled text. Think outline structure.

Link Building Strategies

If nobody links to you Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. will not give you a good ranking. It’s the sad but simple truth. The fastest way to get added to the index is to get links from already established websites that are related to your industry but aren’t direct competitors. Here are some low cost methods of building links. They all involve time and writing but have the advantage of being free.

Post Blog Comments

My favorite way to build inbound links is to comment intelligently on related blog posts. Most blog comment forms allow you to enter a URL. Enter yours, and then say something witty or insightful about the blog post. Don’t re-post your link, or include any spammy promotional messages.

Give yourself plenty of time, and try to post at least ten comments per week. Some blogs use the nofollow attribute, so some comments won’t be counted — but if you post something intelligent, the blogger might just blog about you in their next post. Participate in Message Boards

Participate in Forums

Find several forums that are related to your business or organization. Most message forums allow you to include links in your signature that appears below every post. As with blog comments, don’t post promotional messages. Just participate in the community and be a positive and helpful voice. I’ve not only built my search engine rankings that way, I’ve gotten clients who see me as an expert.

Write Articles

Many websites are actively looking for people to contribute high quality content. You probably won’t get paid but you will be able to include your site address in your byline. Publish enough and you will start to be recognized as an expert in your field and people will come to your site to learn from you. If they like what they see they will often link to it.

Do Your Keyword Homework

An entire industry has arisen around keyword research. Some of the people in it will actually be worth the high rates they charge. Many won’t. Keyword research is not rocket science. Read some articles. Pick up a book. Visit Wordtracker. Read sites like Search Engine Guide, seomoz, High Rankings Advisor, and Traffick.

You’re also more likely to rank in the critical top three positions if you target more specific terms. According to a recent eyetracking study from Eyetools, visibility declines rapidly beyond beyond the top three listings. The number 10 spot, for instance, is only seen 20% of the time.

In other words, if your keyword is searched 100 times, and you’re in position 10 in the SERP, your link is only seen 20 times.

Use Cleaner Code

Load time influences how search engines crawl your site. Bloated pages filled with presentational tags and nested tables hurt you. Inline JavaScript and CSS can hurt you. Content that can only be viewed via JavaScript will hurt you.

• HTML tables that aren’t specifically for tabular data, should be removed in favor of lighter-weight CSS layout.
• CSS should be stored in a separate file and linked with the link element.
• JavaScript should be Unobtrusive JavaScript, which will leave your content accessible and searchable under all conditions, and should be stored in a separate file and linked with the script element.

Make Sure That All Content is Accessible

If you have images, the alt tag is a great place to insert keyword rich descriptions of your images. If you use JavaScript, make sure that all your content is still accessible, which also means searchable.

Fix Common Mistakes

Be sure you’re not making any of the most common SEO mistakes. In particular, make sure you have text navigation (you can overlay graphics for style-aware browsers), and that your critical keyword-loaded content isn’t buried in flash objects that search engines might struggle to digest. Make sure that your code validates. Broken code might display fine but make stop the search engine from fully indexing your pages.

Flash

Use Flash only to provide real value to your visitors. There are good reasons to use Flash, but most of the Flash I see is not necessary, and hurts both rankings and usability. If you do need Flash make sure that your designer knows how to incorporate accessibility into your movies or at least provide alternative content that search engines can read.

Don’t

• Use automated site submit services. This can actually get your site red flagged, and delay your rankings.
• Add your site to link farms. Such links can also hurt you.
• Spam — people, blogs, forums, or search engines.

I’ve recently come across a new program that makes reading PDFs into a better experience. Oh, by the way, it’s free, too.

Viewing PDF files is easy on a modern Mac. By default you just double click on the file and Preview will open it up. There is no need to use anything else, though some people who got in the habit of using Adobe Reader (Adobe Acrobat Reader in older incarnations) will download that from the Adobe website. You might prefer the way it looks but Adobe Reader is slower in opening and viewing files than Preview.

There are some reasons to have a copy of Reader, It is better suited to filling our PDF forms and works in conferencing situations that use Adobe Acrobat Connect. I have maybe filled out two PDF forms in the last three years. Reader makes accessing documents that incorporate accessibility features for the vision impaired possible in a way that other PDF viewers don’t, as well as offering some security features you won’t find elsewhere. If you have any of these special needs, Adobe Reader is the best choice. For everyday use I never open my copy.

There are other PDF viewer options. One I particularly like is Skim . What makes the Skim PDF reader more useful than other options? I’m glad you asked. The list of features it offers is pretty long but there are a few that I particularly like.

Bookmarks.

As more and more documentation is created in PDF format we often end up dealing with long manuals, even e-books. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to save your place and come back to it later? Not a problem with Skim. Set a bookmark, title it so you know what your are bookmarking when you come back to it.

Notes

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to add notes to a page you are reading? As PDFs are read only documents, that isn’t easy. Well, yes it is with Skim. Click on a page you want to annotate and a yellow box pops up. Start typing and you have a note. Skim lists notes in a sidebar with page location.

Highlighting - Circling

You don’t want to go to the trouble of making a note but you still want to call out a part of a page for later attention. Skim makes it easy to add the digital equivalent of a yellow marker to any selected text. Want to call attention to a graphic on a page? Adding a circle (or box) around it is just as easy. Strikethroughs, lines and underlines are all there too. With Adobe Reader you can add notes or markup if the original author sets the document up that way, in other words, sometimes.

Remembering Passwords

E-books and special documents sometimes come password protected. Remembering passwords and manually typing them in each time I open a PDF is annoying. With Skim that isn’t necessary. It connects with Keychain to store passwords. Enter them in once, check the remember in Keychain box and forget about them.

Full Screen View

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to remove distractions while reading. Skim has a full screen view feature that hides everything but the page you are reading. Nice.

Magnifying Glass

Another handy feature Skim offers is the Magnifying Glass Tool. Click on it in the Tool Bar then click on a section of the page and it instantly magnifies. Move the tool around and the section you are magnifying moves too.

Other Features

Skim is feature rich and has a number of other features that set it apart from simple PDF readers like Preview and Reader. Some of them like AppleScript and LaTeX support are only for the technical user, but presentations, a reading bar and the ability to export notes are useful for the rest of us.

Considerations

Skim is a bit slow compared to Preview but does display as quickly as Adobe Reader on my iBook. Both are fast on my new Intel iMac, but that has 4GB of RAM installed. Documentation is pretty good and available through the help menu but it isn’t as detailed as I’d like.

So far Skim has been stable for me and is now my default PDF reader. Give it a try. It’s free. http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/

Recommended

Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)
by Jennifer Niederst Robbins (Author), Aaron Gustafson (Technical Editor)
O’Reilly Publishing, 2007

Learning Web Design by Jennifer Niederest Robbins is billed as “A Beginners Guide to (X)HTML, Style Sheets and Web Graphics.” It lives up to its billing. It is structured as a text book, building a knowledge base chapter by chapter. For those working through the book as a tutorial, there are plenty of exercises that reinforce the skills you’ve acquired. Each chapter includes appropriate exercises and a “Test Yourself” section. Extra material is offered through the book’s accompanying website.

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I love resource lists, good ones, of course. The idea that somebody has done the research and taken the time to organize it in a usable format and shared it with the world renews my faith in the web.

Here’s a great list of web based resources that any web designer should find useful. Some are services, some free, some not. Some, like Wordpress, are applications. They all look interesting. Whether I’m better served by an application on my Mac rather than a web one is an interesting question but still, its worth checking out The Freelancer’s Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need.

I’ve been using the demo version of iWork for a bit less than a week. Actually, I should say that I’ve been using Pages semi-seriously and have taken a quick look at Numbers and Keynote. I find that I need to actually use a program in my everyday workflow to get a feel for it.

Keynote I’m totally sold on already. I have to start creating presentations for a series of classes in a couple of weeks and am looking forward to doing so in Keynote. As for Numbers, I just haven’t needed to work on a spreadsheet. I’ll need to do that also in the next week or so I’ll have a chance to kick the tires there also.

So, on to Pages. To say that I was underwhelmed by the last version would be putting it mildly. The idea of an integrated and inexpensive writing and page layout program is very attractive but Pages was sort of a bastard hybrid that did neither in an elegant say. I never used it for writing or editing, only for page layout. It was okay for that, reasonably capable and reasonably easy to use. Not the best either way but an adequate compromise. It wasn’t a everyday program but something that I pulled out occasionally. I do end up writing pretty much every day, just not with Pages.

I’m happy to say that may change. Apple must have realized that the Pages paradigm wasn’t working because they split the page layout and writing functions into separate, well I’m not quite sure what to call them; Apple uses the term modes. They could have just as easily split the program into two, one a word processor and one a page layout program. The screens and experiences are different enough to justify that decision.

The page layout mode is basically the old Pages. There are some tweaks and extra templates but changes are pretty minor. What’s new is the writing mode, and that’s what has me re-examining my bias against Pages and that’s what I’ll be describing. The short of the matter is that I like it. A lot.

Obviously anything made by Apple will look polished and Pages does. And it’s fast. I opened a website proposal that I had started in Word as my first trial document. The difference in speed was noticeable. And this was on a g5 iMac and Word v.X, not running Rosetta on an Intel machine. Pages opened quickly, ran quickly and scrolled quickly, even on a 120 page document (not the proposal). Now going back to Word is annoying. Maybe the new version of Word coming out next year, running Intel native will be faster but for now, no. I’ve ordered a new iMac and iWork, so I’m looking forward to even a bit more speed out of Pages next week.

Beyond the speed, I’m enjoying the uncluttered interface. Word allows for very fine grained toolbar customization, so my version displays only what I want it to. What I found interesting is that the default Pages toolbar is almost exactly what I had set up in Word. I guess my needs are pretty standard. But the Word toolbar now looks dated to me and a bit amateur, sort of the way that PowerPoint templates look amateur after using Keynote. But that’s probably not fair comparing a brand new program to one that came out five or six years ago.

Opening Word documents with Pages is straightforward. I’ve run 10 pretty heavily formatted Word files through Pages and had minor formatting errors on about half of them. But I have the same problem opening some of my old Word 98 files and documents sent from Windows. All in all, import and exporting Word files is straightforward. But it is importing and exporting, not simply opening and saving documents. If I had to send files back and forth a lot I might find that a bit annoyance. Whether that annoyance is greater than the experience of using a slower Word is something I’ll have to see about.

Beyond the formatting issue, Pages actually improves on Word’s experience of tracking changes. Instead of hard to read pop up change notes, Pages displays them in a side column. Word changes seem to be imported and exported accurately, so sharing a group edited document works well. I find it hard to express how much I like the side column approach. The side column is not just for change tracking. It also adds the ability to write notes attached to words or characters in a page. Notes are always visible but out of the way. You can print them or not when printing or exporting to PDF. It’s one of those touches that seems so right and obvious that I wonder why everybody doesn’t do it. Jer’s Novel Writer is the only program I’ve used that offers this touch. Words sticky type notes, modal dialog boxes and side sheets all work but don’t work nearly as well.

Not an Office Killer

Most of the standard word processor features seem to be included but if you are a Word power user you won’t feel any threat from Pages. There is no macro ability. Mail merge works beautifully from Address Book but not from any other source. If someone sends you a spreadsheet of addresses you will need to import that into address book to do a mail merge, unlike Word which can use Excel as a mail merge source. One lack I find strange is the inability to get live updates from Numbers spreadsheet that have been place into Pages. If I remember correctly, even Appleworks did that. If you create a data table in Numbers and place it in Pages, it works beautifully. If you update the date in Numbers you need to re-import the table into Pages. The updates are not transferred. Tables created in Pages have some basic number crunching ability but, while useful, that’s not the same thing.

If you are doing technical writing you will probably want to look elsewhere. Pages does basic footnotes but doesn’t seem to do endnotes. And it doesn’t integrate with Endnote. If you write academic or scientific papers you would be better served with Word or Mellel or the new Nisus Writer Pro.

Search and replace are adequate but basic. Searches and find and replace work as you’d expect. It looks like Pages uses the same find functionality built into TextEdit. You can search by whole or partial word and make the search case sensitive or not. Niceties like regex search included in Mellel or Nissus Writer, along with similarity search, saved searches and batch searches seem to be missing.

Pages also doesn’t seem to offer indexing, cross referencing or line numbers. But honestly, how often does the average user need these features? Pages is not a tool designed for the technical writer or corporate document creator, nor at its price point would I expect it to be.

$So What?

Pages does not do what some other programs can. What is does do, it does beautifully. It shines at page layout. It make document formatting easy. It offers a nice working environment. It is user friendly and has some beautiful templates included. In other words, Pages is an excellent choice for the typical home or SOHO user.

As a web designer I want the most capable software for my work. As a small business person I need the ability to write letters, reports and proposals. With Pages I have all that I need. I can create standard business documents and beautiful ones at that. Pages integrates with other Apple programs like iPhoto and Address Book, though to be honest so do most other Mac writing programs. I foresee that Pages will become my default word processor. I’ll still keep Word around for those times when I need capabilities that Pages can’t offer. I doubt that will more than a couple of times a month. I’ll still do my coding in a dedicated program, http://barebones.com”BBEdit. I’ll continue with my attempt at a novel in the brilliant writing tool, Scrivner, but I’ll move the chapters into Pages for editing. I love Pages’ revisions and notes implementation.

Conclusion

Could I do all my writing, editing and document creation in one program, say Word? Sure. Could I do my work as quickly? No. Could I produce as beautiful formatted marketing brochure or newsletter? Probably, though with a lot more effort. Am I a convert to Pages? Absolutely.

Value: 5

Ease of Use: 5
Documentation: 4
Features: 4
Macness: 5
Highly recommended

When all the furor hit the net about the iPhone not really being open to developers I had this little niggling something of a thought at the back of my mind. It took a few days for it to come to the front but what I finally realized is that the iPhone is, at least initially, a thin client. It’s a phone, a networked device. It may run some version of OS X but it isn’t being offered as a stand alone computer.

The lack of open APIs may disappoint programmers but may not mean much to the average consumer as more and more desktop capabilities migrate to the web as services.

iPhone’s web display capabilities offer a terrific opportunity for small to medium sized businesses to provide services to non-office employees via the web. The average Cocoa programmer may not get to make his game run on an iPhone but everyday productivity capabilites like networked addresses, time billing, shopping (America’s favorite passtime), to do lists, and basic word processing are already available for us. This iPhone positioning makes a lot of sense. (standard disclaimer - remember that I am a web designer)

Yes, Steve Jobs did try some slight of hand in trying to pass web apps off as an API. And, yes, telling traditional developers that their development platform of choice wasn’t being opened up on the iPhone now should cause a stir, but the end result for the consumer is still an extremely flexible tool. The future is networked. iPhone fits right into that future.

According to Wikipedia, Ruby is a reflective, dynamic, object-oriented programming language. It combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like object-oriented features, and also shares some features with Python, Lisp, Dylan, and CLU. Ruby is a single-pass interpreted language. Its official implementation is free software written in C.

That may mean something to a real programmer but to me it is about as useful as a kick in the head. Let’s go a bit farther. Again from Wikipedia:

Philosophy

The language’s creator has said that Ruby is designed for programmer productivity and fun, following the principles of good user interface design.[1] He stresses that systems design needs to emphasize human, rather than computer, needs

“Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, “By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something.” They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves.”

Translating to designer speak

That makes a bit more sense. Productivity and fun sound good. Emphasizing human needs over those of the computer sounds even better. All these factors should make Ruby easier to learn than older languages and more or less equivalent to Python.

So, put into terms that may not be totally accurate but that reflect my level of understanding, Ruby is a modern programming language that borrows the better parts from its predecessors. It shares certain features with other modern languages that make it a more productive programming environment. And as a programming language is a set of formalized instructions that make a computer do useful and interesting things. Read the rest of this entry »»