http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/category/seo/ Search engine optimization, rankings, design, search engine and search directory tips, news, and resources en-us SEO Copyright 2000-2008 Shirley Kaiser, SKDesigns. All rights reserved. Shirley Kaiser 2006-08-29T12:01:41-08:00 720 daily 2 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://backend.userland.com/rss http://brainstormsandraves.com/xml/brainstorms88.gif http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/category/seo/ 88 31 Search engine optimization, rankings, design, search engine and search directory tips, news, and resources Danny Sullivan, longtime SEO guru and voice at Search Engine Watch, announced that he's leaving December 1st, 2006. He wanted to write about the reasons why himself, so be sure to check out his blog post, Leaving Search Engine Watch. To stay in touch and learn what he'll be doing next, visit Daggle, Danny's personal blog, or sign up for his Yahoo! group, What's Next for Danny?. In addition, Danny will continue doing The Daily Searchcast, a 20-30 minute recap of the past day's SEO, SEM news (podcast or regular text viewing). (99 words, 6 links) http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2006/08/29/danny/ http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2006/08/29/danny/ Shirley Kaiser 2006-08-29T12:01:41 Although I'm a designer and not a programmer or server-side specialist, for a few years I've used Apache's .htaccess to a limited degree for clients' websites, primarily for simple URL redirects and setting up custom error pages. Now that I can use Apache's .htaccess for my own websites, I've been immersed in learning more about how to use this powerful tool conservatively but effectively to redirect URLs and to combat spammers and bad bots. Today's post provides links to some of the online sources that I've found especially helpful. (3024 words, 91 links) http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2005/10/09/htaccess/ http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2005/10/09/htaccess/ Shirley Kaiser 2005-10-09T19:56:59 Unfortunately, I'm not surprised by the unsatisfactory results found testing websites for accessibility as published in the July, 2004 issue of First Monday. A multitude of websites from Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany were tested, and fifty US government websites were tested for accessibility and standards compliance. The results were quite disappointing, as detailed in their two new articles. Read on for the details. (336 words, 4 links) http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2004/07/19/accessibility/ http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2004/07/19/accessibility/ Shirley Kaiser 2004-07-19T09:38:29 Cookiecrook's Accessibility Internet Rally: 2003 Training is packed with helpful information about how to create an accessible website and why it matters. You'll find help for CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and more. Be sure to also check out the section on Semantic Markup. Creating an accessible site has the added benefit of helping search engines spider your content better, too. Search engines rank keywords and take cues from semantic markup, such as using heading tags for headers. Read on for more tips and links. (258 words, 7 links) http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/10/07/semantics/ http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/10/07/semantics/ Shirley Kaiser 2003-10-07T18:58:57 As much as I love using Movable Type, a few things have bothered me about MT, too, such as MT generating absolute URLs for internal links when relative URLs should be used. Stepan Riha's MTRelativeURL plugin is an incredibly easy way to generate relative URLs with MT, thankfully, wherever the plugin tags are used. Today's post explains how to use it and why it matters. (589 words, 14 links, 1 image) http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/09/07/relative_vs_absolute_urls/ http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/09/07/relative_vs_absolute_urls/ Shirley Kaiser 2003-09-07T16:13:23 Setting up a new website or a redesign for a client or yourself most likely includes considering the URLs for all the pages. If URLs are auto-generated by software, changing software might result in all those URLs changing, thus breaking incoming links and diminishing or ruining search engine placements unless redirects are set up. Some URL configurations can even prevent search engines from spidering at all, too. Today's Friday Feast explores resources about friendly and long-lasting URLs. I'll follow up soon about the URL choices I made and why for my transition from Blogger to Movable Type. (760 words, 19 links) http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/08/08/friday_feast_55_friendly_lasting_urls/ http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/08/08/friday_feast_55_friendly_lasting_urls/ Shirley Kaiser 2003-08-08T17:29:30 There's plenty of fascinating reading around at the beginning of the week. Here are just a few for inspiration and helpful info: (537 words, 11 links) http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/08/05/design_seo_lots_of_food_for_thought_today/ http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/08/05/design_seo_lots_of_food_for_thought_today/ Shirley Kaiser 2003-08-05T10:02:29 (72 words, 6 links, 1 image) http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/06/17/more_interviews_with_jeffrey_zeldman/ http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/06/17/more_interviews_with_jeffrey_zeldman/ Shirley Kaiser 2003-06-17T17:27:14 Jared Blank addresses that question in his new article for ClickZ, What If You Built a Blog and No One Came? That title caught my eye, so naturally I read the article and checked things out for myself. (419 words, 16 links) http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/05/21/you_build_the_blog_but_will_they_come/ http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/05/21/you_build_the_blog_but_will_they_come/ Shirley Kaiser 2003-05-21T08:04:22 Like many of us, I've been following along with the discussions about whether or not Google is giving too much weight to weblogs and not enough to print publishers. Just a few of the dozens of interesting posts the past couple of weeks are by Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Dan Gillmor, Michael Hall. Some print publishers may be bothered that their rankings aren't higher for news-related searches, but I wonder if search engine experts and other online experts are consulted before print publishers block so much content from search engines behind their password-only subscriber-only areas. If they want to bring... (538 words, 18 links, 1 image) http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/05/20/google_weblogs_and_print_publishers_online_and_off/ http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/05/20/google_weblogs_and_print_publishers_online_and_off/ Shirley Kaiser 2003-05-20T17:05:40