Search engine optimization is the practice of creating search engine friendly web pages with relative content that can be easily searched and indexed. Search engine optimization is usually done with the intention of increasing the amount of traffic to a web site and is a big part of internet marketing.

The following is a simple list of things you can do to improve the search engine optimization of pages on your web site

A simple SEO checklist

• Semantic Markup: Be sure your pages are well structured. A title tag is probably the single most important tag on a page in respect to search engine optimization, other important tags include heading tags, paragraph tags, strong tags, and emphasis tags. These tags should be used where appropriate and should contain key word which accurately describe the content of your page.
• Meta Tags: Although not as important as they once where in respect to Search Engine Optimization meta tags are still relevant and should be used. The description meta tag for example is used by many search engines to allow site publishers to display a short description of pages in their own words within search results.
  <meta name="description" content="A cool web site about web design" />
  and the no follow meta tag can be used to tell search engines that a page should not be indexed.
  <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
  Click here for more information about meta tags.
• Site Map: A sitemap.xml file properly formatted and placed in the root directory of your site can be used to let search engines quickly index all of the pages on your site, inform them of which pages are most important, and how often certain pages are updated. XML-Sitemaps.com has a free tool you can use to instantly generate a site map for any site you chose. The free version has some limitations
• Internal Linking: Aside from your main navigation using contextual links in the content of your site which accurately describe the page they are linking to can be very beneficial in search engine optimization. Consider the following link for example: Web Design Portfolio.
• Keyword Density: Intelligently using words which describe your page or site as often as possible while maintaining usefulness and readability. Is a good way to let search engines know what your site is all about and what words should be used to find it. Key word density also ties in to semantic markup because keywords used in tags like the title tag, and heading tags have greater bearing on search engine results.
• URL Keywords: Last but not least, another factor used in determining your pages relevancy by search engines are keywords in the URL. Rather they be a file name such as web-design.html or part of the file path like /web/design/ incorporating a keyword or to into your domain is a big factor in this step as well.

Read the rest of SEO : Search Engine Optimization »

Anyone old enough to understand basic finances knows that the economy and the job market have been pretty crappy in recent years, so I wrote this post in hopes that it might  help anyone currently facing the burden of unemployment.

You need a resume and cover letter. To start off any job search you’ll need a good resume and cover letter, if your not exactly sure how to write one or if your current resume need some polishing I recommend checking out jobsearch.about.com this site has sample cover letter and resumes which you can uses as a reference to get you started. Alison Doyle also shares lots of other information and resources to aid job seekers.

Have some free software. If you’re going to be working on your resume you’ll need a good word processor / office suite, if you don’t already have Microsoft word I’d recommend downloading OpenOffice. The GO-OO branch of the open source software can open and save in the same formats used by MS Office, which includes the 2007 XML formats (docx) .

You need an email address. In order to start applying to jobs and sending out resumes its essential to have an email address which is professional in appearance, addresses like ladysman217 or sexylady82 don’t tend to go over well with most reputable employers. Here are examples of typical email address formats: first.last@domain.com, firstlast@domain.com, f.last@domain.com, flast@domain.com, I’m sure you get the idea. I think a domain form any major email service provider such as Live/Hotmail, Yahoo, or Google will do but I recommend getting a Google / Gmail account simply because it allows pop and imap access so you can use it with a desktop email client like ThunderBird or MS Outlook if you choose to, having a gmail account also gives you access to Google calendar which can be synced using the same email software I just mentioned.
Read the rest of Tools for the Tech Savvy Job Hunter »

There are different reasons to use excerpts instead of full content in your rss feeds, Such as discouraging sploggers from stealing your content, and encouraging feed subscribers to visit your site. A drawback of this though is that WordPress by default only uses the first 55 words of your post in an excerpt minus any image or other media files you may have included in your post. One way around this is to enter your own custom excerpt into the excerpt field of your post editor while in HTML mode. Another method which I’m now using automatically adds the first image in your post (or a default image you specify if there is no image in your post) to your rss content, involves a function I found at Live Experience . Simply add the following code to your wp-includes/functions.php file:

function get_first_image() {
global $post, $posts;
$first_img = '';
ob_start();
ob_end_clean();
$output = preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i', $post->post_content, $matches);
$first_img = $matches [1] [0];
if(empty($first_img)){
//Defines a default image
$first_img ="http://yoursite.com/image.png";
}
return $first_img;
}

Then open up wp-includes/feed-rss2.php or the file name that corresponds to which ever feed format you’re using, next find each instance of the following line of code

<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>

and append the following to the front of it:

<?php echo '<img src="'.get_first_image().'" alt="" />' ?>

That’s all there is to it, if you’ve done everything right you should now automatically have images in your feeds, if you use a them which uses excerpts I’m sure you can think of at least one other way to use this function as well .

I realize the title of this post may sound a little redundant, but I’ve noticed something peculiar in WordPress, it seems that it will automatically redirect a page if you change the page name (aka slug) but wont bother with anything else in the URL. Case in point I recently published a blog but forgot to set the category name, and my WordPress URLs are set to include the category name as follows http://domain.com/category/slug/ so after I updated the post category I realized the post was still accessible using the old category name in the URL without redirecting, as well as with the new category name, I then noticed I could pretty much type in any category name as long as the slug was right the post would still load, this may be fine or even good from a purely functional stand point but not something you want from an SEO perspective, but luckily you can get the correct permalink and make sure the post redirects there using a couple of built in WordPress functions. Below is the code I placed in the head of my template which makes sure all post direct to the proper permalink.

<?php
//Get the URL used to request the current page.
$pageURL = 'http://'.$_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
 //Get the WordPress permalink.
$pageLink = get_permalink();
//Make sure the page is a single post
if(is_single()){
   //Check if the request URL is the same as the WordPress permalink.
  if($pageURL!=$pageLink){
     //If the URL and permalink are not the same redirect with a 301(permanent) or 302(temporary) redirect
    wp_redirect($pageLink, 301);
    exit;
  }
}
?>