Creating graphics and posting images for your site is one fun thing to do in web development. Nothing makes your site stand out better than some great images. Graphics and images can be used for entertainment, professionalism or a visual queue. A graphic designed properly can change your visitor’s outlook and/or decision for your site. It is important to you have images ready and optimized for your website.

Optimize Your Images

One thing to remember when creating graphics and images for your site is to optimize. What do you mean by optimization?

Optimization is a way to compress data to make your file size smaller. One way optimization works is that it will read through all the color of the image and use other color combinations to make similar colors. This will then discard some colors that will not be needed for the particular image. But there is a downside with optimization. You will lose quality in your graphic and/or images. Quality vs. Size

When optimizing your images watch the quality compared to size. You want the smallest size possible for your site, making your site load faster. This will make it easier for your visitors and search engine bots.

If you image or graphic becomes too distorted, raise your file size. You don’t want a pixelated image on your site. You want your images to look good and professional. You just need to find a balance between having a clean professional picture and having a decent small file size.

Image Optimization Tools
Adobe Photoshop has put this into consideration in some of their new application versions. You can now do a File > Save for the Web Options and Adobe Photoshop has a pre-built optimizing process that is very good. You can choose what file type to save in and how much to compression and optimization. Adobe Photoshop is an expensive commercial program, another option is using Dynamic Drive’s Image Optimization.

Types of Image Files
Last thing to touch on is JPEG, GIF and PNG. There are so many file types, but these are highly recommended for web development.

JPEG
JPEG is a compressed file that has very good quality standards. Because of its compression, colors and data are squeezed out of it to create smaller file sizes. This can cause some blur with images with sharp edges, which is great for photos. If you look at a photo there are no straight lines or edges. Everything is blended together, which why JPEG is great for photos. You can get great optimization out of a JPEG file.

GIF
GIF is used more for vector based graphics. A vector based graphic is when a graphic is made of lines and shapes. Vector graphic have sharp corners, edges or text. When dealing with graphics like described, it is better to use a GIF rather than a JPEG. A JPEG could case distortion on your sharp lines. GIF can also be use for animation. Frame by frame animation saved as a .gif will animate on your page. Transparency is another feature that GIF can support. You can save your images with a transparent background.

PNG
PNG is one of the newest web graphic technologies. PNG is great for quality and file size. You have the best of both worlds in a PNG. PNG can also support transparent backgrounds. The only downside to a PNG file is that some old web browsers don’t support PNG. This problem is becoming less and less a concern. But keep that in mind.

Quickest Time for Web
Optimizing images and graphics is almost a must in web development. Having big file sizes could cause some of your visitors to leave your site. If your site is too slow to load, you need to optimize immediately. Rumour is that you have 3 seconds to pull a surfer in. If you site doesn’t load in that amount of time, then you might lose them. Time your page in your browser and see how long it takes. If you are under a couple of seconds, you’re doing a great job.

About the Author: Cody Sparks - This is a WebHostDesignPost.com Article. Read more articles and information for Web Development and Optimize Web Images.

7 Homework Items to Complete Before Any SEO Class

Below are seven of the top items (though certainly not the *only* common items).

1. JavaScript and CSS code on the pages…

If you’re using JavaScript to do any cool functions on your website or CSS for styling effects, the code for that JavaScript and CSS should be moved to an external file that is then called from your webpage. If you’re not sure how to do this, check out this guide to reducing the size of your “head” (the area within your HTML document where this code appears).

2. Not having unique title and meta tags for every page…

Every single page on your website should have its own unique title tag that describes the topic of that specific page. Title tags are an extremely important on page factor and having each one be different and topical are vital to your success – both for rankings and click through rates in the search engine result pages.

Additionally, every meta description tag, while not instrumental to your rankings, should be unique to each page because search engines often use your meta description tag in their search engine result pages. Good and unique meta description tags contribute to the overall uniqueness of each page and can help increase your click through rate in the search engines. Which listing looks more appealing?

Homepage
Welcome to our landscaping site. Home Services Rates Contact Us … provide great landscaping services to all of… bookmark us now because you will want to …
www.acmelandscaping.com

Acme Landscaping Services | Houston Texas Landscaper
If you’re looking for landscaping services in the Houston, area who serves the South Houston, Pasadena and Deer Park regions with competitive rates, stop here.
www.acmelandscaping.com

I’m sure you get it now. The meta keyword tag? In my opinion, it’s of no real use, but it is simply good practice to include it on your pages, making sure that the content of this tag applies to the content on your page.

3. JavaScript or graphical site navigation…

If your site is using JavaScript for your menus, kill it now. Even with an additional sitemap to lead the search engines, you lose out on valuable internal anchor text and links. There is no reason not to ditch the JavaScript and change your menus to utilize CSS – and by using CSS, you won’t lose the current design or feel. If you’re using graphics to link to your internal site pages, you’ll want to get a redesign to instead utilize a straight text navigation system or retain your current appearance by utilizing a CSS menu.

4. Enter here pages…

Sure, they look cool, but there are several problems with having the homepage of your website be a flash movie or graphic that asks users to click something to enter the site. First, it is typical that a site has their homepage as the most frequently linked to page on their site. By having a bunch of inbound links coming to a page with no indexable content, it wastes the power of your homepage in regards to obtaining search engine rankings.

Additionally, because some people linking to your site may choose to link to the page you get to *after* you “click here” to send *their* visitors directly to the actual content, it also splits the link popularity between what is essentially two homepages – one with content and one without. You’re better off having all of your power combined into one effective, well designed and content full homepage.

Second, from a user perspective, making them click more than necessary is never a good thing. Don’t make users search for content – put it directly in front of them.

5. Canonical issues…

Basically, a canonical issue refers to the search engines finding several different URL variations of the same page. On your server, they are all the same page, but the search engines, particularly Google, have a hard time figuring that out. For instance, your homepage can likely be found be default under a variety of different addresses:

www.homepage.com
homepage.com
www.homepage.com/index.asp
homepage.com/index.asp

To your server, those are all the same pages. Google however sees them as four separate pages. Fixing a canonical error is fairly simple… pick the URL you want the engines to consider your “real” and only homepage and 301 redirect the other variations to the URL you have chosen. I typically recommend that you choose a version of the root. Either:

www.homepage.com
homepage.com

Additionally, I typically recommend that most sites use the www.homepage.com version, as most people will tend to insert the www automatically. However, you’ll notice that Michael chose to use the non www version for the real and only homepage on SEO Class. His reasoning (sometimes you learn something new every day) was that he found that you could get a larger font size for the URL on your offline advertising materials by omitting the www. We plan to do a bit of offline advertising as our primary focus is New York businesses. If you do as well, I’d recommend keeping Michael’s tip in mind. If you don’t plan to do a lot of offline advertising, my recommendation would be to choose the www version. If you already have a canonical issue, check out Matt’s post on the topic for expectations in fixing it.

6. Multiple domains for the same site…

This is an offense committed mostly by big companies with various brands. They have one site at www.brand.com and then own www.subbrand.com, www.subbrandtwo.com and www.brandnickname.com and either have 302 redirects in place from the sub-brands to the main brands, or simply render the same exact site that appears on www.brand.com on all of the alternate domains.

If you’re utilizing more than one domain name, place a 301 redirect on the other vanity domains to either the main page of the site or to the appropriate sub page on the main site. For instance, www.brandnickname.com might 301 redirect to www.brand.com while www.subbrand.com might 301 redirect to www.brand.com/subbrand.asp.

This allows you to use multiple domains for advertising purposes, but 301 redirect all visitors (and inbound links) to the appropriate pages on the main domain to avoid duplicate content issues as well as consolidate the inbound links to the various subdomains to the correct pages you want to rank for the terms in the search engines.

7. Focusing on the small stuff…

Almost every site has problems of some form if there hasn’t been an SEO professional working with the site since before the launch. But, it is important to have any items you need to work on prioritized in a manner that allows you to make the most impact in the shortest amount of time, or which allows you to fix the biggest thorn. An example:

A client of mine once had huge duplicate content issues. In addition to using part of their content from another site (with permission) they were allowing a huge, old, big brand site to utilize their original content verbatim. The “other site” was ten years old, has over 100,000 backlinks and is someone you would see advertised on television. I had to explain to the client that they were being seen as the duplicate and that this big brand site was who was showing up for all their search terms. In addition, the site had canonical issues and needed a big push in the link development arena.

They proceeded to spend thirty minutes asking about whether or not they should bold their keywords on their pages. I told them that if their website was a house, then the garage was sitting in a sinkhole and that asking about bold tags was the equivalent of asking me what color curtains would look best in the kitchen. It wouldn’t matter what color their curtains were because no one would be visiting them while their house was taking on mass damage from the sinkhole.

Moral: If something is causing you massive damage or your site has a big issue to address, fix it before you do anything else.

So there you have it – a few of the more common items you can address before attending a workshop or conference, or paying a professional to take a look at your site.

posted on http://seoclass.com/ unknown author.

original article from entireweb.com newsletter

What is a regional web site?

A regional web page is one that focuses in on a specific area such as a city, county, state, country or area of the world. You do not have to have a regional web site to add a regional component to your site. There are two types of sites I am going to talk about. First is the regional site itself and then a web site with a regional section in it. If you already have a web site and want to expand the content and the audience then adding the regional section is a great option for you.

Building a regional web site.

Regional web sites are becoming more popular. Five years ago if you built a site about the community you live in there was a good chance you were one of only one or two sites to do so. Obviously if you were only one of two web sites for a community then you were at the top of any search for information about that community. It is not as easy now. This is still the case for many smaller towns and counties. But there is much more competition for larger more populated areas. Don’t just rule out larger areas because if done right then you can still do great in these areas as well.

The first thing to do is decide on the area you want to build a page about. A good place to start is where you live or your favorite vacation spots. This is a good choice because you are already familiar with the area. I will share two things the site will need. The first is more important and the second will bring in more traffic.

Next you need to list the things that make the community you chose unique. It is especially good to find the lesser-known unique things about your community. This can include historical places, unique places and fun places. It can even include the best places to kiss. It can have reviews of local restaurants and business, a history of the community, little know facts about the community and any other things that make your community unique and special.

This is important because most community sites are just a group of links pages about the area. This is part of doing it right. When your page is unique and full of quality content it is easier to get good quality links to your site. Many people forget about this and concentrate on make pages about the key words that people search for. When this happens you end up with a site that nobody wants to link to and nobody wants to spend time looking at the different pages of your web site. Quality is always at the top of the agenda. The goal of any web site should be to be the best web site on the internet about your particular topic. You decide which is better: To have 1000 visitors who visit your site a day, who average looking at 2 pages, or 300 visitors a day who average 10. In the long run when you have hundred of well-ranked sites linked to you then you will get the thousands of visitors who visit many pages on your site.

After you have the above and have a quality site for your community then it is time to start looking at keywords. This is what brings people to your site. A good tool for finding out what people are searching for is Overtures Keyword Selector Tool.

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Type in the name of the community in the search box and click the arrow. It will give you a list of how many times that a term has been searched for in Overture the previous month. I will also list all the phrases that were searched for using that term. This way you know what people are looking for when they search for something in your community. Now you can take the information in this book and apply it to making pages based on these keywords. Remember that with every page you build quality is the key. You want your site to be better than any other site about your community. For an example of how to use this tool try this link.

http://arthritis-symptom.com/adsense/keyword-selector-tool.htm

As an example if people are searching for museums in your community do not just make a link page to the museums web sites. Rather list every museum in the area and add a paragraph or two for each. You can also make a page about every museum and have an index page called museums in your community that link to all the museum pages you have built. If you have 10 museums in your community people will visit most or all of the museum pages. Be sure to add a short description on the museums in your community page.
Adding a regional section to your web site

This is an idea that has become very popular in the last few years. As the internet continues to grow it is becoming harder to be at the top of the search engines for the most popular terms. So one of the things you can do is to make regional pages for your products or information. I stumbled on this by accident years ago. As I have mentioned I have a very large arthritis web site. As a service to my visitors I decided to add a section to the web site that listed had a page in for every state that listed arthritis resources in that state. It quickly became one of the most popular sections of my site especially in the search engines.

This can be done for any product or service that is not specific to a community. For example I knew a guy who was representative for a Satellite TV system company. He could sell a system anywhere in the country. Once he made the sale the company arranged for the system to be installed. So he built a page for Satellite TV for every city in America. He did this because he found out that many people were searching for Satellite TVs in their communities. He had about pages for over 500 different cities.

This worked well for a while, but he had a problem. Basically every page in his site was the same. The only difference was the name of the city and state. The search engines now frown on this. He tried to fix this by adding unique information about each city. He finally gave up on this and redid the site under a new domain name. Once a search engine punishes you it is hard to get back in their good graces.

So if you are going to do this for a product or service you need to make every page unique. As mentioned above, quality always is important and you can no longer cheat the search engines. So do not take the easy way. Take the time to make every page one that the search engines and your visitors will be proud of.

This can also be done as a service. One of the most popular sites on the internet is topix.net. They have the largest news network that includes news for almost every city and town in America. This can be done for almost any service from adoption to zoos. Some subjects have way too much competition and companies that are spending too much money for you to compete with. Regional travel and legal sites are examples of these. Even though there is a ton of competition for some types of regional sites there are still literally thousands of different topics and services that do not have too much competition.

About the Author: Rusty Ford is editor at http://arthritis-symptom.com/

So, you have decided to put your business to work for you on the web. Your next decisions could make or break the productivity of your new web site. There are many points to consider when setting up a web site. The following is a discussion of what to consider.

Professional Web Developers:

The single most important decision to get your business on the web is to hire a professional web developer. Professional web developers can be a great source of information. They are experienced with internet technologies and can produce professional looking web sites with high visual impact which can help build your web presence. Stay away from amateur web designers. The price may be cheaper and more attractive, but you will get an inferior site in the end and they may not be there when you need help with your site. You can count on a professional developer for support if you have problems with your site. Your website needs to be easy to use and enjoyable for your customer to ensure return visits. A professional web developer has the experience and knowledge to build a great looking and user friendly web site.

Domain Names:

Choosing a domain name is another important part of your web site development. Try to use a domain name that will be easy to remember and spell or find the closest version to your company’s name. You want your domain name to be short, catchy, and memorable. Have a few backups in mind in case the domain name you want is already registered. Buy the “.com” version of the name if it is available. People will remember “.com” with your domain even if it is a “.net” or “.org”. Avoid names that sound or look like other companies. A customer may land on another site by mistake and never come back to yours. A good domain name can make the difference in the productivity of your site.

Web Hosting Services:

Web hosting companies vary in services and reliability. One thing to consider is uptime, or if you’re a pessimist, downtime. You want to choose a host whose servers are up and running as close to 100% of the time as possible. An hour or two for routine maintenance is no big deal, but watch out for hosts who have a history of downtime and problems. Talk to your web developer, they usually have a few hosting companies they rely on for hosting.

Web Space:

Another point to consider is web space, which is the amount of memory provided to store your web site information. If you are planning a large e-commerce site, you will want more space than if you are trying to provide information about your company to prospective clients. Your web developer can help you decide on the amount of web space you will need.

Bandwidth:

Bandwidth is another important issue. This is the amount of information your site can send to users within a given timeframe, including downloading files and visiting your site. Bandwidth is usually tracked in monthly increments. Once your site has reached its bandwidth limit, you will either have to pay for more, or your users won’t be able view your site. The size of your website affects the bandwidth, so keeping files such as graphics or video to a minimal size will help control this. Professional web developers employ many techniques to optimize graphics and other information to keep bandwidth usage to a minimum. You also need to consider the amount of traffic you may generate to your site. More page hits means more bandwidth.

Access to Your Site Files:

Access to your site through ftp (file transfer protocol) is another important item to consider. You will want to be able to update or edit your site when needed. Some hosting companies will control the access and perform updates for you and may not do it in a timely manner. You don’t want to be waiting days or even weeks for your updates especially if you are trying to generate income from your site. Also make sure that you own the domain name and site files they generate for you. This will make transferring domains easier if the need arises. Some hosts provide Content Management Systems (CMS) that make editing easier for the client. Most professional web developers will work with you and perform updates for a minimal cost.

Hosting Plans:

Once you have chosen a hosting provider, you will want to choose a hosting plan. The cost of the hosting plan will be dictated by the points mentioned above. Most hosts offer a variety of plans at different levels of services and costs. Various options can include the number of email accounts, amount of bandwidth, level of customer support and availability of applications such as databases, forums, guestbook services and shopping carts. Web developers have experience in determining what best suits your type of web site and your personal needs.

A variety of factors influence your success on the web. Considering the topics discussed here can help you avoid mistakes and set you on the right path for an effective web site that meets your needs. A professional web site developer, such as isiteweb, can discuss these points with you and help make your venture into the World Wide Web an enjoyable experience.

About the Author: Matt Claypool is a web designer/developer at isiteweb.