St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Create a Post in WordPress Video

WordPress, a web application that supports not just reverse chronological order articles, hierarchical pages, a WYSIWYG content editor with a working image/file uploader and embedder and tons of other features, sounds a little intimidating at first.  But the beauty of WordPress is that it’s easy to use.

Yes WordPress is powerful, secure, has tons of plug-ins and a huge user community.  But it also has it’s basics down.  If you are a basic level user it just doesn’t get much easier than this to work.  Other Content Management Systems (CMS) like Drupal, PhpNuke, Joomla will have even the fastest of learners pulling their hair out within a manner of days.  Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s them.  WordPress is so widely customizable that it can do just about any job that they can.  But without the heartache that the others cause.

XML Site maps are 5 years old and we are still amazed as people who are using their site maps effectively. As the lady in the video below also points out, often times a poor sitemap.xml is an indicator of a poor web site plan. ie, sometimes more content isn’t better.
She also touches on a great point, using other forms of XML, namely RSS feeds can be a link building machine for a web site. Others sites that are focused on providing users the latest from the blogging world, or even better are focused on providing the latest info from the specific niche you are in, will provide summaries and links to your articles and pages. This not only builds links but it also can generated a little targeted traffic occasionally.

This will be a two part series, next week will tell you about an instance where you may NOT want to have a “properly” implemented sitemap…

We’re proud to launch our in house made client info and proofing system. Behind a password protected front end we’ve created a custom section for each client with client news just for them, a summary of their account status, proofs of their latest web designs, if any are available and a simple feed back form for approval and feedback on these proofs.
Like we said it’s pass word protected so if you are awaiting a proof we’ll be contacting you soon (if we haven’t already) with your user name and password to the client info center,

Any of my SEO clients and many regular readers here know that researching what phrases people are actually searching for and how tough the competition is for those phrase is a very important part of any SEO campaign.  It usually the first step, in fact.

This video has some tips about how to gain a little more insight on how to get some keyphrase ideas.  More importantly, it has some off hand advice, which is actually great about integrating analytics and paid advertising into continuing campaigns.

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Stop Form Spam - but how?

Form spam, everyone hates it.  That’s when some automated software finds the contact form on your web site and uses to tell you about cheesy offers you’d rather not hear, like how they can get to to #1 on Google for anything you’d like for $9.99!  The most common approach has been to use an image based CAPTCHA script to make sure that a human is filling out the form.  The problem is, they really irritate users and now they make programs for spammers that can read the image the Captcha produces so now image based captcha just doesn’t really work any more.

What’s a web Designer to do then?  We have the answer.  We needed a custom script that was secure, easy for users and easy for web designers.  Years ago we developed one for a client, but it was a bit too custom for general release.  So we simplified it so that even an entry level web designer could customize it and implement it.    We made it more secure and kept easy for the one filling out the form to use.  We liked it so much we use it on our own contact page.   So far it has blocked 100% of the form spam and also blocked everyone who has tried to access the form handler page directly (robots, pranksters and hackers, o my!)

Download the source code, see how it works and get support on our Stop Form Spam page.

Some times when your hard work pays off, it’s good to lean back and admire what you’ve done for a moment.  This post is one of those moments.  We’ve made learning how search engines work and how to best use the info we gather, a priority for over a decade.  For the last eight years, we’ve had some great successes with the search engines.  Since most traffic to a web site comes from a search engine and the overwhelming majority of that traffic comes from the first page of search results, you can see how this greatly benefits our clients.

There are two points to consider when viewing this list.

First, it was compiled on 07-05-2010 and the search engines change their rankings all the time.  We keep on top of this but lack of resources by certain clients may cause them to fall in the rankings.  Of course some client are putting more resources into their search engine marketing efforts thus their ranking will improve.  Once you learn how to get a web site ranked well, it’s just  a matter of putting the right amount of resources into it for the keyphrase you want to rank well.

Secondly, there are numerous web sites that are doing even better than these but larger clients often request a non disclosure agreement.  there are several reasons for this.  Like if they are a web design company or an seo company.  Sometimes they are in a completed unrelated industry, they just don’t want their competition to read their web designers blog and learn their custom strategy.  I can’t say I blame them.

Here’s a short list of some of our most recent search engines successes:

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