A lot has been written about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and it can be confusing and contradictory. Without going into great depth about costly models (pay for results placement, or per click, or hiring SEO consultants) versus the free methods, I thought I’d offer some basic free steps for improving your position in search engine results. For clients wanting to improve results for free, I take the simple steps described below. These have been working well for me and my clients. Note that the very best thing that you can do is to use good page titles and to write rich content for your Web pages. (And promote your site; don’t wait to be found.) Here’s a brief intro to: META tags (easy to do, but of limited use with today’s search engines) Using meaningful titles for all your Web pages Using descriptive text with image tags Using a file with instructions for search engine robots (robots.txt) Sending Google info about your site’s structure and how often it should be indexed Improving results with links Blogs and search engine results

After we finished their site designs, a couple of clients were looking for more interaction with site visitors, so we added a blog. We ruled out traditional guestbooks; even if we spam-proofed them, a one-way form didn’t achieve what the client wanted. The blogs make nice complements to their Web sites, and could be nicely customized to fit the look of the static web pages (See aaronschuerr.com/aaronsblog and gillianswanson.com/resources.) The more my clients adopt blogs, and the more I work with the three that I maintain for business and personal use, the more I think that it is a good choice for new client Web sites. Some blog themes do a nice job of combining a lot of stable content with dynamic post content (e.g. the Revolution theme that I based this site on), and there are many plugins for the WordPress blog platform that I use. The plugins extend the blog themes to handle things like image galleries, online shopping, spam filtering in blog comments, notifying Google to index your site, et cetera, making it possible to develop a multi-faceted and lively site. Blog Web pages are assembled dynamically in a browser at viewing time using PHP (server-side scripts) to process...

Now that SparklingDawg.com is set up as a blog, I can use the site to share design tips, especially for my clients who have had some training with me on how to update their own sites and blogs. Check back in the coming months, and please feel free to post questions here. You don’t have to be one of my clients to chime in. Livingston folks are always asking me questions about using the Web. This is where I’ll answer the frequent ones. I also hope to put together some training opportunities after the snow flies and I have more time (I hope!). I’ll post any classes like that here.