I’ve heard some time ago that one guy was searching for his keys and he couldn’t find the anywere. Finally, annoyed to hell, he used Google to search “my fucking keys”.

The response was very well search engine optimized:

“Your fucking keys are on the refrigerator, where you let them, deepshit!”.

We can not offer you that, not yet, but we are on the right way to that.

Husband searching keywords on Google “How to tackle wife?” Google’s only search result “still searching”.

Meanwhile, if the next image does not very much meaning for you it’s OK: it’s designed for the search engines… and, implicitly, to all the Google vans that might go by.

It's not a secret that social media is very good for the search engine optimization... entire campaigns were run over social media with some degree of success. Social media congresses and meeting are kept all around the globe, and that's normal: humans are, by definition, social creatures. The internet is virtual, but it's no less social than the "real" world.

We do optimize websites for search engines using social media, so you can ask additional questions if you need more information. Meanwhile, there are some things you should know about how to make your web site more visible:

Have content on your website.

Optimizing a site without content is wasting money, time and energy on an action without results. People are coming for the content of your site: text, images, audio and video.

Find the audience (the target)

That means you must understand your public (you can consider the internet as a huge screen you must put information on and the visitor as an audience) and its behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing.

Define your objectives

Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, by the products and the services you offer, and the SEO applied to the web sites has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in sales over internet. Social media is not direct marketing, so you have to apply different objectives and measurements. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search. Indirectly the content from social media can boost links to website content, improving search traffic and online sales.

Establish a plan for your campaign

The plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share. Whether a keyword-focused strategy for reaching goals means publishing new content or creating an opportunity for consumer-generated content, it must involve proactive promotion and easy sharing amongst members of the community.

Develop tactic for your campaign

As you might already know, some of the most used are twitter and facebook. Google tried something (they called it social network - it's social, of course, and it's almost a network) with Google Plus, but they are over the horizon from their main competitor - Facebook. They are not the only ones: Stumbleupon and Wikipedia, Reddit and Del.icio.us are great for improving the traffic on your site (and the list continue with a lot others), Flickr and Picasa are excellent for your images collections, Youtube for your videos.

The tactic for your campaign should consider as many elements as possible from the previous list. The success of the campaign is a mix of all of them, a social media marketing effort based on finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content. It's an investment in time and relationships, not just spamming some other web sites to promote your site.

Measure your goals

Trends over internet change all the times. Some time ago hi5 ruled, now there are the moments of glory for Twitter and Facebook (among others). Always keep yourself in touch with these trends and optimize your tactics to get the best results.

Measure your results

Ok. You've put your plans into action, you have done a part or all points you previously decided to do and now you want to know the results. Use the tools that show you the detailed statistics with the visitors on your page and where they come from. You can always learn some good things from that and you can optimize the future campaigns and the performance of your SEO.

 

One of the subjects I wanted to write about here is the increase interest about the sites that have multi-language support and content. We've been designing sites with this support from some time, some of the clients never uses this but others require it from the beginning.

The target of the website or the software you want to purchase means a lot when the multi-language is involved. When creating personal blogs or something small for a specific targeted area the multi-language option does not matter very much (or not at all), but the internet can be accessed from every place on Terra where there is physical support to it. The search engines can bring you the same results wherever you are on Earth and they can bring you as results websites from all around the globe that match your search criteria. When selling products and services over the internet it just does not matter where the client comes from (where is his/her location), it matter only that his/her money gets in your account.

It's not wrong to say that the international language of the internet is English - it may be rather difficult to browse the world wide web if you don't know it, but depending of the area the default language can change. So, having the description of the products and/or services published in different languages it can only help because you may have visitors from other places in the worlds that does know your default language of the site. The best solution when developing a website is to create it in such way that the multi-language option is always there, even if it is never used, and the adding of a new languages is easy and does not imply any changes in the structure of the web site.

As software developer I can say that the software it may not be as visible over the internet as a website, you can only see or here about it's results. The best software (no matter it's target and field of activity) is the one that's easier to use by any user. One teacher in the faculty taught us, as students, that the development of the user interface is a race between us and the nature: we have to create better interface, that can be used by any fool in the world; the nature always creates bigger fools. The education over the world has a lot of lacks; the software that have the interface in several languages well known in the wold will not resolve the problems of the education, but it helps in some way.

For example, I've "met" a Hungarian company some time ago that were selling stuff over the internet, they created 6 different sites (with the same identical structure and different content) for 6 different countries & 6 different languages all over the Europe. The maintenance of those sites were a killer because they had a lot of products and every time when they were making changes (in the description of the products, adding & deleting products depending the current lists) they had to go in 6 different administration panels and do things. One single web site, developed with multi-language option would have made the things a lot easier - one panel, 6 languages and articles for every language. The domain names can be mapped distinctly using the server, so all the modifications could have been done in (maybe) half of the time.

You must already know that more and more sites uses javascript (in one way or another) to make the design of the site more shiny and more attractive for the visitors. Some uses simple javascript functions, others uses metric tones of jQuery or Ajax.

If you are wondering if javascript is good for search engines optimization of your site, the answer is still NO. There are small steps in that direction, but you should know that the spiders grabs the html (static) code, including the content. If you are intending to use javascript to dynamically generate URLs and/or content in your site don't: the crawlers will ignore it. jQuery and Ajax are good for creating animations, but the spiders won't stop to watch them, their job is to read the URLs and the content and go further.

When the things will change, if they are going to change, I'll let you know about that.

From our experience we can say for sure that the web design and seo clients are not always right... in some cases they are almost never right.

Why? Because a very important part of them don't know exactly what they want from the software engineer/ programmer/ web designer /seo specialist they hire to do a job. Some have almost no idea about how the final product should look like, I say nothing about the necessary workload to reach that final result.

I've met persons that have an idea: "let's do 'that'", they said. They had only a few blurry small ideas about how the software & site would look like in the end and they had to be guided to understand every aspect of the product.

Other asked: why does not my web page appears into the first page of google results? The site was a brand new one, it was just finished and it had been online only a few days. I had to explain the guy that it takes time for a site to get to that first result page.

That why we offer the initial consulting of a project, before starting a job. The necessary documentation can be written before any coding must start - it's a part of the development cycle of any project (software and web design) that is a big black box for a lot of people.

When somebody is educated in the field and know the things work it's easy to talk to him/her. That's a part of the reason of this site: to offer an idea to newbies about what we do. It takes a lot of time and a lot of patience to explain everything from the start to somebody that knows nothing or very little things - if he already know the project is going to end faster.

So, do NOT act as you know everything. Ask and we'll tell you. We'll do the job for you when the things are all clear and the price is good. That's we do for a living.

As I've just wrote, pinging is used for announcing other sites over the internet (mainly blog directories, content aggregators and social media sites). XML-RPC is one of the most common methods to acquire this task if you want to create your own scripts or to modify the current existing scripts on your server.

XML-RPC it's a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet.

XML-RPC is also a remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.

There are two ways to ping another site: simple ping (with only the minimum data - the required information about the site), and extended ping (with some additional data). The XML-PRC library designed for php can be downloaded from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpxmlrpc/

XML-RPC Ping:


require('class/lib/xmlrpc.inc');


$client = new xmlrpc_client('http://rpc.pingomatic.com/');

//simple ping ('title','url')

$message = new xmlrpcmsg('weblogUpdates.ping', array(
new xmlrpcval('Optimizing my site'),
new xmlrpcval('http://www.webdesign-software-code-seo.com')
));

$response = $client->send($message);

if($response->faultCode() == '0'){ echo 'it works'; }

 

Extended XML-RPC Ping:


require('class/lib/xmlrpc.inc');


$client = new xmlrpc_client('http://rpc.pingomatic.com/');

//extended ('title','url','updated_url','rssfeed','keyword1|keyword2|tag')

$message = new xmlrpcmsg('weblogUpdates.extendedPing', array(
new xmlrpcval('Optimizing my site'),
new xmlrpcval('http://www.webdesign-software-code-seo.com'),
new xmlrpcval('http://www.webdesign-software-code-seo.com/very-true/'),
new xmlrpcval('http://feeds.feedburner.com/greentwinkiecom'),
new xmlrpcval('seo|search engine optimization|Optimizing my site')
));

$response = $client->send($message);

if($response->faultCode() == '0'){ echo 'it works'; }

 

You can found here: http://xmlrpc.scripting.com/ more information about what is XML-RPC is and how to handle the code.

The most important thing that you should know for now is not to abuse of this. If you send too many pings from the same URL or site in a short period of time you may be banned for that URL, or even that specific IP. As I read over the internet some considered (or still consider) XML-RPC pinging as Black Hat SEO because it could be used to get to the first page on the search result for the long-tail words in a very short period of time... but the pings does not count so much in the present time. They are still used with success to promote the sites.

Search Engine Optimization is, mainly, making your site prepared for the spiders and crawlers that visit it and gather data about the content, the URLs and lots of other things. The on-page SEO (that things that a SEO specialist does on your site like putting the h1, h2, h3... h6 tags in the best place on the pages, creating a list of keywords and setting the best titles and metatags, redesigning your URLs to friendly URLs - I've been writing about this, so you must know already about it) are usually done once. From time to time they can be updated, but that's not a requirement.

One of our more recent projects involved some modification to a flash web page and it's improvement from the search engine optimization point of view. The client was complaining that his page was loading very slow and it was not very accessible from the main search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing). I am not going to write about my experience with that particular web site, but the use of Flash for web development is slowly dying while the seo is having more and more influence over web design.

Do you know how people think when searching with Google? You should know, you probably reached this post using a search engine. Somebody put some comments inside an image to illustrate a very common way to think: people have no patience to see the results from pages greater than 3. Some stop at the end of the first page.

I am sure you think the same way, only on occasion you reach the fifth or sixth page, almost never on tenth page. So, do you really think that you don't need a SEO expert for your web project?

Let's say that you have a table with the following structure:

+--------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field        | Type     | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+--------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Id           | int(11)  | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| Author       | char(30) | NO   |     |         |                |
| Title        | char(100)| NO   |     |         |                |
| Summary      | text     | YES  |     |         |                |
| ISBN         | char(100)| YES  |     |         |                |
| Release_year | date     | NO   |     | 0       |                |
+--------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

and you want to list the column inside mysql and/or php code.