Hey guys, first of all I’d like to apologize for not posting in so long. I was busy with exams and stuff, but they’re now over, so you can expect lots of new posts soon . Anyway, I thought I’d post some seo tips to help you website gets indexed and ranked, since a lot of people have asked me for this. They are quite basic and include both on-page seo and off-page seo tips, but they are important and helpful nevertheless.

The SEO Tips

(in no particular order)

1. Title Tags: Use your keywords in your title tag, and make sure you have a unique title tag for every page. If you’re using WordPress, download the All in One Seo Pack Plugin.
2. Decide between the www and non www versions of your site, and redirect one of them to the other. Here’s a guide showing you how to do that. Use the Redirection plugin to manage all your redirects, if you are using WordPress.
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Hey guys, I am starting a new weekly series, in which I will post links to some of the articles I have stumbled upon during the week. They will be related to web design, graphic design, freelancing, seo etc.. ( you get the picture).

Web Design

1. Coding a Web Design for Speed and Quality
2. Web Design Trends: Testimonials Design
3. All You Need to Know about Web Design Project Planning and Process
4. 5 Damn Easy Ways To Improve User Experience
5. 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

Roundups

1. The element wood in web sites – 33 examples
2. Say it Loud! 60 Websites with Huge Typography
3. 34 cheat sheets for web designers and developers
4. 25 Great Examples of Using Gradient Effects in Web Designs
5. 26 awesome Firefox add-ons for web workers
6. 5 Must Read Presentations about CSS Coding
7. 50 RSS Feeds Every Designer Should Read
8. 30 Must Have Web Design Books In Your Christmas Wishlist
9. Top 10 Tutorials To Learn PSD To HTML Conversion
10. 500+ Free Download High Quality Photoshop PSD Files For Designers
11. 40 Free Amazing jQuery Plugins and Tutorials With Demo

Freelancing

1. Bulletproof Your First Freelance Contract
2. 8 Sure-Fire Ways Freelance Designers Can Earn Passive Income
3. Long Term Freelancing Success – Part 1 – Dedication
4. How to Skyrocket Your Earnings as a Freelancer
5. The Bare Bones That Every Freelance Contract Should Have

SEO

1. Search Engine Optimization 101
2. The Only SEO Tools You’ll Ever Need
3. 21 SEOs you must follow on Twitter
4. The Ultimate WordPress SEO Checklist
5. 10 Link Building Tools for Tracking Inbound Links

Blogging

1. Blogging: Secure Your Spot as the “Go-To” Blog
2. How to Fail as a Blogger
3. Selling Ad Space: Tips from Top Design Blog Owners
4. Why I Can’t Stop Blogging About Design
5. 6 Sure-Fire Strategies for Better Blogging

Twitter, Social Media

1. 5 Simple Steps To Rock Social Media
2. Social Media Basics For Freelancers
3. 10 Essential Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter
4. 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs
5. Top 10 Ways to Lose Twitter Followers

I hope you found some useful links here. Please feel free to share any links via the comments. Oh, and please subscribe to my rss feed if you want to get the latest updates.

Hey everyone, I am back. This post is going to be about WordPress SEO. It’s a checklist of the steps you should take to ensure that your WordPress blog is fully optimized. I hope you like the post and find it helpful.

Step 1: Use Pretty Permalinks

• By Default, WordPress uses very ugly permalinks like www.yoursite.com/?p80 which are not seo friendly.
• But you can easily change your permalink structure. Simply go to Settings->Permalinks, Select Custom Structure and type in /%postname% in the text field. This will make the default url of a post www.yoursite.con/your-post-name which is search engine friendly.
• You can also use /%category%/%postname% to include categories in the url. But I recommend only using postname, if you are going to include a post in more than one category.
• After changing permalinks, install the Redirection Plugin and under the Plugin’s Options, make sure both the ‘Url Monitoring’ check boxes are set to ‘Modified Posts’

Step 2: Optimize the Meta Tags

• The code I use in my title tag is this:

  <title><?php wp_title(); ?><?php if(wp_title(, false)) { echo | ; } ?><?php bloginfo( ame); if(is_home()) { echo | ; bloginfo( wouldescription); } ?></title>

  What this does is that on the home page, it shows Your Blog Name | Your Blog Tagline, and on post pages it shows Post Title | Blog Name. To use this piece of code, simply go to Theme Editor -> Header.php and replace the default title tag code with this one.
• For your meta description tag, I suggest you use a piece of code something like this:

<?php if (is_single() || is_page() ) : if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?><meta name=”description” content=”<?php the_excerpt_rss(); ?>”/><?php endwhile; endif; elseif(is_home()) : ?><meta name=”description”content=”<?php bloginfo( wouldescription); ?>” />

What this does, is that on singe post pages, it uses an excerpt of your post and on your home page, it uses your blog tag line as the description.
• Also, For more control, you should use the All in One Seo Pack Plugin so that you can set custom post titles for certain posts, and also add meta keyword tags for posts.

Step 3: Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate Content could affect your search engine rankings, and in a wordpress blog, there are often 4 to 5 places where a post appears. This could harm your blog a lot. To avoid duplicate content, here are some steps you should take

• Use only excerpts of your post on the home page, category page and tag pages.
• Noindex all the unessential pages of your blog.
• Also, Disable unnecessary archives such as the author based archive on a single author blog or a date based archive if you think it’s not required using the Robots Meta Plugin. Below is a screen shot of the settings I use in Robots Meta:

Step 4: Use a Sitemap

• Use the XML Sitemaps plugin to generate a sitemap. The plugin’s default settings are fine. Simply upload and activate the plugin and you’re fine.
• Also submit the sitemap to Google in Google Webmaster Central.

Step 5: Nofollow Links you don’t want to Pass Juice to

Okay, we have heard of Google’s statement on Pagerank Sculpting, but even then, I think you should nofollow certain links, such as links to register and login pages and links to your categories and tag pages if you’ve decided to keep them from being indexed. You can use Robot’s Meta for this too, here are the settings I used:

Step 6: Use Proper Internal Linking Structure

It is very important to maintain a good linking structure within your blog. It helps keep visitors on your blog and helps in improving search engine rankings. Here are some steps you can take to improve your internal linking structure:

• Use a Related Posts Plugin.
• Use Breadcrumbs
• If possible, use simple text-based navigation
• Optimize the anchor text of links
• Link to your most popular blog posts from the sidebar
• Use a sitemap as outlined above

Step 7: Optimize your Images

• Use keywords in the alt attribute
• Include keywords in image names
• Enter a description in the title tag
• Use the SEO Friendly Images Plugin
• Use the Smush.it plugin to optimize images

Step 8: Other Quick Tips

• Choose between www and non www and redirect one to the other. You can use the Redirection Plugin for this.
• Ping Sites after publishing new posts. Go to the Writing Tab and scroll down to the update services box. Add a list of sites you want to ping when you publish new posts in the box. Here’s a short list

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2 http://bblog.com/ping.php http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php http://ping.feedburner.com http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/ http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://topicexchange.com/RPC http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

• Make sure your sites html and css are valid.
• Make sure that your blog title is an h1 on the home page and that your post titles are an h1 on the post pages.

That’s about it. I hope you found this post useful. Please help share this post by bookmarking it on your favorite social bookmarking sites. Also, if you liked this post, please Subscribe to my RSS Feed.

Here is a list of 15 Awesome Logos linked to their Design Processes, which contain information on how the designer came up with the concept, how he executed the concept and a lot more. I found them extremely interesting to read, and I hope you do to.

1. Just Creative Design Logo by Jacob Cass
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Hey, I thought I’d compile a list of some of the best articles on how to use twitter for business. Here is the list, currently comprising of 25+ articles. If you feel that an article not on this list should be included, simply leave a comment with a link to the article, and I will add it to this list.

Tips, Tricks and Guides

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Another trend I have been noticing in web design is the large number of sites using mascots nowadays. In this post, I will be posting examples of popular sites using mascots, as well as tips and links to tutorials.

What is a Mascot?

It an animal, human or any other kind of object, which is used in the branding of a company/website. They are used to identify a brand, and they typically indicate the kind of ideals the brand represents, for example, friendliness etc. A mascot is usually cute, friendly and sweet, and on occasions, it may also be kind of silly . Mascots are also used on advertising material. Another thing to note is that mascots aren’t the same as illustrations. Illustrations may not necessarily be used in the branding of the site, and different illustrations may be used on different pages. But the mascot represents the identity of the site, and it stays the same throughout the site.

Examples of sites using Mascots:

Mailchimp

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Hey, I am going to be posting a series of articles of the trends which have emerged in web design in recent times. I will be covering one trend in each article. This is the first part of the series, and in this part, I will be covering font replacement. Gone are the days when Designers are limited to using Arial, Helvetica and Verdana in the body of their websites. Although these fonts still dominate, there has been a growing trend among designers to use various font replacement techniques to upgrade the typography of the sites they build by using so called ‘non standard’ fonts on their sites generally for blocks of text and for headings.

Examples

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Hello everyone, in this article I am going to showcase 20 super creative and inspirational logos. The logos are linked to the designers website.
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There are quite literally thousands and thousands of WordPress plugins out there. Well, here is a list of my top 70 plugins, most of which I have used on some blog or another at one time or another. Enjoy

WordPress SEO Plugins

1. Google XML Sitemaps Generator – This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
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Hey everyone, this article is going to be a list of the best, most creative and most attractive free social bookmarking sets. I took quite a while to compile this list, so I hope you like it.

1. Social Media Icons Pack in 3 Sizes for Download

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