Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

Photoblog

Monotone Photolog Theme for WordPressBecause it is very simple to upload images with WordPress soon users started to regularly post photos, using WordPress as a photoblog. Until the release of WP2.5 photobloggers had to use the custom fields to upload thumbnails for the archive or to create a filmstrip in the footer. With the new media uploader in WP2.5 this is not longer needed. WP now automatically generates a medium sized and a small thumbnail. Thumbnail sizes can be specified in the settings and used for the archives display or a filmstrip.

There aren’t many photolog themes for Wp and even less generate the photolog feeling with only one picture on the mainpage and a click on the picture goes to the previous entry. With the arrival of the Monotone Photolog Theme for WordPress theming in this area soon make become more popular. AFAIK Monotone officially is only released for WordPress.com, but can be retrieved from the SVN Directory.

Tumblelog

T1 Tumbletheme for WordPressTumblr is a popular platform, perfect for quick blogging items people stumble upon. I mentioned in my previous entry that Chyrp a great self-hosted platform is for your own tumblog (?!), but also WordPress can be used as tumble-engine.

Using WordPress as a tumblelog is not difficult: there are several themes to make your Wp blog more tumblr-alike and there’s even a Quick Post plugin for WordPress, providing the blogger with bookmarklets to easily submit content to their WordPress powered tumblelog.

Searching for web pages on a particular topic is as easy as typing a few words into Firefox’s Search Bar.

For example, if you want to find information about the world cup:

1. Click in the Search Bar.
2. Type the phrase world cup. Your typing replaces any text currently in the search bar.
3. Hit EnterReturn to search.

Search results for “world cup” appear in the Firefox window.

Selecting search engine

You can switch the search engine by clicking on its icon and selecting the search engine of your choice. Some search engines, like Google, search the whole web; others, like Amazon.com, only search specific sites.

Manage search engines

Click on the icon of the search engine and select Manage Search Engines... to add, reorder, remove, or restore the default search engines. Select a search engine and click the appropriate button to to move it around within the list or remove it. You can install new search engines by clicking the Get more search engines… link.

* Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involves a combination of free website submissions and paid search engine listings, to ensure your website reaches customers using search engines to research purchase decisions.
* Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art and science of increasing your website’s visibility to search engines for those important keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business.
* Search Engine Optimisation typically includes keyword research and development, competitive analysis and industry benchmarking, backend coding optimisation, website submissions and results reporting.

Search engines are internet venues where BILLIONS of people congregate to search for information. The most prominent search engine giants are Google and Yahoo. The kind of traffic these dot-com companies receive per hour is phenomenal.

So naturally, companies would gravitate towards placing their links and sites in an attempt to garner more visits to their web sites.

In order to maximize ranking and PLACEMENT, companies have used tools such as search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is the method or process of improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing.

Legitimate search engine optimization practices focus on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving site content, usability and using legitimate methos of promotion through web phenomena such as viral marketing.

Search engines all use complex algorithms in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering. However, “black hat” SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo will continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the garbage out.

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a result page. The more common ones are adverts, paid inclusion, and organic listings. Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself foremost with organic listings for a variety of keywords. This can increase the quality and quantity or visitors to a desired web site.

Search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. Search engines crawl through the web. Search engines eventually find your site and index the pages they find. Page titles, body text (ie, great content), META tags and other elements all play a role in what gets indexed. People then review the results of what was found by the search engine, based on keywords they type into the search engine.

A directory such as Yahoo! Directory depends on human editors to create its listings. You submit a description of your site to the directory for editors to review. A good site, with good content, will be more likely to get reviewed than a poor site. A search of a directory looks for matches only in that directory’s index.

Yahoo! also has a search engine that includes spidered websites along with their directory listings and “Sponsor Results” which are pay per click ads, similar to Google’s Adwords. Originally Yahoo! displayed only listings from their directory. Then in 2002 they added search engine listings from Google. In 2004 they started using their own search engine based on AltaVista’s technology. A few years later they acquired Overture (formerly GoTo) which was the first pay per click program.

This is where things start to get complicated.
Search engines are trickier than they look!  You’ll discover this the first time you enter a query on C++, the programming language.  At least of the Web search engines will essentially say, “Huh?”

C++ is not a word.  It’s a letter followed by two characters that might, depending on the index, be regarded merely as punctuation.  Many text search engines have trouble handling input of this type.  Many don’t deal too well with numbers, either.  So much for “007,” “R2D2,”or “Catch-22.”

Important Note:  This problem is no longer as bad as it used to be.  I’m now finding relevant hits for C++ on a majority of search engines sites.

Here’s another example of a text string search engines hate:  To be or not to be.  Just about anyone who finished junior high school will be able to tell you where the phrase comes from and (possibly!) what it means.  But some search engines choke because all the words in the phrase are stop words–i.e., unimportant words too short and too common to be considered relevant strings on which to search.   However, if you enclose the query in quotation marks, forcing the search engine to find the words, “to be or not to be” in that precise order, most search engines can  recognize the phrase as a famous quotation from Hamlet.

Let’s take a less obvious example.  Suppose you’re a fan of murder mysteries and you want to search the Web for the home pages of all your favorite authors in that genre.  If you simply enter the words “mystery” and “writer,” most search engines will return hyperlinks to all Web documents that contain the word “mystery” or the word, “writer.”  This will probably include hundreds–or even thousands–of URLs, most of which will have no relevance to your search. If you enter the words as a phrase, however, you stand a better chance of getting some good hits.

However, as search technology advances, this is not as much of a problem as it was a couple of years ago. Many search engines will now automatically apply the “adjacency” operator when responding to a two-word query. This means that they will indeed look for documents in which your two words appear next to each other.

If you understand how search engines organize information and run queries, you can maximize your chances of getting hits on URLs that matter.

Search engine ranking algorithms are closely guarded secrets, for at least two reasons: search engine companies want to protect their methods from their competitors, and they also want to make it difficult for web site owners to manipulate their rankings.

That said, a specific page’s relevance ranking for a specific query currently depends on three factors:

* Its relevance to the words and concepts in the query
* Its overall link popularity
* Whether or not it is being penalized for excessive search engine optimization (SEO).

Examples of SEO abuse would be a lot of sites linked to each other in a circular scam, or excessive and highly ungrammatical stuffing with keywords.

Factor 2 was innovated by Google with PageRank.  Essentially, the more incoming links your page has, the better.  But it is more complicated than that:  indeed, PageRank is a tricky concept because it is circular, as follows:   Every page on the Internet has a minimum PageRank score just for existing.  85%  (at least, that’s the best known estimate, based on an early paper) of this PageRank is passed along to the pages that page links to, divided more or less equally along its outgoing links.   A page’s PageRank is the sum of the minimum value plus all the PageRank passed to it via incoming links.

Although this is circular, mathematical algorithms exist for calculating it iteratively.

In one final complication, what I just said applies to “raw PageRank.”   Google actually reports PageRank scores of 0 to 10 that are believed to be based on the logarithm of raw PageRank (they’re reported as whole numbers).   And the base of that logarithm is believed to be approximately 6.

Anyhow, there are about 30 sites on the Web of PageRank10, including Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Intel, and NASA.  IBM, AOL, and CNN, by way of contrast, were only at PageRank 9 as of early in 2004.

Further refinements in link popularity rankings are under development.  Notably, link popularity can be made specific to a subject or category; i.e., pages can have different PageRanks for health vs. sports vs. computers vs. whatever.  Supposedly, AskJeeves/Teoma already works that way.

It is believed that Inktomi, Altavista, et al. use link popularity in their ranking algorithms, but to a much lesser extent than Google.  Yahoo, owner of Inktomi, Altavista, Alltheweb, is rolling out a new search engine, which reportedly includes a feature called Web Rank.  More on how that works soon.

The robots.txt file will instruct search engine robots what pages and/or folders on your blog or website should be or should NOT be crawled and indexed. Most Content Management Software (Wordpress, Joomla, etc.) will have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images or admin files) and you really don’t want them to crawl them because there is no relevant content on them so creating a simple robots.txt file can actually improve your website crawlability and therefore rankings and organic traffic.

These occur when a search engine treats www.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com, and yourdomain.com/index.html as different web sites. When Google does this, it flags the different copies as duplicate content, and penalizes them. If yourdomain.com is not penalized and all other sites link to your web site using www.yourdomain.com, then the version left in the index will have no ranking. These are basic issues that other major search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN, have no problem dealing with. Google’s reputation as the world’s greatest search engine (self-ranked as a ten on a scale of one to ten) is hindered by its inability to resolve basic indexing issues.

Search engine optimization has been a hot topic for a last couple of years. With changing algorithms, search engines and directories swapping technologies and services and a general growth (or sense of survival), much has changed in search engine optimization technique. In the early days, spamming your own website with endless strings of keywords with the same color as the background is gone.

Search engine optimization then evolved into a dependence solely upon the content of the metatags regardless of what the rest of the rest of the site was about. Spamming the title and description tags with huge strings of keywords was enough to get top placement in many search engines (SE’s).

Now, however, search engine optimization has come to a place of making the metatag content match the text on the rest of the web page. Throw in link popularity and relevancy and you now have the contemporary formula for top rankings.

In contemporary search engine optimization technique, the title tag is probably the most important metatag on the website. The website’s primary keyword / keyphrase needs to be in the title tag. The description tag and other hidden metatags also are beneficial when they are keyword rich.

Search engine optimization, now also features the creation of keyword-rich and hopefully content rich text for the body of the web page. The keyword-rich text is for the SE’s and the content is for the visitors. Both audiences must be kept in mind when writing this text.

The last element in search engine optimization is the creation of incoming links that are relevant to the main subject of the website. One way to accomplish receiving incoming links is to trade links with another site (reciprocal linking). Another way is to pay another relevant website a monthly advertising fee in order to display a text or graphical link to your site.

Search engine optimization is something that can be accomplished through education, through an SEO company or through software that will create keyword-rich pages semi-automatically.

The educational part of search engine optimization can be attained by reading everything on the Internet focused on this subject. Going with a search engine optimization company will work for others who don’t have the time or inclination to self-educate or who want to get started right away. Software will work for others, though it is generally not as effective as the other two methods since search engine optimization is as much an art as it is a science.