It’s quite common SEO practice to write articles on subjects relating to your website and submit them to article sites. Good quality informative articles will then be picked up by other website owners and used on their sites to further the exposure of the useful information. Several months ago I wrote an article on secured loans and bad credit which I distributed to a number of article sites. Over time I have seen the article used on a few sites and naturally it pleases me to know other people found of use. However some website owners simply choose to use one

This is quite a hot topic in SEO as people dispute the ethical concept of buying links on other websites. In a recent response to the question of whether or not a site would be punished for buying links, I read the following: ‘I don’t know but I think that you shouldn’t be punished. You are not getting punished for buying a text ad in a newspaper, so why should you be punished for buying a text link on a web site? You are marketing your product. Isn’t the web all about that? ‘ This makes a very valid point on the

This is an addition to a previous post about my site creditmarket.co.uk In the post I didn’t go into any reason why I think Google decided to drop the site from it’s listings after a consistent run near the top (for which I can’t deny I’m grateful).  Before I go any further I must make a point of saying that I was by no means the only one affected at a similar time due to the same ‘Google update’. This particular update (like a tropical storm) had a name. My recall is shaky as there were several ‘named’ updates but the one

To create a logo image fo your website that appears to the left of the ‘http://www’ of your web address. Go here: http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ It’s a free service and it can make any picture you want into a ‘favicon’. Leave a comment if you want any more info.

Now that I have uploaded a fresh new slicker version of creditmarket.co.uk it’s got me thinking and reflecting on the journey so far. In brief, in 2002 I was lucky enough to procure the nice memorable domain name. I’d never built a website and I only knew how because I went through the tutorials in dreamweaver. After letting my creative side run wild I came up with a nice ‘yellow’ theme for the site. This wasn’t really official enough for a personal finance site so after a couple of months the site became blue. I read and read and read and discovered a

It is done. The site had been completely revamped using much better structure, more choice, more logic, more options and basically, more..! There were a few scary moments when I went live with the update due to one or two human errors and a database discrepancy. I thought I might have to completely remove the hosting account and start from scratch but that would have been a real hair puller due to the static IP and SSL… Luckily, perseverance paid dividends as usual! Now to wait and see if Google pays any attention!  

After many long hours and much learning and developiing I am very close to uploading the newly redesigned version of my site. Not this one, my mail ‘flagship’ as some might call it. Approx 600 pages later and I am about to start the painstaking task of writing the htaccess with all the URL redirects. OK so if I’d tried I could have kept all file extensions the same but the site needed restructuring and it’s had some problems with the big ‘G’ in the past so a spring clean should help. So to it…

When I set myself the task of completely redesigning one of my sites using php and css I thought about how long it would take. The site has over 550 pages and they’re all just plain html. I started by making up some templates so it was really just a case of copying and pasting content. There are some other layout alterations and all the internal links need to be completely changed (and I’m not looking forward to updating the htaccess redirects for the whole site!). I set myself a target of at least creating 10 new pages per day.

Anybody who has played around with templates using WordPress will know that it is the template that calls other elements of the page together. Typically the code looks something like this: The leftcolumn.php displays on the left of the page etc. If the left column contains a menu and the right column contains the text and main content of the page, you should switch the two around. You may think why does this make a difference? But I tried it and with the first set up, the source code of the finished page had all the code for the menu

I just practiced what I preached and moved 100 lines of navigation and menu code underneath the content of my main site. All the navigation still displays above the main text but the code is now much further down the page, making it easier for the SE’s to get to the meat! I should have done that months ago….! Ah well.