Get Good Ranks through Search Engines

There are a few points you need to focus on if you want to get good ranks in the search engine.
In order of importance, here are what you should focus:
1. Keyword research
The idea is to find low-competition keyword phrase with good demand. Many people, especially newbies, try to optimize for competitive keywords and wonder why they never get to the top 10 in the search engine.
A simple approach is to type in a keyword phrase into Google and check how many results it returns. If it returns less than 500,000 results, you will have a good chance to rank well for that keyword phrase.

2. Link building
Link building is almost the "everything" of SEO.
If you are not a newbie, you would have read everything about link building.
article marketing
social bookmarking
web 2.0 sites
website directories
blog comments
press release
RSS
LinkVana
The game of search engine optimization is a game of link building, and the game of link building is a game of time vs money.
If you have all the time in the world, it is possible to do everything yourself. Else, you will have to spend money to get the chore done.
That's why I said link building is a game of time vs money.

3. SEO friendly website
I just want to quickly give you a checklist of things you need to take note in onpage optimization.
Use keywords as your domain name.
For every article, make sure that the keywords are in the title, first sentence of the first paragraph and inside the last paragraph.
Keywords in the title and keyword meta tags.
You should use the filename of the article as the filename of your webpage.

4. Unique content
Is it a must to rewrite the articles? My answer is no. But contrary to my answer, 95% of my websites are created using rewritten articles. I don't want Google to wake up one day thinking that they want to penalize duplicated content and suddenly my income becomes $0 overnight!

5. 'Beauty' of the website
Many people don't focus on this. What happen is Google measures the duration a visitor stays on your website. If the duration is long, Google will think your website has good content and it will reward you with better rank.
To get good ranks in the search engines, you need to focus on all the 5 points. Search engine optimization is not a rocket science. It's purely hard work and leverage. Most of the work are tedious, but if you know how to outsource and buy tools that can simply the work, you will greatly cut down your time on search engine optimization.

CSS3

CSS-Only form

A great example of a table-less form created by Jeff Howden. A real time saver for web developers:

http://jeffhowden.com/code/css/forms/

Link Thumbnail with CSS

A great way of previewing what the link you are about to click is about. Why send your users to a website they dont wanna go? Let them preview it through a thumbnail:

http://lab.arc90.com/2006/07/link_thumbnail.php

CSS Submit Buttons

Almost every single website has a form of some sort. Here’s a good way of treating your beloved form submit button. Great article:

http://www.ukthoughts.co.uk/journal/css…

Star Ratings

You see theese more and more. Mostly on CSS Galleries, Netflix, etc. Here’s a looooooong but very interesting article on how to put stars on your already-rocking website:

http://www.komodomedia.com/blog/2005/08/…

Target WHO?

Let users decide if they want to open a link in a new window or not. A good article on the subject:

http://webdesign.maratz.com/lab/new…

Oh yeah, the link above opens a new window :)

You will never ask about round corners again!

A massive set of techniques to create rounded corners with CSS. Some use images for the corners, some dont. Try the different methods and see what matches your preference. I personally think: The less images the better, but it all depends on what you are trying to create. Enjoy:

http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/…

Photoshop-Style Drop Shadows with CSS

I was recently working on a project that required each uploaded image to have a drop shadow blow it. After searching all over the place, I found a really simple and comprehensive solution to the problem. Check this out:

http://theshapeofdays.com/….

CSS Tab Menus!

A great set of CSS Menus created by exploding boy. Take a look at the source code and notice how each menu code is segmented so that it’s easy to follow.

http://exploding-boy.com/images/cssmenus/menus.html

About CSS3.com

WHAT IS CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the modern standard for website presentation. When combined with structural markup language like HTML, XHTML, or XML (though not limited to these), CSS provide Internet browsers with the information that enables them to present all the visual aspects and elements of a web document. CSS apply things like borders, spacing between paragraphs, margins, headings on images, control of font faces or colors, background colors and images, textual effects like underlined or strike-through text, layering, positioning, and a number of other presentational effects. CSS controls the presentational aspects of a web page’s design, whereas HTML, XHTML, or XML control the
structure of a webpage, which means more than determining that certain text is a heading, other text is a paragraph, other text os a list of hyperlinks, and so on.

By using modern standards like CSS and XHTML, you can dramatically reduce the cost of building and maintaining a website when compared to legacy HTML-only pages. You can also greatly reduce the amount of physical bandwidth and hard disk space required, resulting in immediate long-term benefits for any webmasters and web visitor

CSS TUTORIAL

Cascading Style Sheets, commonly referred to as CSS, is a simple design language intended to simplify the process of making web pages presentable. Put simply, CSS handles the look and feel part of a web page or a whole website. With CSS, you can control the color of the text, the style of fonts, the spacing between paragraphs, how columns are sized and laid out, what background images or colors are used, as well as a variery of other effects and styles explained here.

The term cascading in Cascading Style Sheets refers to a specific way in which browsers determine which styles to apply to a specific part of the page. This method is called “the cascade”, and it’s from the cascade that CSS takes its name.

CSS3.com’s new style.

What do you think? approve? disapprove? Love it? Hate it?

I like the way all properties were easy to reach before. I will add a list of each one of them to the side menu very soon.

Also, Ive noticed I should have made each one of the properties a “page” and not a “post”. Is there a way to easily change that on wp?

New Cascading Style Sheets Recommendation from W3C

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today issued a Recommendation for Web style sheets. The Recommendation - Cascading Style Sheets, level 1 (CSS1) - gives Web designers a robust set of tools to help them specify Web page presentation properties such as fonts, colors and margins. Through links, CSS1 allows a single style sheet to apply to all Web pages on a site and thereby dramatically simplifying Web site maintenance. Also, a style sheet can be put inside a Web document and in detail specify how the document is presented. W3C Members have reviewed the CSS1 specification and support its adoption by the industry.
Microsoft and other software vendors have products that support CSS1; Netscape, Adobe, SoftQuad and Grif are among the W3C Members who will be adding support for CSS1 in their upcoming software releases.
With Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) content providers do not have the control they have in print media over color, text indentation, positioning, and other aspects of style. Today CSS1 offers a powerful and manageable way for authors, artists and typographers to specify the visual presentation of an HTML document or collection of documents.
"The Web's main document format, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), was intentionally designed as a simple language that valued document structure over document presentation. However, with the commercialization of the Web, presentation of Web documents is becoming increasingly critical," said Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the W3C and creator of the World Wide Web. "CSS1 brings HTML authoring to the next level by effectively combining the structure and content of Web pages with powerful presentation capabilities. We look forward to the industry's further adoption of CSS1."
"CSS1 is a powerful tool. It can alter the look and feel of an entire web site simply by changing a single style sheet," said Håkon Lie, co-architect of CSS1. "CSS1 makes it very much easier to maintain a consistent style throughout the entire Web site. At the same time, CSS1 enables rich individual expressions that Web designers will appreciate."
Creative web designers have tried to bypass HTML's limitations by using images of text, which look like good typography but result in documents that cannot be searched, fed to speech synthesizers for visually impaired users, and do not print well. They have also used non-portable proprietary HTML extensions to gain control of spacing, and tables to simulate margins and indents. CSS1 allows designers to directly express the appearance they seek while retaining device-indepedent document structure, reusability, searchability and accessibility for the disabled.
"By separating the structure from the visual presentation of documents, we ensure the documents created today can also be displayed on the presentation devices of tomorrow," said Bert Bos, co-architect of CSS1. "HTML has become a universal storage format that will outlast current computers. CSS1, when used correctly, assures that documents can be preserved without sacrificing aesthetics on the Web."
It is expected that other specifications will build on CSS1 to provide support for Web fonts, speech style sheets, extended layout and printing capabilities. Also, W3C is actively working with its members to ensure that script-based applications can take advantage of style sheets. For example, a script attached to a Web page may dynamically alter properties, such as color, set in a CSS1 style sheet.
Please see attached fact sheet and testimonials document for additional information on CSS1.