If you need some stock photos, one of the best places is Fotolia.com. They have a great selection of royalty-free stock images that you can use for websites.
One of my clients got images of paddle boats for their site.
Hire a Fiverr and Save Some Time
May 24, 2011Ok, sometimes you have to know when your beat. I have tried and tried and then had one of my guys try and failed to install the world famous one click install for WordPress on a Windows 2003 box. We have done this before many times, but this particular box is giving us trouble. I don’t know what I said to it to tick it off, but it won’t play ball.
As I mention my woes to another geek at happy hour, he mentioned this site: Fiverr. It is a site that list jobs people are willing to do for $5. There is a “programming”, “technology”, and “programming” section which had a few people that could solve my issue. I “ordered” a service, he fixed my issue and he received $5 (actually I gave him $20 since I spent over 8 hours of my time on this issue).
Sometimes you just need to bring in the experts and at $5, it’s not like you are hiring a plumber.
Lesson Learned: First Link Priority
May 18, 2011Noble Samurai posted this nice article on the First Link Priority issue. In a nutshell, if you have two links going from one page to another, only the first one counts, the rest are ignored.
So if your first link is an image, then you are not passing along those rich anchor text keywords. They provide a few examples on how to detect and fix the issue. The main technique is image replacement, which we do use on the newer site. However, to confess, it was more about “graceful degradation” and device compatibility then SEO.
You can see a violation of this rule on Rainydaygames.ca’s Action Games category page. As you can see, the thumbnail image precedes the text link. We could use text replacement here, but since there are quite a few images in some of the categories, we run the risk of violating another law: Show Google what you show your users.
From my readings, using the text replacement method once or twice is perfectly safe. Past that, it starts to get risking. Instead for RDG’s categories, I would just move the image to the right side so that the link comes first in order and then the image. The other option is to move the game title up and span across columns.
Ah, Rainy Day Games. She was a beauty queen back in the day. She ranked number one for most of her games, but now time as faded her. I guess it’s time for a face lift. Scalpel here we come.
It’s going to be a big job.
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Posted by Corey
Fancy an Icon?
May 10, 2011The icon is just a file named “favicon.ico” that sits in the root of your website. It is standarized now so that all browsers will look there as the source.
US-EH.com's favicon.ico
However, you can also put the icon anywhere in your site, but you have to make sure you put the path in the link tag under your header tag.
<html>
<head>
…
<link rel=”SHORTCUT ICON” href=”http://www.us-eh.com/favicon.ico” />
…
</head>
To create the ico file, I use the free online tool by favicon.cc. I just upload a logo and then edit the 16×16 grid to get it looking clean. Download it and put it in the root and don’t forget to add the above tag to your header.
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Posted by Corey
Wiebe’s Moving Update
May 6, 2011We continue with our goal to modernize our customer’s sites with a Winnipeg Moving company, Wiebe’s. Once again, the new site has been converted to ASP.MVC and C#. This site was already in .Net, so it was a quick upgrade. We also took the time to change a few bits of the copy. We changed the more generic term “Local” and made it more concrete with “Winnipeg”. The same for “Rural” and “Manitoba”. Finally, we redirected the old URLs to the new ones uses IIS redirects. I will review the logs the next month to see if those old URL are still being used and if not, then remove them.
The next step for Wiebe’s Storage is to relook at their SEO efforts. They have 2 to 4 competitors that are firmly planted in the market, however, they are not that far out of range. Time to do some analysis.
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Posted by Corey
Code and Processes 