AlexOConnor

A little about SEO This post may or may not help you. If you lack technical knowledge or capacity, then this guide might be a little hard to swallow. Everything that I post in here I have personally tried and tested. I use these techniques everyday in my job. These techniques are also w3c compliant, for those of you who don't know... w3c is the www consortium, they write the rules for programming web based applications and websites. But enough of that. There exists a technology called SEO. It is an accronym that stands for "Search Engine Optimisation", before we get into what SEO is all about, there is common myth and misconception that I want to vanquish from your memory banks... Many people say that to implement SEO into your website correctly you need to make links back to your page... While that is partly true, it's also partly untrue. The links are only effective if the person is affilated with you. The link has to be reciprocated, if you make a link on your myspace to your youtube, it won't do anything. It's like buying a one way ticket and expecting to get home. You need to make a spiders web of information... And this is where it gets technical... Creating the spiders web! This is where some technical knowledge (or applied vocational skills) would be extremely handy. We are going to discuss HTML. This is the core of SEO, it's not about links, it's about code. If someone says they can build you a website with SEO, they will intergrate SEO from the start. Effectivley, you should design a website around SEO. It's extrememly important to any aspect of the web. Fortunatly for many of us here today, we have a distinct advantage!... I'm going to make an assumption here that most of you use pre-built web pages where you only have to make a profile. For my example, I am going to use Youtube. Here is the part you should all... attempt to understand, it would be hepful, but it certainly isn't vital. <title>Your webpage title goes here</title> <h1> This is a heading </h1> <h2>This is a heading</h2> <h3>This is a heading</h3> <h4> This is a heading</h4> <p>This is a paragraph</p>[/html] If this is already out of your depth, don't worry too much, It shouldn't get any more technical than that. SEO is an art in itself, but we aren't going to discuss it in extremem detail, I'll keep it low-key. THe code in that box above is a scripting language called HTML. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. The elements listed there are called tags. The first thing you will see is the title tag: '<title>......</title>', that is the first thing the webpage reads. So when you sign up for your profile, if it asks for your name or such like... This will often also wind up being the title to your webpage. The title output is displayed at the top of your web browser, it is not actualy displayed in the webpage: [center][/center] The next parts are the h tags, these are the page headers, the second most important thing in your website, each of these will be read by google and when people put in a search, google reads your heading and says "That's a close match, this one will go high up in the list", so try to make your headings conherant, don't just do random. <p> is where you normally have "About me", "My interests", "My hobbies", "What me and my girlfreind did this morning"... You get the jist, try and kepe your content clean. And by that I don't mean reduce vulgarity. Make sure your language skills are epic, if you have poor grammar then the liklihood is that it will hinder your SEO. [size=5] [center][b]The Google BOT![/b][/center] [/size] The Google BOT is a monster that crawls the web. Considering I can't teach you the ins and otus of SEO without teaching you programming, I'm going to teach you the most basic method of SEO, it is still effective, however... It can be slow. Add your website to google. I don't want to explain how to do that in this post because google do a darn good job of explaining it themselves, if you use youtube or another service like it, don't bother adding it to google, it's already there. However if you have a personal website here is the link to add it to google: http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/ [size=5] [center][b]How The Google BOT Works...[/b][/center] [/size] The Google BOT searches through web pages and reads all the content. It will find your website through links to other pages, the more links you have, the faster your website will appear in google, however, if you have too many links it will dilute your page, and there will be an information overload and your content will be flooded. Effectivley, you will drown your website. Be clear, be concise, only have relevant links, and try to keep it below 12. The Google BOT will manually add your website eventually even if you don't add it manual, but if you do add it manually... Great. It's faster! To some of you, this may not be new, but if you have questions, ask me. Alex O'Connor

Gimp for everything! It is a little difficult to use, but if you know it inside out, it's just as powerful as photoshop. I was one of the programmers who developed it ^^; Sourceforge forever!

This is my guitar, I know a lot of guitarists are scared about just knocking their guitars... I'm not, rather, I like my guitar like this, it adds character. Nobody else can replicate my guitar. It's truly unique. =] You guys should post pics of your guitars too! Alex O'Connor ~