TaylorLovett

Internal vs. Inbound Links

March 21, 2012 by Taylor Lovett

While recently doing some SEO consultations, I noticed how most people don’t understand the importance of internal linking. Let’s go back to SEO basics for a minute so I can explain.

The goal of all search engines is to serve you with the most relevant possible websites to your searches. All search engines have a different “algorithm” for deciding which pages are most relevant. Almost all of these algorithms (Google especially) place high importance on inbound links. This means the more sites linking to your site the better. The most valuable thing you can have is an inbound link from a site serving content relevant to yours. For example since my site has articles on SEO, a useful inbound link would be one from seoengine.com.

“Inbound links are like other sites voting for your content and telling search engines what your content is about.”

On the other hand, internal links are like letting search engines know about your content and voting for it. This is extremely important! Internal links signal search engines that your pages exist and are important.

Internal links are also important because your links carry authority. What do I mean when I say your links carry authority? Well, let’s say my homepage taylorlovett.com is a Google PageRank 6 (which it actually is). That means all links on my homepage carry the authority of PageRank 6. So links on my homepage carry more authority than links on some obscure page of my website that has PageRank 1. But by linking my homepage to that obscure page, I am, in a sense, telling search engines that obscure page should have more authority. Therefore my homepage should contain links to the rest of my website to spread around the “authority”.

Does that make sense? I hope it does. If not, feel free to email me with any questions.

Categories: Internet Marketing, Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, Washington DC SEO, Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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SEO Friendly Images WordPress Plugin

February 16, 2012 by Taylor Lovett

Hey guys, I wanted to let you know about a plugin I just started using. It’s called SEO Friendly Images.

SEO Friendly Images accomplishes a few tasks that will save you time, improve your HTML code, and ultimately add SEO value to your website. The plugin automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images (unless they already have them). This provides substantial SEO value because it allows you to add more keywords throughout your website.

  • The alt attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your images to search engines and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.
  • The title attribute plays a lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when a visitor hovers their mouse over the image.

By adding alt and title attributes to all images, the plugin in turn makes your images W3C compliment (this means your code is valid which is important to Google). This plugin is extremely easy to configure and I’ve added this plugin to all my websites. I recommend everyone does the same.

Download the Plugin

Categories: PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, Washington DC SEO, WordPress Customization, WordPress Plugins, Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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Critical Landing Page Software to Make You Money

December 22, 2011 by Taylor Lovett

If you’ve read any of my earlier posts on landing pages, you know the importance of utilizing landing pages in your online sales efforts. Every successful internet marketer I’ve ever talked to has told me that landing pages are absolutely critical in generating sales and/or leads.

Making landing pages from scratch is time consuming. If you aren’t a web designer who is proficient in HTML, creating a professional web page is almost impossible. Why waste time and money creating individual landing pages when you can have a WordPress plugin automatically create them for you? Let me introduce you to the MaxLanding plugin for WordPress.

Features:

  • Works with any WordPress theme
  • 12 landing page templates
  • Fully customizable with plenty of easy-to-use options
  • Includes clickthrough and lead generation templates
  • Options for embedded video and product images
  • Create unlimited number of landing pages
  • 1-click copy of an existing landing page
  • No need to know HTML or to edit code files
  • All landing pages come Search Engine Optimized

MaxLanding allows you to automatically create landing pages in WordPress. The plugin is extremely customizable. You can create 1 click-through and 2 click-through landing pages with ease. MaxLanding is proven to increase the amount of sales generated by landing pages. Also since this plugin works with WordPress, you can easily hook up your landing pages to Google Analytics so you can view minute-by-minute stats of your visitors!

I recommend that you definitely give this plugin a try. You have nothing to lose. It’s cheap and if you don’t like it, there is a 30-day money back guarantee.

Download MaxLanding WordPress Plugin

Categories: PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, Washington DC SEO, WordPress Customization, WordPress Plugins, Tags: , , , , , ,
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Landing Pages: What Are They and When You Should Use Them?

August 16, 2011 by Taylor Lovett

There is a lot of talk today among bloggers and internet marketers about “landing pages” or “sales pages”. You might have heard people talking about how useful they are in generating new prospects for your business. I can tell you this is absolutely true but only if the landing pages are created and used correctly.

What is a landing page:
A landing page is simple a page that a visitor lands on after clicking a link. It could be your homepage. More often than not a landing page is the page that a user arrives at after clicking an advertisement.

When to use a landing page and why they are extremely important:
Suppose I have an advertisement link on webdevelopers.com. The link text reads “Free SEO Report”. Most amateurs would have this link point to their homepage. The smart move would be to create a special landing page on my site that is completely separated from the rest of the site. The landing page would be targeted specifically for the link “Free SEO Report”. That means the landing page would probably have a header that reads just that, Free SEO Report. Using a targeted landing page for your advertisements (especially for PPC ads) dramatically increases the amount of new prospects or conversions you will receive per ad click.

Categories: Google Tips, Internet Marketing, Rockville Web Development, Washington DC SEO, Tags: , , , , , , ,
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Google Alerts

June 8, 2011 by Taylor Lovett

I wanted to let you know about a new Google service I stumbled upon recently. It’s called Google Alerts.

As you know I run a small online web development business. I target search phrases like “Maryland web developer” and “Maryland wordpress”. I’ve spent time and money getting my website to the top of Google for those search phrases.

I also spend time searching those phrases on Google to see where my website(s) are located as well as to learn about my competition. When new websites pop up on “Maryland web developer” or “Maryland wordpress” searches, I want to be the first to know so I can examine those websites and evaluate the type of keyword strategies they are using (this is how the pros do it).

Anyway I was spending a lot of time unnecessarily searching those phrases for new competition until I learned about Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a new service that provides email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Simply, tell Google the topic you wish to monitor, enter your email address and the type of results you wish to receive, and click create alert.

It’s that simple. From now on Google will alert you when new websites appear on searches on the topics of your choosing!

Categories: Google Tips, Internet Marketing, Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, Tags: , , , , , ,
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Custom Contact Forms Development Is Underway

May 23, 2011 by Taylor Lovett

Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that the development on Custom Contact Forms has started up again after a 4-5 month break. CCF has now been downloaded over 100,000 times and is still growing. Expect to see a new fixed field for dates (that uses datePicker jQuery) as well as a few other surprises in the next couple weeks!

Enjoy.

Categories: Custom Contact Forms, PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, WordPress Customization, WordPress Plugins,
3 Comments

50,000 Downloads for Custom Contact Forms

January 31, 2011 by Taylor Lovett

In under 8 months, Custom Contact Forms has been downloaded 50,000 times! Can you believe it? Before creating CCF, we tried to use Contact Form 7 and Secure Fast Contact Form on our websites but there just wasn’t enough customization. We need our form submissions saved in the database and a style manager to customize every aspect of our forms.

Custom Contact Forms was created by website owners for website owners. We love when you guys send us feature requests and suggestions which we regularly incorporate in new versions. If you have any feedback, please email it to us!

We couldn’t be more proud of what Custom Contact Forms has become and we LOVE our loyal fans. Thanks to everyone who helped make CCF the most intuitive and customizable contact form plugin for WordPress!

Categories: Custom Contact Forms, Rockville Web Development, WordPress Customization, WordPress Plugins, Tags: , , , , , , ,
4 Comments

Meta Descriptions and Titles – What They Are, Why They’re Important, and How to Optimize Them

January 21, 2011 by Taylor Lovett

Meta descriptions and titles are probably the most important thing for SEO within the HTML of your site. These two tags allow you to have some control over how search engines like Google display your website.

What Are Meta Tags?

“Meta tags” refer to specific HTML tags that appear in the area of the page. Here is an example:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> This is the Meta Title tag! </TITLE>
<META name=”description” content=”This is the meta description” />
</HEAD>

See how the title and description tags appear within the of the page? They will only work if placed in that area. From the standpoint of someone viewing your website, the meta description tag is completely invisible (unless they view source code), it is used exclusively by search engines. The title tag can actually be seen by your viewers in the browser bar at the very top of your screen. There is also the meta keywords tag, but this tag is ignored by most major search engines (Google included). Right now we are going to focus on the two most important meta tags for SEO, the meta description and title tags.

Google places great importance on meta description and title tags when your website is being indexed. The following is a screen shot from a Google search:

Taking advantage of these tags gives you a huge advantage over your competitors. Having worked with many small businesses as an SEO consultant, the vast majority of people do not make use of these tags. Clients pay me thousands of dollars to get their website on the first page of Google for specific keywords; sometimes all it takes is making good use of their meta tags! Which leads me to the next thing I want to tell you…

How to Optimize Meta Tags

You’re going to be surprised at how simple this really is. First I want to introduce the concept of relevancy. You want your website to be as relevant as possible to the keywords you are targeting for Google searches. Keywords in certain areas of your website are given more weight than others. The most prominent area on your website for keywords are your meta description and titles tags. So you want to make sure every single page on your site has these tags. Also every meta description and title tag should be unique otherwise Google might flag your website for duplicate content (this was discussed in an earlier email I sent you). That being said, here are the guidelines I follow when optimizing my clients’ meta tags:

  • Make sure every single page on the website has unique meta description and title tags.
  • Make sure every meta title tag is no longer than 60 characters in length and every meta description no longer than 160 characters in length.
  • Fill each meta description and title tag with as many relevant keywords as possible.
  • Make each meta description and title tag describe the page very closely. This means I don’t just stuff them full of keywords; I actually make sure they all make sense and are relevant to their page.

How to Optimize Meta Tags in WordPress Websites

If you are running WordPress, optimizing your meta tags is MUCH easier. There are tons of plugins that allow you to edit the meta description and title tag without having to know HTML. I use All-In-One SEO on all my clients’ websites.With All-In-One SEO, each post and page editor contains a box near the bottom that allows you to easily change the meta tags. This plugin even shows a live count of how many characters your meta description and title tags are currently at! WordPress is great for SEO and makes it very easy to insert keywords throughout your site. Just remember that each page, post, category, and archive actually have their own web pages so don’t forget to optimize all their meta tags.

Categories: Google Tips, Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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Duplicate Website Content – Why It’s Bad and How to Fix It

January 12, 2011 by Taylor Lovett

Hey {!name}, I thought I’d let in on a big problem that I look for on client websites when I’m doing SEO consulting.

From Google Webmaster Tools:
—–
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content
or are appreciably similar
——

Here’s all the ways duplicate content can occur on your website:

* URL parameters such as click tracking and some analytics code can cause duplicate content issues.

* Printer friendly versions of content can cause duplicate content issues when multiple versions of the pages get indexed.

* Session IDs are a common duplicate content creator. This occurs when each user that visits a website is assigned a different session ID that is stored in the URL.

The biggest problem with duplicate content is that search engines don’t know which version to index. If you are using a WordPress website, then duplicate content probably applies to your website in a more subtle way, a way which most SEO “gurus” try to charge you money to learn about. Multiple pages with the same page title or meta description are considered duplicate content which hurts your website in a variety of ways.

The page title is contained in the HTML header and can be read by users in the URL bar at the very top of browsers. The meta description is also contained within the HTML header but cannot be read by humans and is used exclusively by search engines like Google. I’m going to send you another email about the importance of meta descriptions and titles and how to make good use of them.

— Ways to Detect Duplicate Content on Any Website

* Here is a useful duplicate content detector tool: http://www.virante.com/seo-tools/duplicate-content.php

— Ways to Fix Duplicate Content on WordPress Websites

* First make sure all your pages have unique page titles and meta descriptions.

* If you are using permalinks, each page can be linked to in at least two different ways i.e. yoursite.com/?p=20 or yoursite.com/mypage/. Make sure you pick one way to link to each page throughout your website. If you are using permalinks, you should be using yoursite.com/mypage/

* Finally, if you still have duplicate content, you will need to mark pages with canonical link tags. A canonical link tag tells the search engine where the primary version of that content resides. Here is a great WordPress plugin that does this for you automatically: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/canonical/

— Ways to Fix Duplicate Content on WordPress Websites

* The best way to do this is to manually add the following meta tag to the section of every page that is a duplicate:

That’s it! Everything you need to correct duplicate content on your website is in this email. Enjoy.

Categories: Google Tips, Internet Marketing, Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, WordPress Plugins,
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Google XML Sitemaps – Free SEO Points

January 10, 2011 by Taylor Lovett

An XML Sitemap is a list of pages on your website (not readily visible to humans) that is formatted in such a way that helps Google index pages on your site that it might not find otherwise. Your Sitemap can even specify how long before the content changes on each page so Google knows when to come back and reindex. This has HUGE value for SEO.

Do any of the following apply to your website? (This list is pulled directly from the Google help page on Sitemaps)

  • Your site has dynamic content.
  • Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
  • Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
  • Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

If so, you definitely need an XML Sitemap. Have you every seen video content when searching on Google? You can create an XML video Sitemap for Google that will allow your video content to be disabled on the Google search page. In my personal experience with SEO, Google, and small business websites, XML Sitemaps have been an invaluable tool. Most people don’t know what they are and often pay me to do SEO work. One of my SEO “secrets” is to install the XML Google Sitemaps Plugin on my clients websites. My clients usually see results within a few days from using that plugin! Crazy, huh?

Download and install the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin for WordPress

Categories: Google Tips, Internet Marketing, Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, Tags: , , , , , ,
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WordPress Reference Guide for Developers

November 30, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

WordPress theme and plugin developers, I found something you might like. A women named Natalie from DBS Interactive emailed me informing me of there WordPress Reference Guide for Developers. I am a huge fan of the WordPress Codex but the reference guide they put together is much easier to use than the WP Codex. It’s like an encyclopedia for WordPress theme developers. This is definitely worth a bookmark:

WordPress Reference Guide for Developers

Categories: CSS Tips and Tricks, PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, Website Development, WordPress Customization, WordPress Plugins, Tags: , , , , , ,
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10,000 Downloads!

November 14, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

Custom Contact Forms has been download over 10,000 times in it’s first 5 months. Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback and bug reports. 4.1.0 is in the works and hopefully will make Custom Contact Forms available to more types of server configurations. CCF has grown in to quite the plugin and is only gaining more features. In the future we hope to add lead capturing and internet marketing functionality. Thanks!

Download Custom Contact Forms

Categories: Custom Contact Forms, Rockville Web Development, WordPress Customization, WordPress Plugins, Tags: , , , , , , , ,
4 Comments

5 Tips for using AJAX with JQuery and PHP in WordPress

November 12, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

Hey guys, I haven’t been posting as regularly as I like to be posting. Right now Custom Contact Forms 4.1.0 is in the works and I am doing a few freelance SEO/web development projects. While trying to debug the Custom Contact Forms admin JQuery/AJAX features I stumbled upon a great article.

If you write plugins for WordPress, this is a must-read. This article goes in to detail about a lot of the best practices for using Javascript with PHP in WordPress. 9/10 plugins are not using JQuery properly and thus cause havoc for other plugins (like mine!).

Check this out: 5 Tips for using AJAX with JQuery and PHP in WordPress

Categories: PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, WordPress Customization, WordPress Plugins, Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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Web Hosting from Hostgator: 24/7 Customer Support and 99.8% Uptime

October 5, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

I’ve been a professional web developer for around 8 years and this is an honest review of a hosting company that a believe deserves some recognition. Hostgator is hands down the best web host on the Internet today for a variety of reasons.

I’ve used a number of hosts: Godaddy, Network Solutions, Bluehost, Midphase, Globat, Hostgator and a few others. All these companies offer the world to customers at low prices. All most all of them do not deliver what they promise. I have horror stories from all these hosts expect Hostgator. Most of these hosts offer the same things Cpanel, PHP/MySQL, unlimited emails/subdomains, gigabytes of space, tons of bandwidth, etc. The two most important things you must consider when picking a web host besides having all the features your site needs is customer support and uptime.

All the bandwidth a space in the world doens’t mean anything if your website is down an hour each day. All these companies promise great uptime and customer support, the only one that actual delivers is Hostgator. I am telling you this from personal experience. The links to Hostgator in this post are affiliate links, but the content if this post contains no hype what-so-ever.

It is common knowledge web developers work late at night, we need to be able to contact our host late at night. Hostgator offers 24/7 customer support via phone, live chat, and email. I have tested the phone and live chat options at 4 AM on a Saturday night. Someone picks up the phone or enters the chat immediatly. Also the wait time at peek hours is very short, the longest I’ve EVER waited to speak/chat with someone is 5 minutes. No hype.

The reason I had to leave all the hosts above was because my website was down or loading too slowly far too often. Hostgator is the champ at uptime. My website is very rarely down and always is running quickly. Again, all the hosts above promise this but only one delivers.

There is no reason not to host your website with Hostgator. If for some reason you aren’t satisfied, they have a 30 day full money-back gaurantee.

Categories: Rockville Web Development, Web Hosting, Web Hosting Reviews, Website Development, Tags: , , , ,
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WordPress Frameworks or Parent Themes

August 13, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

WordPress frameworks are the wave of the future for not only WordPress users but also developers.

What are WordPress frameworks?
Wordpress frameworks provide a structure for developers to build off of containing a ton of great functionality. WordPress frameworks are the definition of not recreating the wheel. The release of WordPress 2.7 beckoned a revolutionary new feature, child themes. Child themes sometimes contain as little as a single style sheet file and build off of a parent theme (duh). The parent theme, or the framework, contains a basic HTML framework, a default plain looking style sheet, and most importantly loads of great functionality: a completey widgetized header, footer, homepage, and sidebar, some great widgets included the frameworks theme function file, and a great configuration page for the template (allowing you to choose primary and secondary navigation menus, choose SEO settings, exclude categories from the blog page, and much, much more) among other things.

Why use a WordPress framework?
As previously stated, why reinvent the wheel? Developers turn their nose at already developed frameworks because they feel they can do it better. I assure you this is not true. The functionality of these frameworks provides a versatility to WordPress that would take a year for any programmer to develop. Also, many parent themes provide a plethora of beautiful child themes to spiced up your site.

Top WordPress Framworks
Genesis: Developed by Studiopress, this is my go to framework and I use it on most of my clients websites. There are enough professional child themes to suite anyones tastes and everything is extremely easy Ito customize. The Genesis widgets are amazing and come preinstalled: add twitter to your menu, featured pages and posts with preview images (that you can define within the page or post!) and more. The SEO capabilities of Genesis make plugins like SEO all in one redundant. Also Genesis is compatible with every 3rd party plugin that I’ve ever tried which is important. This is definitely my favorite WordPress framework and is very affordable.

Thesis: Another great WordPress framework. It has a host of nice child themes to spice up your site. This framework also has a great configuration page with many of the same features as Genesis. It lacks the custom widgets that Genesis has. A means to manage SEO is also included in this framework. Where this framework is lacking is customization from the standpoint of the developer. The code is documented poorly compared to Genesis making it a constant battle to change anything code-wise. Thesis is also a little more expensive.

There are other great frameworks out there such as Thematic, but Genesis is my preference.

Categories: PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, WordPress Customization, Tags: , , , , , ,
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Custom Contact Forms 2.1.0 Released

August 7, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

Custom Contact Forms 2.1.0 brings a bunch of new, great features to WordPress blog owners.

  • Create, edit, and delete form styles; customize every aspect of your contact forms.
  • Create multiple styles and attach different styles to different forms
  • “Are You Human?”, new fixed field added
  • Custom Contact Forms news feed added to admin page

The fact is that Custom Contact Forms is THE best and most customizable contact/web forms plugin available for WordPress today. Best of all it is 100% free.

Categories: Custom Contact Forms, PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, WordPress Plugins,
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At Dusk Photography SEO Project

August 2, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

I just completed a Search Engine Optimization project on At Dusk Photography, a wedding photographer in Sydney Australia. It is amazing to think my web development portfolio extends all the way to Australia.

Check out the full story, with site and keyword research screen shots in my Rockville web developer portfolio.

Categories: Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization,
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Raving Reviews for Custom Contact Forms 1.1.1

July 27, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

The first stable version of my WordPress Plugin, Custom Contact Forms has been released in version 1.1.1. Version 1.1.1 includes fixed fields that are included automatically and not listed with user fields. The first fixed field added to Custom Contact Forms is a secure captcha.

As well as fixed fields, plugin users can now make a custom thank you message and have fields remember how users previously filled them out; error messages have also now been added to the WordPress plugin.

Custom Contact Forms is quickly becoming a popular WordPress. It is much more intuitive than any other contact form WordPress plugin and is extremely easy to use. Custom Contact Forms has been downloaded and installed over 240 times in its first two weeks. Here’s a review from a WordPress blog owner:

You have the best of the WP contact forms. Outstanding effort. Congrats!

Mark Lasserre – lasserre.us

Most importantly Custom Contact Forms updates itself automatically if you have an old version so they are no reason not to upgrade immediately. If you have any suggestions are problem with my WordPress plugin, please email me and I will fix them same-day guaranteed.

Download Custom Contact Forms 1.1.1

Categories: Custom Contact Forms, PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, WordPress Plugins, Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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Custom Contact Forms 1.0 Released

July 18, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

My new WordPress plugin, Custom Contact Forms 1.0, has finally be released.

Custom Contact Forms is a WordPress plugin for handling and displaying custom web forms; insert the provided code in any page, post, category, or archive in which you want a web form to show. This plugin allows you to create fields with a variety of options and to attach them to specific forms you create.

Definitely allows for more customization than any other WordPress contact form plugin out there today. The greatest part of this plugin is the comprehensive admin page which allows you to manage fields, forms, and tons of customizable options in one place! Also comes with a web form widget to drag-and-drop in to your sidebar. It has been tested on WordPress version 2.7.1 and up. Give it a try on your blog today; it’s free!

Categories: Custom Contact Forms, PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, WordPress Customization, Tags: , , , , , , ,
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SEO Techniques for Bing

July 16, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

In the field of SEO, Google’s search engine dominates the market. But what about other search engines? Yahoo and Bing, despite not being as popular as Google, can still send your website massive amounts of traffic. Many of the on page and off page search engine optimization techniques are the same for all search engines, but some search engines place more weight than others in certain areas. Bing, Microsofts replacement for MSN, heavily favors sites that have proper validating HTML code. Off-page, Bing favors sites that utilize social networking and social bookmarking sites. Bing also likes sites that link to lots of relevant external sites.

Heres in interesting article on SEO techniques for Bing:
On-page and Off-page Bing SEO Techniques

Categories: Internet Marketing, Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, Website Development, Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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SEO Doctor Firefox Addon

July 11, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

I stumbled on an interesting add-on for Mozilla Firefox called SEO Doctor. SEO Doctor adds a small flag icon to the far right side of the url bar which opens up a small box containing information and stats pertaining to search engine optimization. when clicked. SEO Doctor’s main features:

  • Assigns an SEO score to each page and looks for SEO errors like missing alt tags, missing meta tags, and more.
  • Counts the number of inbound and outbound links keeping track of link flow and revealing any potential areas that might leak “link juice”.
  • Detects pages that can’t be found or indexed by Google and other search engines
  • Shows estimated total number of daily visits, total number of daily visits from search engines, number of nofollow links, measures loading time, and more

For me the most useful features of SEO Doctor are the ones detecting missing page features that might affect my search engine ranking. For example if I forget to use an H1 tag on a page, SEO Doctor notifies me. If I don’t use at least one H2 tag on a page, SEO Doctor warns me that I should even though it isn’t required like the H1 tag. SEO Doctor saves me tons of time because it shows me these things while I’m viewing the page instead of me taking time to search through each one of my pages to make sure they all have H1 tags.

SEO doctor is great for experienced web developers and still easy to use for novice ones. It’s definitely worth a download and it is free after all; so give it a try.

Download SEO Doctor by Vladimir Prelovac

Categories: Firefox Addons, Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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5 Essential Free Tools No Web Developer Should Be Without

July 6, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

I’ve been a programming in PHP and developing websites for 8 years and here are 5 free tools that no web developer should ever be without. Most if not all of these require that you use Mozilla Firefox.

1. Web Developer add-on for Mozilla Firefox

Of course number one assumes you are already using Mozilla Firefox browser. This addon creates a toolbar in your browser that allows you to accomplish a myriad of things much more easily than if you didn’t have the toolbar. Disable javascript, highlight css elements, edit CSS elements and view your changes live, view code source more easily, outline block level elements, find bad code, view image properties, validate your code, auto-fill in forms (this is incredibly useful when testing a form with many fields), manage your cookies, and much, much more. It goes without saying that this toolbar is a necessity for any web developer, PHP/Javascript programmer, or WordPress plugin developer.

2. IE Tab Plus add-on for Mozilla Firefox

This add-on allows you, the user, to switch the Firefox rendering engine to that of Internet Explorer’s. Simply right click on a page and click view in IE; this opens a new viewing tab in your browser that renders your current web page in IE’s engine. When building web pages, web developers often switch between Firefox and Internet Explorer (the two most popular browsers) to see how their website looks in each. Now with IE Tab, developers can stay in their current browser

3. Ubiquity for Mozilla Firefox

Another Firefox add-on big surprise huh?!? Ubiquity allows for dynamic commands to be entered by the user. Ubiquity allows for extended browser funcionality with dynamic commands. After installing Ubiquity, users can subscribe to commands that Ubiquity developers have created. Pressing CTRL+Space brings up a console that accepts commands which otherwise would take a few extra steps to do manually. To list a few commands: lookup artilces in wikipedia, search, translate current page, and much more.

4. Ubiquity: PHP Function Lookup

PHP function look up adds a PHP function lookup command to Ubiquity. PHP developers often need to look up functions for a variety of reasons. Not anyone can remember the order of parameters and return type for thousands of functions. Opening a new tab, going to PHP.net, and typing in a function takes time. Ubiquity’s PHP function look up command lets you do this by simply pressing CTRL+Space then typing “php your_function”. This will save any PHP programmer tons of time.

5. Ubiquity: WordPress Codex Lookup

WordPress Codex Lookup adds a command look up feature to Ubiquity allowing you to quickly search the WordPress codex for information. If you use WordPress, create WordPress plugins, or modify WordPress themes, this will save you some time. Press CTRL+Space, then type “wp codex_search” and Ubiquity will open a new tab in your browser with your WP codex search.

Categories: CSS Tips and Tricks, PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, Website Development, WordPress Customization, Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Content Boxes and Rounded Corners with CSS

July 2, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

Rounding corners has become more and more popular as the internet has grown older. Even Google allows users to select options in Adsense to round corners. There are many ways to round corners some using 2 images and CSS, 3 images and CSS, 4 images and no CSS, purely Javascript, only CSS (CSS3 only unfortunately), and more. To me CSS and rounding corners is an art because there are an infinite amount of ways to accomplish this effect but some are more elegant than others. This Bethesda web developer Maryland WordPress expert found a great website explaining in detail (CSS, XHTML markup, and images included) 25 great ways to achieve rounded corners in your layout with minimal HTML markup. Here’s the link:

25 Rounded Corners Techniques with CSS

Categories: Rockville Web Development, Tags: , , , , , ,
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Strange Google XML Sitemaps Error Fixed

June 24, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

Today, I installed the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. I configured the plugin accordingly then directed my browser to http://taylorlovett.com/sitemap.xml to see my newly built sitemap. I was confronted with the very ugly error:

Error loading stylesheet: An unknown error has occurred (805303f4)

http://www.taylorlovett.com/wp-content/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/sitemap.xsl

After some searching on Google, I found others having the same issue but no definite solution. It seemed that directing my browser to http://www.taylorlovett.com/sitemap.xml worked fine but http://taylorlovett.com/sitemap.xml did not. I figured out the problem was that in my General Settings page my WordPress address (URL) was set to http://www.taylorlovett.com/sitemap.xml and my Site address (URL) was set to http://taylorlovett.com/sitemap.xml. After changing them both to the exact same URL, the problem was solved!

Categories: Rockville Web Development, Website Development, WordPress Customization, Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
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Comment Template Customization in WordPress

by Taylor Lovett

Today I was working on my blog and started styling comments.php in my WordPress theme – this wasn’t too difficult but still took me a couple hours to sift through PHP/Wordpress jargon to find the HTML/CSS code I was looking for. Before long I wanted to style the actual comments posted by users. To my dismay I learned the code for user comments is not in the comments.php theme file but rather in the comments-template.php file in the WordPress wp-includes/ folder. Bummer.

Customizing the WordPress wp-includes/comments-template.php file is extremely complicated, even to a veteran PHP programmer, and after messing with it for 2 hours I started searching Google for a guide. I found out through various guides that the wp_list_comments() function called in comments.php can take a callback function as a parameter that will use a custom comment function as opposed to the WordPress default. By using the callback parameter to point to your own function, you can really take control of the WordPress comments style and structure.

I found a great guide that will take you step by step through creating your own comment function for the wp_list_comments() function to callback.

WordPress Comment Templates Customization

Also, for background information on wp_list_comments() and a full list of it’s parameters:

Function Reference for wp_list_comments()

Categories: PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, WordPress Customization, Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Google Pagerank Sculpting

June 23, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

I found an interesting article written by the head software engineer of Google’s Webspam team. The article talks about internal link loss as well as external link loss and the use of nofollow tags within one’s site to sculpt pagerank. The WordPress blog post debunks many of the SEO theories about “link juice”. Link juice has become a very popular trend among SEO and Internet Marketing consultants in the past two years. This article, written by Matt Cutts, is definitely worth a read:

Gadgets, Google, and SEO by Matt Cutts

Categories: Internet Marketing, Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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How to Build a Successful Website

June 13, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

I just found a great article/guide for the individual who wants to build an income generating website. The guide goes step by step starting from choosing long tail keywords with relatively little competition to writing good content with your sites important keywords, and finally to search engine optimizing your HTML code. I found the part about how to do keyword research and analysis with Google’s keyword tool, Wordtracker, and the Pagerank toolbar especially useful; in fact I applied many of the techniques here on my own site. Definitely worth a read for any webmaster. Check it out:

How to Build a Successful Website

If you like the article, be sure to click some of the social bookmarking links below to share the article with your friends. Enjoy.

Categories: Internet Marketing, Rockville Web Development, Search Engine Optimization, Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The New 2010 Taylorlovett.com Homepage Is Up

June 12, 2010 by Taylor Lovett

Welcome to the 2010 version of Taylorlovett.com. This mission of this website is to bring web development solutions to small businesses. Based in Rockville Maryland, I specialize in websites and blogs (usually WordPress based), search engine optimization, and Google Adwords consultation. Please see my affordable web development solutions for more information on how I can improve the functionality and overall “feel” of your website as well as increase your websites internet exposure. If you would like to see some fine examples of my work, please see my web development portfolio. Welcome to the new site!

Categories: Google Adwords, Rockville Web Development, Site News, WordPress Customization, Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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New Site Features and Web Development Projects

December 30, 2008 by Taylor Lovett

So I have added a few little features to the site. I added a photo viewer to the portfolio section to view screen shots more efficiently. I also updated the about section. I plan to add a more comprehensive resume section when I have the time. These days I am working full-time for a construction company in Rockville, Maryland as Head of IT. I have mainly been making their websites more dynamic, as in content controllable through PHP/MySQL administration panels. More updates should follow this one shortly.

Categories: PHP Programming, Rockville Web Development, Site News, Tags: , , , ,
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Portfolio Is Up and Running

June 1, 2008 by Taylor Lovett

The web development Maryland portfolio is now available. The portfolio contains projects ranging from web design and imagery to content management system integration and PHP programming. The portfolio contains three sections: Development, Imagery, and Management, Purely Scripts and Programming, and Freelance Images. Click on a project to learn more and to view screen shots.

Categories: Rockville Web Development, Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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