If you want people to visit your website, it can be very helpful to feature topics that are “trending.” Google and Twitter, for example, keep track of which keywords are being searched for most often, or which are being mentioned most commonly. Staying on top of these trends will earn your website a reputation for offering fresh information on the topics that people care about. There are several different kinds of tools you can use to keep track of what is trending on the web. Here are a few of them.

Twitter trends are a good way to keep track of what is being talked about on the web. While these trends are displayed on the front page of Twitter, their open database makes it possible for other developers to create software to analyze trends in tweets. Rather than telling you what is searched for, this keeps you in touch with what people are saying.

If you want to follow the trends on twitter using graphs, Trendistic is a good option. You can view trends over a day, week, month, 90 or 180 day period for any subject. This is a great way to stay in touch. PicFog is another useful piece of software that searches Twitter photo upload sites. If you want a current image about a subject you are covering, this is a very useful tool to have, and possibly to incorporate into your web design.

Google Trends is one of the most commonly used and well known options available. It allows you to enter in as many as five different topics. The software then tells you how often the topics have been searched for over a period of time. Additionally, it tells you how often the topics have shown up in the news, and which regions of the globe are more interested in specific topics.

By using Google Trends, you can get people to specific visit site areas by staying on top of what’s being covered. You can also get some idea of what keywords to include in the text. One limitation of Google Trends is that it doesn’t tell you how often the topic is searched for, it only tells you how much more or less than average the topic is being searched for. A reading of 3.0, for example, means that the term is beings searched for 3 times more often than normal.

This post is wrote with the help of Andrea Infusino, an italian SEO and programmer. You can check his (italian)website or follow him on twitter.

Seo and web designer. Looks like they are …too far apart .. but is not the truth … I think every web designer should know, (at least) the basic knowledge of seo.

But seo is always in changing, improving, and this year was a big year of changes for SEO.

So what has changed for seo and what a web designer should know about these changes?

seo for web designers

Some are not really important for Us, like the google caffeine, the new  algorithm, but others involves directly our job and is really useful for a web designer know how the improve the ranking of a web site. Nowadays is not (only) about a h1 tag, a good title with keywords or some good links.

Just think about HTML5. The new section and article tags, will give us(or the contend editors) the power to use more than h1 tag on a page, so  what’s about this? The semantic is changing, and google, as others search engines, will consider this, so probably the h1 tag should be not more relevant in the further years, as is it now?

I will not explain all the new features or how they works, but we should now these changes, and what the expert SEO Andrea Infusino thinks about these changes.

So what has changed in 2010? Let’s see.

1- Google caffeine, instant search.

Real time is the future! Google instant, do you know this? You can make search in real time. As web designer , you’re not obligated to know this,and you can think “This is not important for me!!”. Right!  But is a  big change, important, you must know this. A seo must know how the new algorithm works, a web designer should know about this new, big change in the search engine ranking.

What Andrea says about this :

so many internet marketer thought instant searches could have changes the way of searching for users and AdWords campaign have to include partial keywords ads (“t”, “tr”, “tra”, “trav” etc… for “travels”), but don’t.
Instant search is just a faster way to get organic searches executed. Another important point, in the other hand, is that instant search could reduce users time spent on page because many users can find their result before typing all the keyphrase!

2 – Show the results!!

Are you still logged in google? Not only the instant results, you can view a preview of  the web site. Move the mouse over the result in the SERP, you can see a preview of the web site. what’s about this?  Well … I’m trying to improve the page considering this factor, maybe is not real important but is good to know.

Andrea :

it’s important to remark that flashy websites, and ad-fully website, are not displayed at best because instant preview crawler does not execute them. In these cases you have to consider to give an alternative and valid content or redesign your webpages for a more fruible and accessible design and contents.
In addition we have to remember some webmaster witch hunts when they started getting instant preview crawler visit counted in direct traffic into Google Analytics panel, fixed afterwards

3 – Social Networking

Facebook, twitter and the other “friends”, you can see in the SERP the results of facebook status, facebook pages, friends, link posted, the same is for twitter. SE are considering these pages in the results, and sometimes I see that some page facebook are on the top of a SERP before the web site. Maybe is not goodthat you’re fans page is listed before of you’re site in google, or not?

Andrea’s consideration:

have you already heard about Blekko?
Blekko was lauched with “slash the web” but it is really more than a slashing utility. It allows you to dig very a lot of informations: you can get  and analyze so many ranking factors for free and comparing them with other websites -read competitors-. Just think that Google webasmter tools don’t!
Anhoter interesting point is that blekko allows you to search for google adsense pub id, and last bu not least a more incisive spam fighting, removing so many spammy websites and useless aggregators.
Into social signals Blekko started to put, afert logging into facebook, some facepiles of your friends into search results (liked pages).

4 – Social links are important for ranking

Yes, google consider social link, they can improve the ranking of your web site. And if Google does this, the others SE will do the same.

Andrea :

To explain the importance of social signals, just think about some non-direct benefits. First of all Yes, google consider social link, they can improve the ranking of your web site. And if Google does this, the others SE will do the same. You have to consider Google, and other S.E., let you know and create our own social cirle, that is you friends across the web and social platforms. A social circle is a small world that allow you to get traffic and new signals for your blogging activity. In addition just think social circle is composed of nofollow links. Could this harm you website? It doesn’t, but this could represent a great value. A good post will be shared, clicked and visited really many times and you can easily think that the direct link benefit is not so important if you consider the traffic and brand reputation below this!

5 – Real time world is now!

Real time? click on the link real time, in the google menu on the right, you can see result from  social  in the serp. As the same time you can see real time streaming of result based on twitter streaming, so what? Launched a new web site? You should appear in the first page of result simply sending a link to twitter, is nice, really nice. You can get visits on a new web site with a simple tweet, that could be in the first page of the SERP.

Andrea :

“faster” is the keyword: we can read this into two main branches.
Google and other techologies, consider facebook or twitter medium speed of posting news and updating, are moving to faster platofmr and changes. Your website, your design and application logic must be as flexible as possibile in order to adapt themselves to the changes of the web (think about social widgets). In the other hand Google have already introduces page speed utilites, and this is a tangible signal that we must keep our pages really fast, creating good and reacheable CDN, light js and images, excellent webhosting and so on!

6 – Personalized searches.

Users can now personalize they’re search, and the results will be more relevant depending on the previous user research. Google explained this very well in this blog. Is based on the last 180 days of search.

Andrea :

someone could thing that this is really harmful for a website owner. I just only say that it’s true if you are not sure of creating a good, unique and valuable content!

7 – Blog comments, “no follow” link ?

Google is considering this, mainly to fight the spam. Spammers always searching for new ways to fill internet with they’re shits! A way to do this is commenting on posts, but not writing ” buy Viagra”, instead they use  something like this “OH! What a good post!! I’m going to subscribe to your rss”. If you are using this technique to get backlinks .. don’t do it .. I don’t think is a good idea, in the further years Google and other search engines will make other chnges to fight this problem.

Andrea :

Right: I can say you really more! User generated content is really important to “up” your pages and articles. Spend your time to get your user involved into your topics. Put questions or other signals to create a reaction into your user, and let’s see how they are forgetting do/no follow problems.

Be happy to get 10 good comments with new ideas intead of 1000  low-quality comments hard to manage, hard to believe, spammy-like.

8 – Google is not the only one.

Google is not the only search engine in the world! Of course is the best, the more important and the one whose decision will  affect the SEO world, as the previous mentioned before. But is not the only one, Bing as grown a lots in the last year, although Google did not liked this, and they says “Bing has copied our SERP”. Try to consider this in you’re optimization. For example bing offers a sort of “webmaster tool” (yeas ok, maybe the are “inspired” by google), as the same as Yahoo,despite everything, is still important.

Andrea :

think to yourself “what happens if google will close?”. We have always to consider that point. Social networks and new search engines are growing up everyday with new ideas, and the web is changing. Google is still the number one in the search segment, but we have not to stop to find and be optimized for niche search engines, just like for keywords and traffic (80/20 is always the key!). One of the most critical point for Google now is the sponsored search into facebook where bing offers its results.

Facebook is not our lives, but we have to admit that we spend so many hours on it for fun or for work. So many young users are on facebook everyday and even older one are getting facebook profiles. This profilation, htat is really a deep one, could harm Google predominance. Once we used to say “i’m on the web” surfing over yahoo, altavista, aol and others. After we used to say it while we where searching just only on Google. Now we say it browsing facebook or twitter pofiles! The web is changing! We are going to a more person-centric web infrastructure, and google is moving to this direction introducing more accurate SERP, personalizations and geo-localitazion services and social-integrations too!

9 – Maps? Localization?

Big web sites are not really hard to put in a serp, or in the first pages, but what if you create a website for a restaurant? If you search for “restaurant name of city” is not sure you will be in the first page, although in you’re city there are only 3 restaurant, so why? Because of big portal, so the first page will show the results from a portal that contain the section of “restaurant in Paola”. So what? Stop fighting with backlinks, posting the link everywhere, or buy links from dedicated services. It has no reason!! Buy 100$ of adwords impressions, and add the restaurant to google maps, you should be in the first page without know nothing about seo(Yes, I think Seo don’t like this …)

Andrea :

local searches can fit very well with “less is more” concept. Just do less, for less people and get more visibility, more leads or more traffic considering to reach a local audience. Sometimes getting ranked well into local searches, better, having a higher ranking using local-based keywords can help you to face a lower competition. Add this to mobile apps for local business. Think about Facebook Places or Fourquare or Gowalla or Twitter Localization or Google Maps or Google Places. Local is getting more and more important and we can count so many signals to say that local is the key for small/mid business. Just concentrate your efforts on these signals and apps, starting using them and try to getting the most from them not only for  some direct benefits on Google ranking, but for covering your places with your presence and brand!

Final conclusion.

SEO is important, is not our job, but is important. If you are a web designer, or better said a front end developer, consider SEO when you make a new website, of course,  is not our mainly mansion, but the client will be happy to know that you can improve the ranking of his page, not only the aesthetic.

WordPress is, of course, one of the best CMS and blogging platform that your can find actually.

The reasons why use wordpress are a lots : semplicity, easy install, a lots of plugins, big commmunity and , naturally, is free.

Another advantage of this fabulous CMS is that is loved by Google and the other search engines, and , with some modifications and the use of the rights plugins, your blog will be really good indexed in the various search engines, bringing you more users and traffic.

How to make this? Changing something in your blog’s settings and adding some plugin.

First of all you need to change the URL Structure of your blog, when you install wordpress the blog URL structure is this :

http://www.myblog.com/?p=1

This is a good structure but you can improve and use a structure “SEO-friendly”.

Go in the Admin panel of your blog in Settings- permalink and change the permalinks, in my Blogs I use this :

/%category%/%postname%.html

Another good solution may be to add the ID or the date of the post, so you ‘ll give to the search engine an order, and this is better :

/%category%/%post_id%/%postname%.html

One important thing that you must consider when you change your permalink structure is that the search engine will index this pages and is better to not change more this structure, so choose what structure you want to use and never change this.

Although a recent article by Google says that the don’t care about the URL structure and the new algorithm can index without problem all the kind of URL, I’m still conviced that this is still important and improve your posistion in the search engine, and of course you will put keywords in the URL, and this is important for Google and others.

That’s all? No, sure, but from the panel control of wordpress there’s no more to do, wordpress is SEO -ready and the semantic code is loved by Google et company.

Of course there’s another important thing to consider that is important for the positioning : the title of your post.

The title is really important for improve your blog in google (or other search engine) so always, before to write a post, take some minutes to think in the title , how to put (with sense)  keywords in the title, and how to capture the attention of the users with few words.

One good solution may be this : go in google and make a search for the arguments that you’re going to write and  take a look at the first page, look the titles and the keywords used, this is a good way for inspire your title-post.

Of course remember to things : inspire doesn’t means copy-paste, and when you search don’t make the mistake that a lots of users do, don’t think as a SEO when you’re searching, but think like a user that doens’t know nothing about SEO or html.

Other step to improve your index in search engine : the categories. Use alwways the correct categories, if is necessary add a new category, don’t worry if you have a lots of categories, the important is that everty post is in the right category, I can’t put this post in javascript is has no sense, and i can’t use other categories, the only category where this post must be is SEO.

If you have planned, or have ready, articles to publish in your blog, better that starting writing all the post in the same categories, not jumping form on to another. I had my photoshop tutorials and other articles, wrote in my italian blog, so I translated this in english and starting posting here, i’ve started with the photoshop tutorials, how you can see.

I can write this article before, or the jquery sections, but, IMHO, is better start writing all the articles of the same categories and after pass to another category.

This must be considered if you have articles ready to be posted, if your are writing now your articles, there’s no problem but remeber is always a good idea give a sense and a order to your blog.

When you’r writing articles, try always(try no force) to link the previous articles of your blog, like I’ve done in the previous chapter, linking the photoshop section and jquery section, make this in a naturally way, and not force this.

All the links must be naturally, how the SEO says : content is the king. Never force links or text or keywords, everything must be naturally, is the best way to Google and company likes your blog.

If you are familiar with html and wordpress theme, take a look at the theme of your blog, some templates use to put the title in a h2 tag, change this to h1, this is not really important, but h1 is more important than a h2. take a look to the title attribute in the link of the titles post, usually there’s something like this:

permalink to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>

delete the “permalink to” and leave only the php code.

When you upload an images in your posts , remember always to give it a description, this will be the alt of your images. this is important for usability too.

When you add an external link to your post, put the rel=”nofollow” to the html tag, so the crawler will not follow the link, and don’t leave your blog.

Now, is time to “extend” our blog with some great wordpress plugins for SEO.

1. All in one seo pack.

king of the SEO plugin for wordpress. There’s no words for this plugin, simply download and install, it will add for every word a custom fields for title and the other meta tags, remember for SEO and positioning the tag title is, of course, the most important of the meta tags, be sure always to write a good title tag and put the keywords in this( not like keywords tag, but explain what your  post is about and don’t use more than 60 words).

2. WordPress Related post.

This is another great plugin, because permit you to add some related post at the end of a post. How I said link the posts in your blog is a good way to make the crawler index the pages and , of course, this will be util for your users that maybe want to read more about hte same arguments of the post.

3.Yoast breadcrumb

This plugin is to create the breadcrumb in your navigation, important for the users and for the crawlers to let they know where they are.

4. Pingpress

This is a great plugin. With this plugin you can ping and actualize your profile in a lots of social networks, like facebook or linkedin, automated. Simply sign in in the web site and configure the plugin, everytime you will write a post this will be automatically add in your status in the various social network that you have configured.

5. Social Bookmarking reloaded

This plugin is for add the share buttons in at the end of every post, you know how the social networks are important to drive traffic to your blog, but remember that the best way to drive traffic is write good post, not only to share in all the networks sites in the world.

6. Google Sitemap generator

Plugin for create a google sitemap in xml format, for the google webmaster tools. THis will not improve your position in google, but make faster the index of your site.

7. Sitemap generator

For generate a sitemap in your blog, is not the google sitemap, but a page , like my sitemap in the menu, take a look to understand how it works, I suggest to use this plugin is very useful.

Well… this is all? Not, but for your blog this may be good for improve it in the search engines. Of course if you want to learn and study SEO, this is only a start point and nothing more.

Anyway the most important thing that make the difference in SEO and make a website loved by Google and receive backlinks from other sites, is only one: write great cotnent and posts, this is the oly and best way to make your blog known.

Remember the first rule of SEO is : Content is the king! this phrase is not casually.

During the last few years, Internet City has been under a constant threat, totally unbalanced between the forces of good and evil… Okay, this would be a great start a novel or story of science (not fiction), but today we’re going to talk about other things (the legends, myths, and other herbs will remain for some possible future or past edition).

Anyway, today in ¨Myths, legends, mysteries, and other herbs¨…. we will only be talking about the differences between absolute paths and absolute URLs.

The term ‘absolute path’ refers to the main folder or document with the domain’s name.

An absolute URL is one that starts with the protocol of transference and refers to a document on our site.

Let’s suppose that in the root directory we create a document index.html, this document is the absolute path: http://www.lastwebdesigner.com/.

To clarify a little, the true absolute path for each domain in all of the Internet is always, always ”/” (and try to debate and convince me otherwise, but I doubt it will work).

Some people tend to confuse what a relative path is with an absolute path, and even more so if they mix up the cables and confuse ”URL” (links) with ”Path” (folders), which is to say, an ”absolute path” is not the same as an ”absolute URL.”

The absolute URLs always start with the protocol of transference (http,htpps,etc.), followed by the name of the domain (or IP), plus the document we are searching for (whether this is an image, an html document, or whichever other document).

The Absolute Paths always start with the root of the domain where they can be found (without protocols, without ports) and point directly to the document that we select, for example, an image that is saved in the folder ”img” that was previously created in the race of the site and whose name (that of the image, of course), is ”image.jpg”. Alright, now we have an archive with the name ”index.html” that we’ve created in another folder ”htmls” also from the race from the Website. The norm is that when we open the image with some editor WYSIWYG (I’m not going to name a specific product… since they don’t pay me for advertising), in our code, we notice that what we have written our unbelievable, never well-pondered and often one of the reasons for poorly-treated editors… leaving us with something like:

<img src=”../img/image.jpg” alt=”image” />

What does the superior code tell us? Well, that we have inscribed a new image with its relative path, that which, if we never move the HTML archive of a site or do not use anything to rewrite our pages, will always be available and will be perfectly visible. But, what happens if we move the page and we create it in another subfolder, for example: ”/htmls/subfolder/index.html’‘?

In this case, we can say “bye” to our supply of milk (but don’t worry, because new cows are born each day and will surely produce more), knowing we will not see the precious image, even if we see a beautiful “image not found” error (depending on the navigator this can appear in various forms). Although with security we will always see the alternative text (image tagged with ”alt”) Firefox furthermore needs you to create the tag ”title” that will function equal to the tag ”alt” (one can see that they have forgotten about this and I don’t see that they’ve done anything to fix it), but that is another issue and our topic today is links and absolute paths.

To conclude (thanks to this hot and cold time), remember the differences between an absolute Web ”URL” address an absolute Path.

The absolute URLS are always those that begin with the protocol of transference and refer to some document from our site.

The absolute paths make reference only and exclusively to our Website and it is recommended to eliminate the ”disappearance” of links or images on our site (with the great advantage that if we move our server site, or apply rewrite technology, we won’t have to touch our code at all).