April 28 Customer Website Tips galin
http://californiawithkids.com/tag/red-robin/ Blogging is a practical way to make your sitemap grow. Blogging is useful for SEO because it tells search engines that your site has changing content, and it gives the search engines more pages to crawl.
http://theygotodie.com/wp-content/cgialfa 
If you are blogging, there are other methods for helping SEO besides just writing about topics related to your site. One simple method is to link to older posts in your post.
By trying to reference a couple old posts and linking to them in a post, you should increase the number of crawls your pages receive. When search engine bots crawl a page and see a link without “rel=’nofollow'” in the anchor tag, it will follow the link to the related post. Linking will cause both pages to be crawled, increasing the number of crawls to that page. This increased crawling is the same reason why link exchanges are practical for SEO.
When linking, make sure to link to other posts that tie into the article content. Search engines are looking for quality content, and search engines will keep evolving to make sure of quality search results. We advise against any sort of spamming tactics.
Give us a call today to talk about an SEO solution that works best for your web needs.
April 14 Customer Web Usage Tips galin
I’ve had potential customers ask me about making QR codes. They have been getting a lot of buzz lately, even in the local newspaper. Here is an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch about them.
The first time I was asked about QR codes, I honestly didn’t really know what they were. Then when I was shown one, I immediately replied “yeah, I can make that”. This is because I noticed all QR codes do is send you to a url link. From a web developers viewpoint, all that is necessary is creating the webpage that you wish your QR code to take people to. That and going to one of the thousands of QR code generating sites out there.
QR codes have a great use for advertising and specifically for sending people to video tutorials for a specific product. Say your business creates shelves but delivers it in parts to customers to put together on their own. QR codes could be used to send customers to a video tutorial on how to make the shelf they just purchased. Pretty neat in my opinion!
March 2 Development Techniques galin
Adding links through HTML is pretty straightforward. It is the simplest, useful HTML ‘coding’ out there.
To link specific text you use an anchor tag. These look like ‘<a>’, but also must include a couple specific parameters defined in it. To tell it what URL or web address to send the link to, you must define a parameter inside the ancor tag called ‘href’. For example, linking to this website would look like
‘<a href=”http://gpmwebsolutions.com”>’.
That is how you link something, but how do you make text appear? This is simple. To make text appear you must place what text you want after the anchor tag. After the text you must then include a ‘</a>’ in order to indicate the end of the link. For example, a full link to this website would look like
‘<a href=”http://gpmwebsolutions.com”>Great Web Solutions</a>’. This would display the words ‘Great Web Solutions’ and link to the address indicated in the ‘href’ parameter.
Here is a link to w3schools information about making anchor tags/links: W3Schools anchor tag information. Other useful parameters to define in the anchor tag are listed on that site. Below are the ones I find the most important.
Important Anchor Tag Parameters
- ‘target’ – This tells the link where to open. Defining this to ‘target=”blank”‘ tells the link to open in a new window. This keeps people on your site still if you are linking to another site.
- ‘rel’ – This is useful for telling search engines not to leave your site while crawling. If you define it to ‘rel=”nofollow”‘, then it will tell the search engine crawling bots to not leave your site when finding a link. This is important for helping your page rank. At the same time, when getting people to link to your site, it is important to make sure they don’t define this attribute (when doing a link exchange).
February 14 Development Techniques galin
My route towards web development is very unusual. I received two Bachelors of Science in Math and Economics at the University of Michigan. I took one computer programming class for my Actuarial Math degree in C++. That and a basic intro to javascript class through my old company are the only formal trainings I have had. Today, I feel comfortable researching and building whatever a customer may want. Why is that?
The internet is why. When I first started at my old job, they needed extra hands to do some HTML/CSS work. I didn’t have enough work to do, so I said to myself “Why not”. A co-worker there showed me a website, w3schools.com. If you want to learn computer languages, go there. Read through a tutorial. Read through it again. Then read through it again. The tutorial I would start with is the CSS and HTML stuff.
I still use this website as a reference point for how to code things I want to code. It has most of the syntax stuff you would ever want in the languages of PHP, Javascript, and HTML/CSS.
I do think my analytical degree background and my extremely analytical brain are other reasons why I am so efficient and comfortable with web development. If you think you have a similar mindset and want to get involved in an excellent industry, read that site and feel free to email me questions at galin@gpmwebsolutions.com.
