I just finished reading Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, and believe me when I say that I couldn’t wait to write up a review of it. It’s the kind of thing you just want to share with everyone you meet.

Here at Omnistar, we take SEO seriously. That’s why after hearing so many good things about Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, I was excited to finally get a chance to read it. Now that I’ve finished all 331 pages of it, I’m even more excited than I was before.

Wall’s SEO Book does an excellent job of covering everything that you could possibly want to know about optimizing your site for search engines. From domain name decisions to logo designs, css tips to meta tags, Wall covers it all. And he doesn’t hold anything back. Reading Wall’s SEO Book is just like hiring him at his $500/hr rate, except you have to actually think, and he gets paid less.

Still, some people might balk at the $79 price tag on his downloadable ebook. But believe me: it’s well worth it. Wall writes in a readable style, and never advises you to go out and buy $900 worth of software on some other site; he gets straight to the point and tells you how to do what the professionals do. When I say that you will make back your $79 investment simply by implementing a couple of his ideas, I mean it.

I should mention here that Wall’s book is for long-term optimization only. He doesn’t distinguish between black and white-hat SEO, he simply talks about what works while avoiding what doesn’t. But although he experiments with some SEO practices that might increase search engine rankings temporarily, his SEO Book is geared only toward those practices that will help your site to build and maintain optimization in the long term.

Please notice that my recommendation of Wall’s SEO Book is not to give an affiliate link so I can make money. I’m recommending it because I really believe it works. Whether you’re a beginner at SEO or an expert who’d like to have a fully organized, readable list of everything there is to know about search engine optimization, you should buy Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. It really is search engine optimization at its finest.

Posted by Eric Herboso.

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Your domain name, whether you like it or not, is your online identity. A lot of effort is ordinarily put into choosing an effective domain, whether it is keyword-heavy, or the same as your storefront name. Less attention is paid to the possibility of utilizing different top-level domains, simply because ‘dot-com’s are traditionally the most popular. But it can pay to try to take advantage of a different top level domain, depending on your business type.

Top level domains (TLDs) are the part of a web address that comes after the domain name. You can find a full list of available domains at IANA.org, whee they have a country code list and a generic tld list. Some of the more famous ones are listed below.

.com

Commercial: Open to any registrant.

.biz

Business: Must be commercial.

.info

Information: Open to any registrant.

.jobs

Companies: Open only to advertise jobs for own company.

.net

Network: Open to any registrant.

.org

Organization: Open to any registrant.

.pro

Profession: Open for doctors, attorneys, and cpas only.

.fm

Federated States of Micronesia: Common radio broadcaster tld.

.la

Laos: Common Los Angeles tld.

.tv

Tuvalu: Common television broadcaster tld.

.us

United States: Open to any USA-centered registrant.

The most important of these is the .com tld. Even if you decide to go with a different tld for marketing purposes, you must keep the .com tld as a 301 redirect to your main site; otherwise, you run the risk of a competitor claiming the .com version of your business name and profiting off your marketing.

That said, using a different top level domain can sometimes reap large dividends. One popular news blog uses a .tk tld, and advertises their site with "tk" phrases to push the unusual domain on blog readers. Having an unusual top level domain can boost your brand by making it stand out; and the drawback of it becoming less memorizable due it not being a .com is negated so long as you also register the .com version and have it 301 redirect to your actual tld.

If your business caters to a local market, having a local tld can be very useful. If you’re expanding into a new market and want to register the appropriate domain, make sure to do research first. Although .gb is the official tld for Great Britain, most companies there use .co.uk addresses. Also, former Soviet Union countries do not regularly use their own country codes; .su tlds are still very popular there.

Be careful not to put duplicate content on each of your domains. Always use 301 redrects to your main page and keep all your content there; otherwise, search engines may penalize you for serving duplicate content. But remember that there are no penalties for using less popular domains by itself, and it pays to be creative with anything that you market.

That said, you do have to be careful about a few items. Though it is rare, occasionally overzealous corporate spam blockers will deny email that gives links to a .biz name. This never occurs on spam blockers that you can purchase online, since blocking all .biz content is going overboard, but every once in a while a system admin will think it is a good idea and block all such e-mails from getting through their server. Also, sometimes the less often used tlds carry a connotation of nonprofessionalism; .my may look interesting due to it sporting a two-letter word (e.g., http://oh.my), but if your business has such a tld and it isn’t obvious why you chose it, then it could hurt your image.

If you do decide to leave the comfort of the .com arena and try out an alternate tld, make sure to market the name aggressively. Take advantage of your unusual domain name, because it is something that your company will sport that others won’t. Emphasize it, perhaps by using wordplay, or making it a different color in the logo. The point is to make the alternate tld work for you. After all, if choosing an alternate tld doesn’t help your brand, then you shouldn’t use it in the first place.

Posted by Eric Herboso.

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When designing your site, a common mistake is to spend all your time working on nothing but content and layout. But, as in most things, it is always the little things that make you stand out from the crowd.

Typography is, when you think about it, one of the most important design decisions you can make on your website. Sure, your color scheme, layout, and logo are just as (if not more) important, but remember that the whole point of getting visitors to your site is for them to read your content, and that means that more than anything else, your site visitors are going to be looking at your typography near-continuously. So you can see why choosing a good typographic style is extremely important for every web designer.

There are a few main issues that you have to keep in mind when dealing with typography:

Minimalism

Never use more than three different fonts on a single page, unless you have an exceedingly good reason to. One for headers, one for subheadings, and one for content is more than enough.

Serif versus Sans-Serif

Serif fonts do not scale to smaller sizes well, so copy should always be in a sans-serif font. Headers are a different matter, so long as they are larger type.

Using CSS

Site-wide typography decisions should always be maintained at the stylesheet level. This is important for three main reasons.

• Good SEO technique requires content keywords to be coded semantically–headers should use <h#> tags, and emphasized content should use <em> tags. By keeping typography out of the html code, you make it easier to code semantically, and to update for keyword-related issues later on.
• Your pages render better. On dial-up connections, if you don’t use CSS, then every time a new page is loaded, the browser has to read the style commands over again, and so momentarily, your site will look very different from how you wish it to appear. With CSS, this problem occurs only on the first page load; every subsequent load uses the same style sheet, and so the problem never recurs.
• Bandwidth conservation & load times: by using CSS for typography, you save on bandwidth costs and your pages will load faster as a result.

Font-family attribute

It is sometimes tempting to resort to all kinds of fancy font faces, but remember that the end user will only see the fonts that they have installed on their computer. As a consequence, you must always remember to cite a number of fonts, from your first pick to your last, ending with a description of the font-family you prefer. For example, you might use the following in your stylesheet:

h1   { font-family: Garamond, Georgia, serif; }

body { font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; }

Column width

Dictating a maximum column width is useful for many reasons, but the most important one is that when you have a large block of text, it is much easier for the eye to read the text in narrower columns than in columns that take up the entire monitor width. Magazines and newspapers limit column width for the same reason you should: the human eye finds it much less stressful to read in smaller blocks of text.

Browser variability

Remember that how your site looks on your computer is not necessarily how it may look on someone else’s machine. Every browser may show typography differently; that’s why you have to pay careful attention to your css specifications.

Of course, this is certainly not all you’ll ever need to know about typography. But it is a start that will not only make your site more user-friendly, but also will help to keep more visitors coming back. After all, that’s what being a webmaster is all about.

Posted by Eric Herboso

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One problem every webmaster should be aware of is bandwidth theft. Sometimes, malignant webmasters who like your images may decide to hotlink them, effectively serving your images (using up your bandwidth) on their site. While it may not be a problem ordinarily, all it takes is one time: if a blog with a large readership hotlinks your image, you may use up your monthly bandwidth allowance in the space of a day.

As with most problems, the best way to solve this issue is to prevent it from happening in the first place.

There are a few of ways you can stop hotlinkers from showing your images:

• Denial of Access
• Alternate Image Served
• HTML Document Served

Each of these methods requires modifying the .htaccess file associated with your site. Your .htaccess file protects all files in the same directory as the .htaccess file as well as all files in subdirectories of that folder. When modifying the .htaccess file, remember that it must remain in ASCII format, so use Notepad or any other plain text editor.

The denial of access route is the most common method used. It basically consists of refusing any domain other than the ones you specify to show the image. The modification to your .htaccess file should include the following lines of code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|swf|png)$ - [NC,F]

Make sure that each line is unbroken, and remember to replace yoursite.com with your actual domain name. Notice that this code refuses hotlinking of gifs, jpgs, pngs, and flash files.

Alternately, you may wish to try and gain hits from unwanted bandwidth theft. By serving an alternate image, you will still be serving up images, which causes you to lose bandwidth, but instead of the image the hotlinker requested, you may show an image that states: "To see this image, please visit YourSite.com" or something similar. To do this, simply replace that last line of code (the Rewrite Rule line) with the following:
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg)$ http://yoursite.com/hotlinked.gif [R,NC]
Please notice that in this case, the image replaces only gifs and jpgs with your custom image.

The last method is rarely used, because it takes much more effort to implement, and requires php. But the last method has the added benefit of allowing people to link to your image, which the aforementioned methods do not allow. For example, if someone likes your image and decides to link to it, when the page loads, it will show the referrer as the page that linked to it–which means the RewriteRule from above takes effect, and the above code will deny or replace it. Yet you may not want to deny viewers from seeing your image in such a situation, since the person linking your image is not stealing it for their own use, but is actively referring their visitors to your content.

The idea is to change all requests for a picture file to instead serve an html file that shows the image requested. If someone hotlinks this image, the request will fail, because what your site will serve them is an html file, and browsers will be unable to render the file, and instead will show the generic image placeholder. But if someone links to the image, they will silently be redirected to an html page which will not only show them the image they wanted, but also provide links back to the rest of your content! So with this method, you disallow hotlinkers, and yet provide image linkers with the image they wanted, plus additional content that you specify.

There are two drawbacks to this final method: first, you must be using php; second, you will not be able to serve up an alternate image to hotlinkers. For an in-depth description of how to implement html document serving on image requests, see Thomas Scott’s excellent article on AListApart.

Posted by Eric Herboso.

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