Linked Up Design

I just posted an ad from Lynda.com on my site. Reason for this is that of all of the on-line training sites that I have looked over or used this is by far the best one. There literally nothing that you can not find a class for and I assure you that you will learn a ton from the class that you do.

Linked Up Design

Well after a very exhausting week, I have managed to redo my site taking what I learned from the video on SEO that I watched on Lynda.com. And what was my reward? Well, I finished the site and loaded it up and then check on whois.sc and got back my score. Now to brag about this would be wrong but I will say that my score was very rewarding for my work.

One of the key things that I learned early with regards to SEO and building a site is this point: “You can’t design for SEO only, you have to design for the our potential clients, customers or readers, those of you that have blogs.” Personally I feel that is really the only way to go. To be more specific, if you look at my sites code, there is no H1 or H2 headers which anyone that knows about SEO will tell you has to be in. I ran in to some trouble with this when putting together my site because of the fact that design-wise this was not going to look good. My design was to have a site that got peoples attention quickly, while showing off some design tricks. Because putting in headers put a lot of space between the header and the paragraph, it would have not look right so I opted to not use them. This might or might now work.

Tools I used:

• First thing that did was homework and that was what took most of the time. I ran through Google’s Adword campaign to check on key words for print and web design as well as SEO. This was pretty easy because each of these words are “the” keywords. These are obviously in the Title, Keywords, Description & Meta Tags section of the site.
• From there it was working out the copy that I was going to use in the site so I handed this over to my partner who is our copywriter and we hashed out putting in these keywords in the copy but not in a way that was overwhelming in the site. In other words, we did not put things like, “SEO is great, you need SEO in order to improve your SEO score to get people to visit your Web Site!”
• Using some bold tabs here and there will also help in the long run.
• One thing that I put in as a keyword is my location, the reason being is that a bit later tonight I will be sending the URL to local directories in Google and Yahoo to help increase my marketing in my own area.
• From there I will submit my site to Google, Yahoo and Bing.
• Next it to put the site in to Directories and a few months from now I will see if this fancy score I got really paid off.

Do understand that just because I got a good score for the site, it does not end from there. The site needs to be built up as it only has about 4 pages and I do not have the delusion that I will be #1 in ranking in a few weeks, I am 35 miles from NYC so I don’t think that is going to happen. What I know will happen is that I will be able to reach people in my area now which is really more important then anything else!!

I have spent the last week watching a bit of an out dated yet very interesting training video on Lynda.com regarding SEO/SEM. The video is broken down in to chapters and then in to sections and was about 9 hrs long. I choose the word out dated very carefully here because the video is from 2006 which in web years is about 10 years old but on the other hand, all the links and people that are mentioned are all still around and valid which make the value of the time spent very high!!

The fact of the matter is that the video is so educational that I have decided to completely redo my website to conform along with the points that the author Richard John Jenkins had brought up and point out. (This explains why I do not have a link to my site as yet!!)

I encourage all of you out there that are will to take on the challenge to site and watch 9 hours of video to do so because it is well worth it. Those who have been around for awhile will pick up some new tips and those that are new to working  with SEO/SEM will learn a ton. As an aside, it is a $25 membership for the month but you have full use of all the videos that they have and this is very expansive.

In the next few weeks as I go through all of the links that were spoken about in the video, I will be adding them to this site.

(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Lynda.com, I am simply promoting this site based on my experience with them and I receive no benefits from then or any of their affiliates.)