Jamie Harrop wrote a post on Daily Web Ideas on 7 ways to increase your pagerank. Great post I must say and I recommend reading it. He discussed how to get a better pagerank from an excellent marketing and advertising point of view.

On another note I’d like to toss in some of my own SEO ideas for better results - from a web developer’s perspective. Considering Jamie has already covered the other end, this is all I have left.

I cannot stress enough the issue of Keywords. No matter how good your pagerank, if your website is not picked up by the right keywords and phrases it’s useless. Use the right keywords in the URL, the <title> tag, as well as in your content (which include page titles, text, as well as deep-links). If your website is not a blog but a custom made business website, you really need to work on this. Make sure you employe Search-Engine friendly URL schemes. If you are a blogger on Wordpress, be sure to take advantage of slugs and other SEO-friendly Wordpress features.

When the keywords are scattered throughout your page, remember that the things that appear first in the code (which would most likely mean the stuff that appears towards the top-left corner of your screen) has more weight and influence than the other side.

Always use Google Webmaster tools to check for broken links, crawl frequency etc. and keep a track of them if you are serious about SEO on your business website. Make sure your robots.txt file is set correctly to allow good exposure. And don’t use cheap shady tactics like hidden text and illegitimate redirection. Note the difference between 301 and 302 redirects if you often move around pages and such.

Cheers.

Google pageranks are forecasted to be updated in April sometime - or at least that is the rumour.

If you don’t know what a pagerank is.. well. The word itself is self-explanatory. It’s a system that Google has that ranks the importance and relevancy of your site, and you get better search engine results. Also, the links that you give out to other sites have more relevancy too (unless attributed by the rel=”nofollow” thingy).

Even if you are already being indexed by Google, that does not mean that you have a pagerank, or if the pagerank is up-to-date. In my case, my site is rather new so I have no pagerank whatsoever. BUT.

There is a way to predict your pagerank. I’ll be brutally honest with you - I’m not sure how accurate this is, but I gave it a whirl for fun, and it predicted that my blog will hit a pagerank of 5 - which is pretty darn good.

http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction

Try that tool and see what your blog MIGHT end up being. I want to see the pagerank update, and check out how accurate this is. You should do the same. And let me know the results - we can all compare the prediction and the actual result in order to see how good this tool is!

When Google gives me a pagerank (which is expected to be updated in April, so I will finally be given a pagerank), they determine the quality of my outbound links as a factor.

So far, because my blog was so new and I’m such a nice guy, I just exchanged blog links with everybody who asked, basically. I had an interesting chat with John Chow today over lunch, and he pointed out a few things to me. When Google gives me a pagerank (which is expected to be updated in April, so I will finally be given a pagerank), they determine the quality of my outbound links as a factor. My pagerank is forecasted to be 4/10 according to a somewhat-trustworthy 3rd party engine I found somewhere, and I don’t want to ruin that opportunity.

Starting today I am cropping out the following type of blogs from my blogroll :

1. Does not update regularly (I’m not asking for once a day - just regularly. I don’t care if it’s once a week).
2. Has no valid content. By valid content I mean it generates its own content (instead of gathering posts from other blogs and putting it all in one blog), and is not commercial (i.e. if your blog exists for the sole purpose of selling things for your affiliates). I will only link to blogs that have valid content that have valid information for surfers.
3. Has no relevancy to my blog. There are great logs out there that have great content that I do read, but it’s bad for my pagerank if that other blog does not have anything that is related to mine. I will do blog reviews of these type of blogs, but no links will be posted on a permanent basis.

For other bloggers out there - I suggest you do the same.

Well, the stats are in for February, and I’ve done some things to this blog to enhance the looks and the functionality of it, as well as keep up diligently with new and informative posts.

Let’s do a quick recap of the growth in traffic :
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Actually this should be an extension of my last post about my website progress report on Calcon Construction.

I was faced with a bit of a challenge on how the section titles of each page would be displayed, and here is my solution to it. The mock-up site can be found at this page.

As you can see, the logo of the company constitutes of a red cell and then a blue cell over it. Each section title must emulate the shape of this. The simple way (well, simple at first) to do this would be to, of course, make images using Photoshop. But…

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Well, Wordpress 2.1.1 was released less than 24 hours ago and I just did the upgrade. It’s not a crucial upgrade, but whatever. May as well keep it up to date.

The upgrade is available at the Wordpress Download Page. Also, a description of the new upgrade can be found here.

In my case, I simply re-uploaded the entire wp-includes folder and wp-admin folder. I never touched anything within those folders or modified them so it’s good to go. I did do a database backup, however, just in case, and I did do a full backup of everything under the wp-contents folder before I started.

It worked for me. That’s the easiest way to upgrade Wordpress, as long as you don’t modify the core files outside of the wp-contents folder. If you want a care-free WP upgrade, that’s the ONLY folder you should ever be touching!

The Golden Question : WHY am I announcing the upgrade of Wordpress?

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A new segment that is being added to my blog is the Web Development Progress Report, which is a blog about my progresses with certain website contracts I am given. I will show you the test site, describe how and why things are done in certain ways. Hopefully this gives newer desginers/coders, as well as more seasoned veterans some ideas. Input is welcomed, but due to the fact that my projects have a time-budget (how many hours can I put into this project for the money I’m getting) as well as a deadline so not all inputs will be taken. After all this is my project.

The contract that I am working on right now is for Calcon Construction, located in Calgary, Alberta. You may be asking “I thought your web design business was in Vancouer, Jeff?” but I got this one thorugh a referral from Rhonda Sherwood, and her sister works for Calcon in Alberta.

Their current website is here - and now you know why they wanted a new one. So we started work about a month ago.. the development process has been going on for a while, which is why this post’s chapter is 1.5, not 1.

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