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December ABCs of Web Design Newsletter

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Introductory comments

My brother is going in for more cancer surgery, so needless to say, my mood has not been the greatest lately. This email from Doug just made my day!

Theresa,

I am an STC member from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I currently work in software documentation (help authoring, etc.), but am trying to develop the skills and work up the courage to start up my own Web design business. I have read several of your articles and have not only learned from them, but have been inspired by your common sense and ethical approaches to Web design.

Thank you for your information about SEO Spam. My HTML instructor (at a local college) endorsed using some of these methods; I now know the dangers of going down that path. I would like to think that a long- term, ethical approach would provide the best results.

Cheers,
Doug

I just completed an edit on my first web site conversion article. It is pretty high level – not overly specific but gives some good information on what web site conversion is and some ideas on how to apply it.

Question of the month

Question: “Dear Theresa: Several years ago, I read your "recipe" for search engine optimization, which was published in the STC Intercom. Since then, I've been successfully using it to achieve excellent keyword rankings for several websites that I'm working on.

However, one of my websites, www.solutiondispersions.com, has recently (over the past few months) fallen out of the first-page listing on Google. Before that, it was running in the top 5 listings. (Now it has dropped so low that I can't even locate it!) In addition, the site is still ranking in the top 5 on other major search engines (Yahoo, MSN, etc.). Therefore, I'm stuck on why it has suddenly dropped out of Google. I have not made any changes to keywords, homepage content, etc.

I was hoping that you might be able to shed some light on what could have happened and how to correct it. Thanks for any help that you can provide. Regards, Larry Cartolano.”

Answer: Great question – Hi Larry - Thanks for your email. Well, with just looking at your site quickly, the only thing I can think of is that Google does change their algorithms every so often and a lot of sites sink in the rankings -- mine included. In the industry, they call it the Google Dance. I would recommend that you monitor your site and perhaps tweak it for keywords to try to get it back up in the rankings. I noticed that you have a lot of keywords listed in your META tag -- you may trim that down a bit to focus on just a few and build more pages to focus on the other ones. I also did a little research on this topic – try to tighten up your TITLE tags on your pages and ensure that your TITLE text also repeats on your page exactly. Hope this helps! Thanks for your question.

Recent Clients of W-edge design:

Abercrombie.com
Moonhorse Art Studio
PC Flyer
Lash Publications

Wrap up

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season and a happy and prosperous New Year.

Feel free to email me any questions! Thanks for reading my newsletter.

Please send all questions to theresaw@columbus.rr.com.

To see the articles from my print web column, go to http://www.w-edge.com/articles.htm

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