There is a very good article in the January 2009 issue of .net magazine about seo tips. Whilst the article is titled "advanced seo tips" it gives does give a good and clear insight into the direction search positioning is taking.
Well worth a read.

There has been an upgrade to an all in one social bookmarking system. We have been using this system for quite a while and would highly recommend it for regular social bookmarkings.
www.onlywire.com

A bit of a shame this. Freeindex.co.uk used to be able to provide a direct link to your site from their products and services section of the enhanced listing. It looks like they have implemented a system which now tracks the number of clicks. Whilst this may be good for their own metrics, it doesn't help much for search engines following direct links into websites. The direct link is now replaced with a link back into their own site which records a click.

Hopefully they will find another way of tracking their links and put it back to the way it was.

Labels: links

We get asked this question a lot. The way we prefer is to use YouTube or GoogleVideo. By uploading your videos to these sites you can then embed the video on your own. This has a couple of benefits. Firstly in your profile you can get a good link into your site from a relevant page. Secondly, you do not use the resources of your own site to show the video but you use YouTube or GoogleVideo.

You have the option to display a nice frame around the video and it looks like an integral part of the site.
Have a look at the parking sensors example with an embedded youTube video.

Labels: video.

We love the way that the embedded pdf's work on your website using this method. By signing up to a free account at www.scribd.com you can upload a pdf. Choosing the show as book method enables a beautiful page turning effect. You can then produce a piece of code which allows you to embed the pdf on your site.
A couple of good benefits. You are using the resources of scribd to display the pdf. Scribd is very well ranked in teh search engine and can provide a good search engine position for titles of your documents.
Here is an example for therapy exercise equipment .
Here is the scribd site www.scribd.com

Labels: pdf

There is a tool which will allow you to create online presentations of your powerpoint slides. This is probably the best tool we have found for this job and we have tried quite a lot. Most have synchronisation problems, some are just useless but this one is just brilliant.

It is called ispring and is available from http://www.ispringsolutions.com/

You download the program and run it. It will add itself to your Powerpoint program as a new toolbar. When you have completed your powerpoint you can then upload it and embed it on your website (it produces an example html page if you need the code).

Here is an example using an iSpring powerpoint to flash conversion using a voice over system from our ITIL Management Services » client

Labels: website addons powerpoint flash

There are only a handful of fonts you can use as standard on the web. Whatever fonts your users have on their computers are the fonts that they can see, so we use an embedded font system to allow users to see text in fonts they do not have. There are many useful reasons for embedding fonts on your site. Particularly when branding is concerned. We use a rather old, but still very good piece of software for this. It is the Microsoft WEFT (web Embedding Fonts Tool) which was originally released in 2001 and I think the latest update was 2003.

How it works:
You specify the website you want to put the font on and choose the font from your own font list. The program will then generate an eot file that you upload to your website. You can refer to this eot file in your css. In the example below I am using the martina font from my primary headings.

<!-- /* $WEFT -- Created by: Neil MacLeod (neil@web-studio.co.uk) on 18/03/2008 -- */
@font-face {
font-family: Martina;
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
src: url(MARTINA0.eot);
}
-->

You can then use this as a normal font-family icon in your css, e.g. Heading 1

h1 {
font-family: Martina, "Trebuchet MS", Arial, serif ;
font-size:2.8em;
font-weight:normal
}

and a main heading looks like this

Martina Font

A great benefit is that the search engines can read the text so you do not need to add in images for headings.

The program is available from http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft3/download.aspx

Labels: fonts, web design