Website Design and Promotion

Greening the Apple

Ben Rowe points to another video by Greenpeace trying to get Apple to go Green.

As a long time Mac user I couldn't agree more. I love Apple's products and am disapointed that they aren't doing more on the environmental front. There is no reason why they can't be leaders in the conscious business arena.

From the Greenpeace website:

We love Apple. Apple knows more about "clean" design than anybody, right? So why do Macs, iPods, iBooks and the rest of their product range contain hazardous substances that other companies have abandoned? A cutting edge company shouldn't be cutting lives short by exposing children in China and India to dangerous chemicals. That's why we Apple fans need to demand a new, cool product: a greener Apple.

It's a clever campaign and as Ben says, It's positive protesting" as they are trying to work with the popularity of Apple, not against it. Take  part in the campaign.

Using Images to Your Advantage

For a few good, basic suggestions on how to best use images on your web site, see Vanessa Fox's post on the OGWC Blog.

Of course images on web sites help — and are often essential to — make them look nice. But search engines can't read them, even if they contain text. So Vanessa's suggestions include:

• make sure most of the text on your pages isn't in your images
• use descriptive "alt" attributes for your images to tell search engines what they are and also for people who have images turned off (they help the visually impaired)
• at the same time, don't go overboard loading your images with keywords

Vanessa's post also talks a bit about Google's image search and how to make it work for you.

Excellent Summary on Key Word Research

I can't help but post another blog entry by copyblogger. His is one of the best blogs on copywriting.

A recent post of his, Five Essential Elements of Key Word Search Engine Research, does a great job of summarizing the value of key word research.

It is easily understandable even for those of you socially responsible and alternative health or healing business who normally want to run when you hear words like "search engine optimization" and "key word research."

Here are his 5 essential elements of key word search engine research:

1. Use the free and the paid research tools available.

2. Be as specific as you can with keyword phrases.

3. Pay attention to popular keywords while being realistic about using those that are highly competitive.

4. Ensure your search terms are relevant to your goals.

5. Choose keywords that support the development of content that is a valuable to readers.

Read the details of Brian's post on key word search engine research.

Duplicate Content

A good post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog on what is and isn't considered duplicate content and how Google deals with it.

Why is this important? Well, from Google and its users' point of view (which probably means you and your web site's visitors) they don't want to show more than one result in a search with essentially the same content. It would be very frustrating if several of the results links took you to basically the same page.

Duplicate content is considered "substantive blocks" of very similar content on two or more web pages. This doesn't, however, apply to the same page translated into more than one language (so no need to worry if you've got a French version, a Spanish version, etc.).

The post gives some good pointers on how to ensure that the version of the page you want gets indexed (e.g., you may have a print version that you don't need to have indexed, but the regular version you do want).