Daily Web Dev

Welcome to the World of CSS Web Design

Although CSS was first introduced in the mid 1990s, it did not become a mainstream tool among web designers and masters until more recent years. This is unfortunate, because there are millions of poorly designed web sites cluttering the internet that could be easily improved with the help of CSS.

So what exactly is CSS? CSS is an acronym that stands for Cascading Style Sheets. The term Cascading Style Sheets implies two things. First off, the style sheets are cascading. This means that multiple style sheets can be used for a single web page. Additionally, the term “cascading” also refers to the way a style is determined in the event that more than one rule matches a single element. The second thing that is implied by the name Cascading Style Sheets is that the purpose of CSS is to style web pages. Whereas the purpose of HTML (or XHTML) is to define the structure of a web page, the purpose of CSS is to define the presentation.

The reason that so many web pages have broken layouts in different browsers is because they try to use HTML to control the structure and presentation of the page. The most common abuse of HTML is attempting to use tables as a presentation method. Although you may be able to achieve the look you want in a single browser, your web page will look broken and distorted in many other browsers. The only time that tables should be used is to hold a set of data (such as the results from a scientific experiment). If you do have a legitimate use for tables on your web page, you can even use CSS to style your table and make it more attractive.

By taking the time to learn CSS, you will be able to create a web page that looks much more consistent across a variety of browsers.

What does this have to do with promoting my website?
You can use the popularity of these sites to help grow your own website. On a website of mine, I received extremely high rankings on many of these social bookmarking sites and the site received over twenty thousand uniques the weekend that I opened the site. You can also get success like this to your site with social bookmarking sites. However, you must make sure your website is the best it can be first. The only way Social Bookmarking sites can work for your website is if you have unique content or something interesting about your site. Basically, you need something that you can create buzz about. Using social bookmarking sites are a great way to bring visitors to your site. Although the quality of traffic from these sites is not great, I have seen many people discover, and become avid users of my sites from Social Bookmarking sites.

Blogs and Social Bookmarking:
Blogs and news sites are by far the most applicable for Social Bookmarking sites. They have the most content and are updated often compared to other sites. Also, some of these sites are based on feeds. Personally, the best way to setup a blog for social bookmarking sites is to install a mod, that has icons or text to send each post to these sites. For wordpress, my favorite such mod is: This one . You should be able to find mods for other blog software as well.

What about Every Other Site:
You can also use social bookmarking sites for other types of websites, however, some might not apply. Social bookmarking sites, such as Digg as well as a few other Social Bookmarking sites, are based on articles or feeds, so you probably wont be able to submit to those sites.

About the different Social Bookmarking Sites:
There are many social bookmarking sites out there, but I am going to give you some basic info and instructions to get the most out of the most popular Social Bookmarking websites.

Digg:
This is personally my favorite Social Bookmarking site. It gets tons of traffic and is Alexa rank 73. This site is geared more towards technology related articles, but there are also sections to post about many other topics. This is the main social bookmarking site to go after, as the traffic is the greatest. If you have one link on your blog or website, put it up to your digg page. People can “digg” your site, which will move it up in the rankings and give it more exposure. When submitting to Digg, make sure you write an interesting title and description, as this will be a big factor in who ‘Diggs’ your site. Also, be sure to submit all your posts and articles to Digg.

StumbleUpon:
This is another good social bookmarking website. In this site, users put in topics they are interested in and a little bit about themselves. Then, with the StumbleUpon toolbar, you can “stumble” sites. The toolbar sends you to a random site based on your intrests. Stumblers can give sites they like a thumbs up or a thumbs down as well as being able to comment on websites. The more thumbs up you have increase your chance of people stumbling on to your site. In this program, it is important to have a quality site, as it will determine the amount of thumbs ups you get as well as if people just stumble again or look at your site. If you get a good amount of thumbs up, you can get some really good traffic through this site.

Technorati:
This is one of those social bookmarking

 I recently stumbled on an article abot Microsoft’s Adcenter. It seems to me to be their response to the success of Yahoo Overture and Google Adsense. I have seen little news about the program, so I thought it would be good if I shared and discussed it on this blog. Here is a Link to the Program.

The program looks promising, in my opinion. There are some interesteting and new features, including Video Advertisements which I predict will become very popular. Microsoft adcenter also had some neat keyword features such as keyword forecast and keyword clustering. The program looks good, however, it does not seem like it can take on Adsense or Yahoo because of Microsoft’s limited search marketshare. I have not yet signed up for the program, but I plan on applying soon. If I am accepted, I will definetly post my response to the program.

4 Ways to Optimize your site for Adsense or YPN

Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network can generate good revenue for your site. Building a quality site is important to generate revenue. Building a site takes a lot of time and hard work. However, by spending a little time perfecting your Adsense or YPN techniques, you can easily increase your earnings. By using these tips, with time and trial and error, you should be able to grow your Adsense earnings.

Offer Quality Content
The best way to get relevant ads is by writing quality content for users to read. If you have little content on your site, you will likely get unrelated ads and therefore less clicks. Writing some unique articles is a good way to increase traffic as well as Adsense earnings. Users reading articles on a website are also more likely to click your ads.

Optimize your Content for Keywords
Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network place ads based on the content on your page. The ad networks search your Title, URL, keywords, meta tags, etc… The best way to make sure you get relevant ads is by changing those things to relate them to your articles or website. Many practices used for Search Engine Optimization, can be applied for optimizing your page for relevant ads. I suggest trying to target a certain keyword or a few keywords. Make sure the keyword is in the page title, meta tags and URL. Also, try to use <h1> and <b> tags on the keywords.

Choose the Best Ad Placement and Format
One of the most important parts of Adsense optimization is where you place the ads. Also, the ad format is important. Try not to overcrowd your page with ads. Limit your pages to two ads per page, three at the very most. Users will be unlikely to return to your site if it is filled with ads. Also, fewer ads look more professional. Try to use smaller ad formats, my favorites are the 468*60 Banner and 120*600 skyscraper. Place your ads where they will be seen the most and keep them close to your website’s content. If you have written an article, the best place to put your ads is usually after the article, as the user is done reading and may be interested in going to a related site.

Try to Blend your Ads with your Website
Blending your ads with your website is a great way to increase your click through ratio, as well as make your site look better and more professional. The easiest way to make your ads look more similar to your site is by using the colors in your website in your ads. Both Yahoo Publisher Network and Adsense allow you to change the colors of your ads. You can also blend your ads by placing them in areas where they look like they are part of the site.

Building Links to Help Search Engine Rankings

Websites are becoming more and more common these days, especially with user-friendly programs that allow you to build websites with a few clicks of a button. With all this competition, the true challenge comes with how to get attention from the major search engines. When people search for information relevant to your website, you want your pages to come up first so that you can receive the most traffic. The best way to boost this search engine visibility is by building links.

Building the most quality links you can is the name of the game, you want your websites’ link profile to be as strong as possible. The stronger your link profile, the more credibility you will receive from major search engines. Even if other webmasters are reluctant to link to your site, there’s plenty of other ways to get good quality incoming links.

A common method of link building is to submit your website to free or (better yet) paid SEO friendly web directories. Web directories allow you to submit your website into relevant categories. This way, web directories give you a great opportunity to get relevant one-way backlinks to your website.

Submitting articles to article directories is another popular method of link building. The resource box at the end of the article allows you to put in usually at least 2 links back to your website, thus building on the strength of your link profile. You’ll also recieve traffic from the article itself as well - interested readers will click on your link after reading your article.

If there’s blogs related to the content of your site, take the opportunity to visit a few and leave comments on some of the posts. In your comment, don’t forget to leave a link back to your website. Search engine spiders will pick up your link and add it to your link profile. This might not work all the time, though. Some newer blogs have nofollow attributes attached to the comments section, which prevent you from getting any benefit from the link.

Link building is a super important aspect of search engine optimization that should not be ignored. Your traffic depends on it.