Web designers can do so much for themselves, their clients and their businesses by incorporating the following seo tips…

1) Make sure your URL’s are as SEO friendly as possible. Avoid all those “=” and “?” marks. Use mod re-write to re-create these URL’s to a more seo friendly format. Also, if the URL includes the keyword phrase for that page, that’s extra bonuses!

2) Keyword research should be the absolute basis of any website design project. It should be the very first thing that you do with your client. You’ll be surprised how many more pages and information you’ll be able to get from your client if you can show them what their target audience is looking for.

3) Use semantic tags on every website page. If you’re not familiar with these tags, read this list of semantic tags outlining all the semantic tags. These are not tags that are used in the section, instead, these are tags used within the body of text. They’re very helpful with search engines and how they understand the content of your website pages.

4) Avoid using flash for your navigation, if possible. I know, I know, you want to show your client your flash design, beautiful menus, etc, but the truth is search engines still have trouble reading flash files and they simply will not follow the links from the navigation menu if it’s written in flash.

5) Don’t forget the alt tags on your images. They should be not only descriptive of the image but use the keyword phrase for the page as well.

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My Christmas Tree is just about ready to go. This site was made for you to show the world your Christmas Tree. I still have a few kinks to work out and the new site design will be ready to go. Please feel free to check out the site and please post your Christmas trees and rate other Christmas trees around the world. I may break the site down into Christmas Tree decoration, Home decoration, and more. Anyway, here is a link to the new web site www.mychristmastree.us! This site was created by robuti.com.

WASHINGTON (AFP)

US president-elect Barack Obama opened up his official transition website to questions from the public on Wednesday with his team promising to provide answers to the most popular queries. Change.gov, Obama’s website until he is sworn in as president on January 20, said the new tool, called “Open for Questions,” was designed to help Americans “make their voices heard.”

“Today, we’re rolling out a new feature that lets you ask the transition team any questions you have about the issues that are important to you,” the transition team said in a posting on Change.gov. “‘Open for Questions’ is yet another step to open up the transition process to the millions of Americans who are following closely, encouraging them to take part in the process and make their voices heard,” it said.

The feature allows registered users of Change.gov to post questions directly on the website. Other users vote “yes” or “no” as to whether they like a question or flag it as “inappropriate.” Registration requires a user to submit their first and last name, their zip code and email address and to select a password. The questions move up or down in rankings according to the number of votes and the transition team said “popular questions selected by the community of web users on Change.gov will be answered on a regular basis by the Obama team.” As of mid-afternoon Wednesday, there had been 56,642 votes on 928 questions submitted by 1,436 people at change.gov/OpenForQuestions. The top question with 645 “yes” votes was from a user named “Diane” in New Jersey who asked: “What will you do to establish transparency and safeguards against waste with the rest of the Wall Street bailout money?”

Questions which had been voted out as “inappropriate” by users included one asking the president-elect to “come clean” about his contacts with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who is facing corruption charges. Obama called on Blagojevich to resign on Wednesday, a day after the governor was arrested on charges which included an attempt to sell off Obama’s Senate seat.

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Have you ever heard a search engine optimization (SEO) professional use the term user experience during a presentation, in an article or as part of a sales pitch? On the web, user experience (commonly abbreviated as UX or UE) is a term used to describe the overall perception, experience, and satisfaction that users have as a result of their interactions with a website.

Search engine optimization is all about the user experience, because the idea behind SEO is to get users to their desired information and destination(s) as quickly and easily as possible by using the users’ language (keywords). Searchers type in keywords at a commercial web search engine. Searchers’ expectations are validated in search results pages and, hopefully, after they click on links within those search results…a perfect, seamless user experience.

On the surface, an SEO professional’s presumed knowledge of user experience might sound impressive. However, if you do a little digging, you might discover that search professionals have their own preconceived notions as to what constitutes a positive user experience, notions that have little or nothing to do with users at all.

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