I just learned something new today that I thought I’d share, because I’m sure there are others like myself that are learning this stuff.  This is pretty cool for those that are new to creating SEO friendly code, like myself.  With this code you can create buttons with link text that is readable by the search engines, plus you can also create buttons that are reusable rather than having to create a button for each variation of the same button that you want to put different text  into.

Let me give you an example of this.  I had two buttons on one of my pages.  They were exactly the same except for the text. One button I wanted to read “Compare” and the other read “Reviews”.  Plus it would be extremely helpful if the search engines actually read that text and followed my link to those pages.Now normally you’d say just create two buttons, one for each with graphical text embedded into the button, and you can do that and it’ll work just fine.  However, with a normal button with the text embedded into the button itself, the search engines can not and will not read that “compare” or “review” text… thus you loose potential SEO power.  With the code I’m proposing, you will actually be creating a css style, and wrapping the “<a href>” tag around the div to accomplish the same thing, but now the search engines will see it as a link and follow it.(if you choose to allow them)

So first, here is the code that actually goes into you page: (or in my case my page to show my compare and review buttons)

<a class=”lower_button” href=”<your website location here>”>
<div class=”compare_review_button” onmouseover=”this.className=’compare_review_button_hover’”
onmouseout=”this.className=’compare_review_button’”>

COMPARE </div>
</a>

———————

this is the code for the review button:

<a class=”lower_button” href=”http://<your website location here>”>
<div class=”compare_review_button” onmouseover=”this.className=’compare_review_button_hover’”
onmouseout=”this.className=’compare_review_button’”>
REVIEWS

</div>
</a>

——————–

Here are the classes you will need to add to your css style sheet.  They control the button characteristics using a url of a graphic we defined in fireworks, the size, the text font, and hover characteristics.

.compare_review_button {
color:#000000;
font-family: “Trebuchet MS”, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:11pt;
font-weight:bold;
height:30px;
margin-left: 20px;
margin-top: 0px;
margin-bottom: 20px;
padding-top:5px;
text-align:center;
text-decoration:none;
width:140px;
background-attachment: scroll;
background-color: transparent;
background-image: url(/images/button-orange.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: 0 0;
}

.compare_review_button_hover {
color:#000000;
font-family: “Trebuchet MS”, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size:11pt;
font-weight:bold;
margin-left: 20px;
margin-top: 0px;
margin-bottom: 20px;
height:30px;
padding-top:5px;
text-align:center;
text-decoration:none;
width:140px;
background-attachment: scroll;
background-color: transparent;
background-image: url(/images/button-orange-hover.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: 0 0;
}

What  you ultimately end up with are two buttons that look similar to the ones in the screen shot below:

The difference with this code is that the search engines will now read two links, one that says “Compare” and one that says “Reviews” that link to other pages on your site.

Now I’m sure some of the established SEO guru’s will say, wow, she just learned this.. yep, I did.  This is an SEO 101.  But I look at it this way, “never too late”, and I’d welcome any comments or corrections if I’ve stated anything incorrectly.  I love learning new things, and sometimes it’s the simplest, easiest things to the guru’s that us newbies don’t know, and still need to learn.

Test it out, have fun with it, and give me a shout if you need any help.

Best Successes!

As I’ve been working on developing my affiliate sites this past year, I’ve come across some other cool sites with some absolutely great information, and just general COOL stuff. I figured I’d put it in one place, and share it with everyone.  Oh, most of these are not affiliate links – only where I’ve specifically stated so.

• This first one, is a collection of “cheat sheets”, everything from CSS Cheat Sheets, to Mod_rewrite Cheat Sheets, to Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheets, to PHP Cheat Cheat Sheets, to HTML Cheat Sheets, to even a World of Warcraft Cheat Sheet. This is one of the best reference sites, I’ve stumbled upon… Added Bytes by Dave Child.  This guy is WAY more organized than I am, or ever hope to be. 

• Another site I found that may interest some of you is this one: The Perfect 3 Column Liquid Layout by Matthew James Taylor.  It provides you with a series of website layouts that use percentage widths and relative positioning, that work with all the common web browsers. They are SEO friendly, and contain no CSS hacks.  This one was referred to me via Stomping the Search Engines 2.

• Thesis Theme (affiliate link) for Wordpress, by Chris Pearson. Although you can get many free word press themes, and I started out using free themes, I found that they really limit your ability to do what you really need to.  Also they tend to not be as SEO friendly as you would really want.  This theme is what I use here at LifeStyleByChoice and it’s very customizable, SEO friendly, and upgradeable without losing your valuable customizations.  They also offer fantastic support, and a very knowledgeable user community via their forum.

• Create .xml sitemaps for google with this site… XML-Sitemaps.com. Very useful when using google’s webmaster tools and submitting a sitemap to google.

• Use Compete.com to research potential competitors in a niche you are considering entering.  Then continue to use it to check on them as your business grows. You can check 3 domains without signing up, and if you sign up for a free account, you can check up to 5 domains at a time.  You can compare daily/monthly visitors, daily/monthly growth, as well as other metrics.  They also offer keyword analytics – showing the top keywords driving traffic to the site.  The keyword analytics only offers a short listing of the keywords, and then you have to purchase the “pro” version to get the full listing.  The biggest advantage of Compete.com for me, is researching who the true market leaders are in a niche you are considering, and tracking that information over time to see if it changes.

• KeywordSpy and KeyCompete are both great key word research tools.  Use them to “spy” into what your competitors or even your vendors are using for keywords to drive traffic to their sites.  KeywordSpy by far has many more features, but is quite a bit more expensive.  You can try out either service and get a very limited result set to work with, before purchasing the expanded versions.

• Almost forgot this one… Traffic Travis. I learned about it, as a free bonus.  I’ve just started playing with this one myself, so I don’t have alot of details on it yet, but from what I’ve seen so far, there is some pretty cool information available at your fingertips.  Plus the base product which has alot of functionality, is Free.   Granted it’s kinda got a goofy name, and it’s not the slickest looking, but some of the information you have available icludes:
  • page analysis of every page on your site, showing the top 20 links with % of link value each is getting, top 20 page words, all your h1, h2 and h3’s on the page, and your google page rank.  This is some useful info all in one place.
  • keyword research tool with daily search counts from google, yahoo, and MSN.  I did find a few that I did not see via google’s keyword tool
  • run analysis on your PPC keywords and see how many competitor ad’s are running for each keyword, also use the search engine tools and see the top ranking sites for each keyword.

As I think of more I will update!

To your success!