It might be useful if you have a site where either you just don’t have a lot of text (remembering that Google LOVES text) or whhere it really is difficult to maniopulate your text to include all the keywords that you think are actually relevant.

Finally, it seems it can also be useful as a signal to Adsense to indicate what your site is about. On one site i was getting ads that, although relevant to one particular keyword, didn’t reflect the use of that keyword on my site. By adding phrases to the keyword tag, I helped adsense to display more relevant ads.

Pictures can either take the form of graphics or photos or in the form of embedded video. Youtube is an easy to access source of multimedia to embed in your site. Graphics and photos can be static or moving, usually using Flash. As a general rule it’s best to only use one moving image and to make that as unobtrusive as possible. Websites with loads of flashing images turn people off in no time.

For static images you will need some form of image editing software. The daddy of them all is Adobe Photoshop – however, a cut down (and chepaer) version called Photoshop Elements can provide you with all you need. A word of warning – don’t use youer web design software to manipulate the size that pictures are displayed – the image will be distorted and fuzzy – so use software that is designed for the purpose.

Try to ensure that the images that you use fit in well with the look and feel of your site. If your site uses predominantly conservative blue tones, a predominatly red image will probably look out of place. make sure that your pictures are an appropriate size – not too dominating, but not so small that your visitors have to peer at the screen to make out what it is.

A supply of free images is available from Stock Xchange and Dreamstime.

The question still remains – what’s the point of Google PR – does it mean anything? And if not why do Google bother to update it?

One of my sites that was recently hit in the Panda2.1 update with a subsequent loss of traffic has just been bumped up from PR0 to PR4 – what’s that all about?

So looks like web developers may be able to breathe again – maybe the days of flash are not limited after all.

The theme has 6 different layouts, customizable backgrounds andmultiple sidebar configurations.

Well if you are a believer in the gospel of Google you may think not. Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Webspam team stated on his blog in September 2009 “Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in Search”.  Well that seems pretty unequivacal. However, I’ve found that there are some times when you need to use that tag.

The first is when the website owner/client demands it. Since there is little harm in including a keywords tag, if the site owner insists it goes in, well it goes in (with a caveat that at least some explanation be given as to why it’s not necessary). “Keywords” and “getting links” are the two things that the average site owner may have heard of in terms of getting a good search ranking, and those are the two things he will be most concerend about.

The second situation where I’ve found meta keywords helpful is in optimising a site for adsense. I’ve sometimes found that using meta keywords has resulted in more accurately targetted adwords ads.

The jury will be out for some time to come up with the conclusion that flash has no future. It’s so embedded into the web designer’s consciousness that it’s unlikely to be ousted soon. And those pesky web designers can be a pretty conservative bunch at times.

Whether Apple will one day see the error of their ways and start making their ipads Flash compatible remains to be seen.

When I’m designing a website, I’ve got two main things in mind. I want the design to look good and I want to make sure that the content is good. If the design is shoddy, even with the most compelling content in the world, people are likely to click away. The question that’s been around ever since web design started is this – Which is more important? design or content? – well both are equally important.

Take the site we with helped with at Freelance SEO . What you’ve got there is some nice graphics and a simple colour scheme (black, shades of grey, purple and white). But the graphics don’t detract from the content rather they enhance the content by making you want to stay on the site.

Sometimes people want to add all sorts of flashing images to their site thinking that it makes it look more professional. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Too much action on the page again causes people to click away. It also distracts them from the content which is the very thing you want them to see.

Flash is a great tool for making images that move. But it’s important that it’s used tastefully and with style. You can get a great looking site if you have some stunning images that fade in to one another. In these cases it’s good to make the transitions very gradual. In the early days of Flash it was quite common for people to use a Flash intro screen. These were a bad idea, and mercifully are a lot less common now. The downsides of using a Flash intro were that they were bad for SEO (search engines couldn’t read them) and that people just plain didn’t like the inconvenience of a splash screen that they didn’t want to see.

So if you’re looking for quality web design, get in touch. We’ll discuss with you your requirements and budget and come up with some designs for your approval If you’ve already got photos and images that you want to use in your site, then we can use those. or alternatively we can design any logos or images that you need and take photos where required.