13 Web Development Tips You Should Know

Web developer? Smart thinkin'. Here are some tips you should know if you don't already:

1. If your site's content can be turned into a widget somehow, such as with an RSS feed or just a mini version of your site (ex. the puzzles widget on this site) - do so - and then submit your widget to all the major widget-oriented websites such as iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Facebook, Live, Widgetbox and Widgipedia - it will help drive a LOT of traffic to your site - think of it as a great form of content syndication.
2. Do NOT: have a public link exchange on your site, sign your site up on link farms or on SEO directories - this will lower your rankings on Google a lot - take it from experience.
3. Though CSS can replicate the styling brought from these tags, search bots love them - so they're worth using for SEO purposes: <h1> - <h5>, <strong>, <em>.
4. Make sure your site supports the big four: Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 1.5+, Opera, and Safari.
5. Make sure your site fits down to a 1024 x 768 monitor resolution.
6. Use the color wheel when creating layout themes. Try to keep your site layout down to three distinct colors.
7. Create a website shell (a.k.a. template), so that if you decide to make another website down the road, it will be a lot quicker to make because you'll already have a framework set up.
8. Create a to-do list for your site so you don't forget anything as it grows bigger - I like to jot sudden ideas I get down on it too.
9. A successful website provides a service to its users - such as teaching (Wikipedia) and/or social networking (Facebook).
10. Whenever possible, use onmousedown instead of onclick - it's ~100ms faster.
11. Use file compression for your javascript and web page files so that your pages load faster - also if you can, put the script include tags at the bottom of your page - this will give the illusion that your site loads faster because browsers usually comb through an entire js file before continuing on with loading the rest of your page.
12. If you have a rails site, I suggest checking out Mongrel and Monit for Mongrel (or God) if you are currently using Apache with FastCGI. You may notice your app is a lot faster with Mongrel clustering than on FastCGI.
13. This one is more of a for-your-health point, but our eyes naturally look slightly downwards - so if your computer screen is straight in front of you at eye level or higher, trying moving it down to neck or chest level - you may notice that your eyes feel more relaxed -- (I learned this last point from an eye doctor and feel that it helps me.)

Well that's it - a quick read - hopefully you've learned something new!

Also, if you think I'm missing a good tip, please let me and everyone else know and comment below (and hey - it''ll be some good free SEO if you have a web development website.)

An Example Why 'Content is King' in SEO

In case you've never heard of the phrase 'content is king' when it comes to search engine optimization, here's a quick example as to why.

If you search for the keyword phrase "search engine optimization" on Google, you'll probably find that the top 15 sites rank similiar to this:

Strong results that content is indeed king when it comes to search engine optimization. 1,931 words are on the average top ranking website (1,204 if you take out bruceclay.com -- which is still quite a lot).

Also not too suprising is the fact that the youngest website ranked is from March of 2003. Google really likes the dinosaur websites, with the average age being 7 years, 8 months old.

One site that was somewhat out of place and hence a bit more interesting was www.inteliture.com. With a significantly less word count and a relatively new startup date, one has to wonder how it is ranking so high.

• Note: Approx. word count only includes the words from the one ranked address listed and not the entire site.
• Note: PageRank and Approx. Creation Date estimated using the SEO for Firefox plugin

8 Quick Search Engine Optimization Tips for Your Website

1. Have Unique Description/Keyword Meta Tags for Each Page

Titles may be obvious when it comes to making them unique for each page, but don't forget about the meta description and keyword tags. They can be unique for each page too you know! If you've got a dynamic website with generated content, it's even easer.

For example, if your site has forums, try putting the forum topic title as the title and meta description for that page. That way, users who happen to search for the right phrase online won't see a bland title such as "XX Forums", but will instead see a much more descriptive title and then some, as it will give them a preview of what they're about to see, which is the whole point anyways.

For all you RoR developers out there, here's what I do with every page on my site: <meta name="description" content="<% if @description == nil %>A blog on web development topics. Covering technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Javascript, AJAX, CSS and DHTML.<% else %><%= @description %><% end %>" /> Where the @description variable I specify in the controller. I do the same thing for the meta keywords too except with a @keywords variable.

2. Text, Text, Text!

Try this out: Google for 'search engine optimization' - you'll soon find that the majority of the top 10 ranked pages have an essay's worth or more of text on their front page. This stands to argue that the more words you have on your page, the better - so long as it's all relevant information. Just think about the sheer multitude of keywords and buzzwords that are in 2000 words over a meager 200 words. You'll get more organic search hits simply because you'll have more keywords and phrases than the next site. It's a no brainer.

3. Create a Sitemap Page

Make it basic, just with links. This improves your ranking, plus it helps the search bots get around on your site.

4. For Quick Search Engine Indexing - Add Your Site's Link to Popular Pages

More popular pages get crawled more often by search bots than their less popular peers. If you've got a new website, put a link to it on a popular page so the search bots will find it faster and thus index it quicker. If you don't have a web page that can help you out, post a link in the forums or comment sections of popular websites with similar content as your new site. Also, make sure to submit your sitemap.xml file as soon as your site is online to Google's webmaster tools.