In the previous article, I discussed the basics of an image fade and how it could be used to display a series of images while conserving space, using the examples of a keyless entry remotes site, as the fade can display images for highly aesthetic products or those that are more technically functional.  In this article, we move into some of the technical aspects of adding an image fade to a website.  This article will not focus on the code itself, but rather some of the options you have and issues to look out for.

The basic code is simple enough.  You have a timer running at a rapid rate (generally about 10 miliseconds), that reduces the opacity of the target image or div while it is positive.  Once it hits zero, it changes the image source (for a basic, all-Javascript fade) or alters the inner HTML of the div (for an AJAX-based fade).  It then raises the opacity back up to 100%, and delays the timer for a few seconds until the process repeats.  So a viewer will see a keyless remote (for example) on screen for a few seconds, which grows rapidly more transparent until it vanishes entirely, and then a new remote will fade in, display for a few seconds, and fade out, and so on.

What’s the difference between the straight Javascript and the AJAX versions?  Well, with Javascript, you need to collect all the information from your database before-hand.  Using AJAX lets you gather the information with each image that you swap out, and generally gives more control if you want to do more complex things with the images.  On the flip side, you will generally need the image to stay faded out for somewhat longer with AJAX, to account for  processing time.

One thing you don’t want is for your old keyless entry remote to start fading back in, and then suddenly switch to the new one.  To prevent this, your best move is to preload your images, and make sure your AJAX completing is what triggers the fade in.

Another thing to remember is that opacity is one of those things that the various browsers just don’t feel like agreeing on.  Make sure you set the opacity changing appropriately for all the browsers, or you’ll get remotes just switching out with no fade.  While this still accomplishes the general goal, it lacks all the aesthetic appeal of the fade.

Now that we have a baseline for the fade, we can move on to some advanced options.  In the next article, I will discuss a few variations on the image fade, including how to run multiple fades at once and an “expanding” fade that relies on changing the image size rather than its opacity.

Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique Website Design. Truly Unique works on websites of all varieties, such as www.cruisingforremotes.com, where you can find keyless entry and keyless remotes.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

White Hat SEO methods are meant to improve the performance of your organic search engine marketing campaign, while adhering to the terms of service laid out by Google.

What Does the Term ‘White Hat SEO’ Mean?

White Hat SEO is the opposite of Black Hat SEO. Generally, search marketers who practice White Hat SEO (or ethical organic search marketing) techniques try to improve their organic rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), while maintaining the integrity of their website and following Google’s steadfast set of rules.

Some examples of White Hat practices include:

* Offering quality content, products and services
* Using relevant keyword-rich meta tags
* Making your website easy to navigate

Why are Ethical SEO Techniques Important for Good SEO?

In short, engaging in suspicious behavior can get your site banned from Google and other search engines, which should be a big deterrent for any search marketer or Web master. As the undisputed king of the search engines, Google is used by millions of people every day, and each user presents an opportunity for your website to be discovered. That said, Google has the power to drive tons of traffic to your website, so being banned from Google would result in a dramatic drop off in traffic and sales for business websites.

Considering all the work that goes into your website, think about how devastating it would be to get banned from the Internet’s most popular search engine. Adding insult to injury, once you’re banned from Google, it can be impossible to get re-listed again. A lifetime ban from Google would have tremendous consequences for your website, which for many companies could very well put them out of business.

Should You Use White Hat SEO Techniques for Your Website?

Implementing White Hat SEO practices is the most effective means of establishing a principled and successful website and business. In addition, practicing ethical search marketing ensures that your website will have longevity, authority and credibility with the search engines.

Let’s look back at each of the above examples of ethical organic search techniques and go deeper to see how to implement each one.

Offer Quality Content, Products and Services

The key to getting traction in the search engines is to author great content around your quality products and/or services. People like good content and so do search engines because good content makes for a good experience for the user. The better your content the more likely people are to visit and explore your website and buy your products.

Using Relevant, Keyword-Rich Meta Tags

A big part of ethical SEO is the inclusion of meta tags in your “off page” site content. Meta tags include meta descriptions, title tags and to a lesser degree meta keywords. Treat your title tags and meta descriptions like ad copy and include target keywords and a strong call to action. For the record, meta descriptions and title tags are the “ad copy” that displays for your website in the SERPs when users run a search query and can be the difference in whether or not a user chooses to click on your site.

Making Your Website Easy to Navigate

Organizing your website to be user-friendly and search engine-friendly is another important part of ethical SEO. To do this, you should map out your pages ahead of time and create a logical hierarchy, grouping pages in a tree with home page first, followed by top level category pages, then leading down to more specific tertiary product pages as drop downs in the sub navigation. This logical formatting makes is easy for both users and search engine spiders to navigate your site and discover information.

When in Doubt, Play it Safe

White Hat SEO practices produce effective, ongoing and principled enhancements to your website and are always good business practice. Unethical SEO practices may deliver quick results, but the results are short-lived. Plus, getting on Google’s bad side is the equivalent of a death sentence for most websites. By following ethical search marketing practices, you’ll stay in Google’s good graces.

Ken Lyons is a Marketing Manager for WordStream, Inc. WordStream offers a suite of dynamic keyword research tools and AdWords Tools for keyword grouping and keyword suggestion for paid and organic search engine marketing.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

When you turn on your computer and connect to Internet Explorer or Firefox, call up Google or Yahoo! and begin to look for information, have you ever wondered what is happening behind the scenes of the words or phrases you entered into the search window?

The instant you type in your search request and hit enter, search engines, like Google, are scanning their databases for the best possible match; and almost instantly what you see on the results page, are links to the most relevant sites that the search engine has indexed.

So, how do the search engines build their databases, or indexes? A search engine finds information for its database by getting the information from their web crawlers, spiders, or robots.

A web crawler (spider or robot) is a program or automated script, which browses URLs (web pages) on the Internet in an automated manner. Web crawlers are mainly used by search engines to index downloaded pages for search term relevancy and for automated maintenance tasks on a website, such as checking links or validating HTML code. The more relevant the site’s content is to keywords or search terms, the easier it is for search engine robots to crawl, index, and rank the site.

Most web developers and even some seasoned search engine optimization (SEO) professionals tend to forget the overall purpose of the search engines, which is this: search engines are designed to find the best results for users and to provide the user with a compelling experience.

Its common knowledge amongst developers and optimizers that good SEO practices are to make a site more user-friendly for visitors, and that the site needs to be easy to find; when you build a site that focuses on the needs of your audience, you are simultaneously building a site that search engines can easily crawl and will be interested in.

Compelling Content For Users and For Crawlers

Creating compelling and useful content will likely have the greatest impact on your website’s popularity. Internet users know what they are looking for, and with good content, you can make sure they find it! The one thing we know for certain is that when an end-user can find what they are looking for quickly, and they like what they find, they will tell others about it. They spread the word through blog posts, social media services, emails, forums, and many other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and the leading search engines, and it rarely comes without quality content.

When creating your content, keep in mind that search engines love providing web users with relevant results, so the more relevant the content is to the end user, the more likely it will eventually be served up by the search engine to that end user.

In the vast field of optimization, you can’t learn enough about the proper use of keywords and keyword research. When composing your site s content, it is not always the best practice to focus on the most competitive term in your copy. Search terms that are overused create redundancy; and just because a term is used frequently, it doesn’t mean it s the best available term and certainly doesn’t make it the most relevant to your site’s mission. By focusing on the less frequently used keywords, it is possible to gain a significant amount of traffic overall from several longer, lower search volume phrases.

Just as important as getting the search engines to give you a high ranking, you want web users to visit your site for a reason, and that reason is to do business with you. So once you get them to your site, you will need to create content that will keep them there. One of the most effective ways to do that is by creating content as if you were your own audience, your own customer. If you were your own customer, what search terms would you use? What intriguing piece of information would keep you on your site and make you want to do business with yourself? Thinking in terms of your customer’s needs, will help you create content that search engines will gladly index and share, resulting in higher ranking and a more defined audience.

Another way to develop quality content for both users and search engines is to know who your competitors are. Once you identify your competitors by using common keywords and phrases, you will discover how to make your keyword list more focused to your business, and at the same time you will build your own unique image. You don t want to look exactly like your competition, so do your homework and create your own search engine identity.

Tony Mandarich owns & operates Mandarich LLC, a full-service web media business specializing in web site development & optimization, video production, photography & Internet marketing.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

You might as well be for all the Internet cares. Around now everybody has realized that just having a homepage on the Internet is not enough to make it as a dot com. The Internet is a really huge place and a website can simply get lost in the million others that are already on the Internet competing for visitor eyeballs. Luckily for SEO services and search engine optimization there are some opportunities available to you to establish a sound business.

If you want to bring your website out of the jungle into the city and where people can actually see it, start by identifying what’s the purpose of your website. Then you must identify keywords that people might search when they want to see content that’s on your website. You can also hire a SEO firm to help you with this. Once you’ve found the keywords that are worth competing for you must start your search engine optimization program.

How do you identify the keywords that are worth competing for? The logic is simple, look for keywords that are related to your offering, are not already optimized to death by other SEO companies and can bring meaningful websites to your website. That needs some creative thinking, but many SEO firm specialize in finding new keywords that can bring you lot of visitors. It depends on how are the SEO services provided by the company.

Search engine optimization is a time taking process and it can take  more than three months for the full effects of your SEO services to show. So don’t expect too much too soon from a SEO firm. Once they’ve done the SEO Google will slowly add the links and pass on the pagerank goodies to you. Do not forget that if you have a new website you can be consigned to the famed Google sandbox for a little while before your webpages will start appearing high up in Google search results.

So running a website is a long term investment and you should look to stay invested for at least a year or more before you can expect to earn true value from your website. Once your website gets older and you are firmly embedded in the search engine, you can rely on regular visitors to keep sending you fresh traffic and you can tone down your search engine optimization drive a bit. Remember to keep investing a little in search services though because the search engines are really dynamic and things can change for you if you are not careful.

Just one last tip for you, don’t go spending the moon for search engine optimization. You don’t need to hire the most expensive name to get into a search engine. Look for a SEO company who is reliable, in the business and who knows the job. Ask around on forums and message boards to find the right contacts for SEO services.

For more resources about seo services or even about seo company please review this website http://www.affordable-ranking.com

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

When you want to be able to display a large number of images in a small amount of space, one of your best tactics is some Javascript code that lets you keep some of the images off-screen, and cycle through them. Even when aesthetics isn’t the main draw for the site’s product – as with keyless entry remotes, for example – pictures can help break up text walls and make the site itself more appealing. Having various keyless remotes or other items moving in and out adds color and animation, catching visitors’ attention and giving them a hint of a website’s variety. There are several ways to code moving images; in this series of articles, we’ll be discussing the image fade.

So what is an image fade, and how does it compare to, say, an image crawl or scroll? An image fade brings up a selection of pictures, displaying them one at a time, each for a few seconds, and then fades out, switches images, and fades back in to display a new picture. So you might have a keyless entry remote display, then fade out and have a remote for a different make or model fade in, and a few seconds later replace it with a third, and so on.

Two of the biggest advantages of image fades over crawls and scrolls (where you have a train of images that either moves automatically across the screen in a loop or is moved back and forth by the user) is that you don’t need to have all of the images on the page at once. Rather than waiting for all the images to load for the page to be fully loaded (delaying any onload scripts you might be using, and possibly delaying the loading of other content), you can have only a single keyless remote loaded up, and use an onload preloader to start loading the rest once the page has fully loaded. Additionally, you don’t need a lot of vertical or horizontal space for the entire train, giving you more flexibility in positioning and allowing you to use larger images. This can also mean extra room for additional information; you might list the name, price, and maybe a short description beneath each keyless entry remote, for example. A crawl or scroll with that capability would take up quite a lot of space, making it unfeasible unless the crawl is meant as the focal point of the page.

A fade involves the display of only one image at a time, which is something of a disadvantage, as visitors can’t, for example, scroll through a large selection at once. As such, image fades are much less useful than crawls and scrolls as a navigational tool. It’s also worth noting that image fades are somewhat more complex than crawls and scrolls, as they work best with the additional of AJAX coding (although you can create a functional one using only standard Javascript).

So, with the key points of image fades noted, the next article will focus on some of the things you will need to consider when integrating the fade into a website. The final article in this set will go over some of the options you have for expanding your image fades.

Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique Website Design. Truly Unique works on websites of all varieties, such as www.cruisingforremotes.com, where you can find keyless entry and keyless remotes.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com