A devoted reader wrote to me, asking:
“I have just picked up your new book Creating Cool Web Sites, and it’s great stuff. I specifically read the chapter on how to increase your findability and am still wondering if there are even more tips and tricks about how to get good search engine ranking?”
A letter came in this morning:
Help! I read about some sort of major security hole where people can exploit the Safari help system and drop junk onto my computer? What’s that all about? How can I avoid it being a danger on my computer?
Here’s a search engine optimization concept that most people don’t think about: make sure you have keywords and key phrases in your TITLE tag. You know what the TITLE tag is, it’s the tag that gives you the name of the page on the Window frame in your browser, and it’s remarkable how few sites pay any attention to what’s in that critical search engine optimization (SEO) field.
Search engine optimization, or “SEO” in the biz, isn’t only for people trying to turn their Web site into a revenue machine, to make money online, but can really be useful for everyone building Web sites. There are lots of different facets to writing, designing and adjusting your Web pages to maximize the chance of them being a top result for search terms, but one of the best – and easiest – is to work with keyword density.
Imagine you were a really big company and walked into the offices at Google, saying “I’ll offer you a deal: I’ll add your advertisements to my Web Pages, you sell the ad space, and we’ll split the revenue.” Sound too good to be true?
It’s not. It’s Google’s Adsense Program and it’s the basis of thousands of different sites currently earning money each time someone clicks on an ad. Some of these sites earn just a dollar or two each week, but others are earning over $500 each day. Without doing anything special, without managing ad inventory, and without worrying about collecting payment from advertisers.
A reader of Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther writes in to ask for an explanation of the regular expression shown in this command:
du -s * .[^.]*
A reader from Austria writes:
As I’m now working through your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Jaguar, I can’t get the commands “alias” and “grep” to work. Has been there a change in the command definition from Jaguar to Panther?
If you find yourself working on the command line and need to whip out a quick statistical analysis or two, you’ll be glad to know that Wicked Cool Shell Scripts fan Josh Kotecha has sent in a very nice little shell script that does just that using the scriptbc script included in the book.
