HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

YouTube is the greatest video-sharing site of all times. The popularity of the site is immense. You can also download YouTube videos using certain services. It is estimated that the daily average bandwidth bills of YouTube amounts to one million dollars. People may start wondering how Google is able to keep the site online especially under such high costs. Advertisements are the main revenue source for YouTube. The sheer amount of users accumulated in the YouTube database makes the advertisers yield to the demand. It is also estimated that 74 million active YouTube accounts are at present available in YouTube. People enjoy the videos present in there. Many videos are also saved offline for watching …

Since Alexa made changes to their ranking algorithm, headsetoptions.org dropped off the top 100K for over 3 months (we are back now), which has not been the case since we started some 20 months ago. The best score for our site was 36K, and on average was around 60K, now we are at around 90K. The drop in the ranking trend was similar to most all technology bloggers; even sites like TechCrunch lost out on the ranking game and were pushed back.

Of course it had no implication on traffic to the sites, but it makes a hell of a lot of difference to folks who rely on such free stats services to invest their advertising dollars, which begs the questions, is Alexa a true representation of reality? Is there a free online tool which is closer to the truth?

Have you noticed lately that certain keywords you traditionally scored high in Google are no longer driving traffic your way? Chances are that you lost the spot on Google SERP. Since the changes that started late July and continued into early August, most all web sites that relied on Google SERP have in one way or the other been affected. Case in point, we are no longer ranked for the keyword “Web Design”, it has been replaced by sites like About.com, WikiPedia.org, forums and directories, all of who basically provide no web design service, instead merely provide the definition of the same. Less than half the SE results are for actual providers of web design …

Google Directory, Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ and ODP, these the the names that cross your mind when you think of top website directories. But if you google “web directory”, a bunch of other popular website directories and website directory blogs will pop up. We had to the opportunity to work on one such own human-edited online directory “Dirsnap” which has risen in ranks to become a top web directories!

Dirsnap – web directory was conceptualized at the same time as wpSnap! my favorite site that bookmarks only the best WordPress themes. While our partners have significantly established wpSnap! as a niche WordPress design site to find some of the most beautiful, basic and …

Using images in place of text can be tempting especially since an image can offer you more visually than just text does. However, most of us end up using text for the simple reason that Google and Yahoo’s search engines are not able to read your images effectively (even with alt text?). Here’s a quick, simple, tried and tested SEO friendly CSS only Javascript free fix for one such scenario; replacing your navigation menu text with SEO friendly images:

Let’s start with making our images that will be used in place of menu text, in this example I am using images 30px tall and of varying width. I make two images for each menu item, one for mouse-over or hover and second for all other conditions.

If your site gets any traffic at all, chances are your RSS feed is scraped and misused by some one trying to score on SERP for the work you have toiled on. This very blog is constantly ripped by sploggers who have no regards to intellectual property rights or just plain simple dumb to realize they are stealing. Here are three sites where you can find the entire content of our blog scraped/ripped/stolen and posted as their own. Of course I did not link to them because I really don’t want you to visit them:

myblogmix.com (this m^*&*0 f$%*r even uses one of our themes on his splog!)
frenzygraphics.com
urlfan.com

How do you stop them?
Jonathan Bailey, a security expert (Plagiarism Today) who also writes on Blog Herald, lists 6 steps to identify and fight content theft. We religiously followed the suggestions for months now (that post on BH was from last November), but none worked thus far. Google is yet to acknowledged our letters (used his cease and desist letter templates, which is a good source, thanks!). I even took solace in thinking maybe they have a backlog or that they will eventually write back, but nothing really happened.

For good SEO, it is preferential to open your comment authors URI in a new page. Why you might ask? Google and other search engines track sites you visit, they can tell what that site contains (obviously), how long you stayed there and where you went next. The intended use of this information is to find if the sites you visited were relevant to your search keyword and/or if all the sites you visit are related. That could also work against you if your site get a lot of spammers commenting on it. Here’s how.

Let’s say you get a comment on your site that look legit, so you want …

I get this question a lot; do you web design or blog design? and I say, is there a difference?

Most new site that I work on are built using free CMS like WordPress and Textpattern so they tend to have a bloggy feel to it, so I see where this question might arise from. But to me, a work done specifically to be published online, irrespective of the site being a blog, is considered “web design”, if it’s on the web and it involves designing, its web design.

With that said, there are many interpretation of what constitutes as web design. Not all web designs are created equal. …

Why pay for a Magazine WordPress Theme when you can get one for free? Introducing The Box, the all-inclusive magazine style WordPress theme that has all the cool features of a premium theme straight out of “the box”. Best of all, it is absolutely Free!
Ola Hedin of Blyerts.com pointed out an IE 6 issue that was fixed on 05/06/2008 at 9:48 PM EST. Thanks Ola
The theme includes among other functions advance edit options, featured-regular post option, second level, conditional and dropdown menus, tabbed JavaScript interface, widget ready sidebars and is pre-styled for Google Adsense and coded to be search engine friendly (optimized).
Demo and Download
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Why this sudden proclamation? Well, we have been in business for over a year now and we have had the pleasure of serving folks from across the globe, but ironically, none from Richmond VA, a.k.a ‘our backyard’ per say. The reason is simple, it’s a SEO thing.

If you opened Google and typed in “Web Design”, you will notice us on the very first page, yes, we do web design and we make it very obvious in almost every post of ours and each page. But we being in Richmond, VA is insignificant in the big picture, after all, we never really meet our clients in person, so why should our geographical …