This topic like most topics on this site is meant to be kept simple and when it comes to keywords when developing the content for your website be sure you keep your selection simple as well. Keywords are the words that you would think other people use when performing searches within a search engine such as Google or Bing. With enough imagination a person could come up with just about any number of combinations for use as a keyword but be sure not to overdo it.

If you are cramming thirty to fifty or more keywords into a single page of copy you will not get the results desired. Also while it is good to repeat your keywords within your copy you should also be careful not to repeat them too often within the same page or paragraph as you might be tagged for keyword stuffing. I wish I could tell you the correct ratio of keywords to copy but as with anything on the world wide web that golden ratio is always changing. A well thought out selection of keywords positioned well within your copy and repeated sparingly will net you a great return as far as search traffic.

You cannot just post something great into the wild and expect a random search engine spider to come across it and consider it the greatest morsel it has ever eaten. If your not listed within search engines and just starting out a great thing to do would be to ask friends or business partners if they could post a link to your site or the new content you have recently created. Another venue for copy crumb consumption could be that of social media. Social media today is all over the place and a great way to let people know that you have something they should read and hopefully provide propagation of your tasty morsel. Most common social media sites include Facebook, twitter, and Stumble Upon.

You can also submit your site or content directly to search engines but from what I understand this is normally the slowest way to get your site noticed and indexed.

There are three ways to use cascading style-sheets within your HTML or XHTML documents. Each one varies slightly in use within your documents. If you are planning to produce documents that are easily machine read and spiderable by search engines you will want to lean more towards using the external type of CSS styling. By using external style-sheets you are affectively moving the pages style definitions off page and out of site of the documents markup. As mentioned previously in “JavaScript and jQuery content movers” you will want to do whatever is possible to get your pages copy within the first five hundred lines of code 0r not far from it in which case moving all styling off page is an excellent idea. Whatever you are doing during the writing or generation of your sites markup be stingy with your available character space and only use what you need. Not over-nesting your divs, inline, or block items is something else you need to pay attention to as it can easily take up valuable space and cause your site to load slower than it should.

Another way to include CSS style definitions within your documents would be to use the embedded method.  When embedding you will encase your CSS within an open and close type assignment tag much like you do with JavaScript. You should typically try to declare all of your CSS styling within the header of your document although most of the time you can get away with having it scattered throughout your markup. Using the embedded method within a document that also has an external style-sheet will allow you to over-ride the style assignments that have been declared within the external document. This is only true if the external CSS document is linked before your embedded code within your markup. This method can be used if needed but it takes up valuable space within your markup.

The final type of included CSS is that of the inline type. Inline CSS is assigned within your elements tag itself. This can typically be viewed as sloppy and make the overall markup very hard to read. The one thing that using inline CSS has going for it is that it takes precedence over any other CSS styling assignments. If you absolutly must overwrite an existing style assignment I guess you could use this method but I advise against it and suggest that you simply create a new class or id for the newly required styling.

::Examples::

External:

Embedded:
<style type=”text/css”>

/* styling goes here */

</style>

Inline:
<div style=”your styling here”></div>

Up until recently most SEOs will tell you that you should try what you can to get your pages content to the top of your markup as possible. I have completed a few tests recently and this method appears to still be true although possibly only for certain situations. This method of content posting is somewhere within the grey area of search engine optimization. When developing your sites layout it is best to place each section of your page within its own content div block. When placing these blocks within the page be sure to put your header below the main content block as to be sure that valuable space within the first five hundred or so lines of your markup are not wasted on markup alone.

After positioning your page sections and you then find yourself having problems keeping the pages content or copy within a decent ratio of your pages initial line of markup at this point you should  consider using this trick. Using the JavaScript or jQuery content mover is simple, the first thing you will have to do is place a div near the top of your page. Its position can be anywhere at the top although placing it directly at the top of your markup may make it appear spammy, well more spammy than the technique should ultimately be. Once this div is in place and been given a unique id with its copy in place you should then create another div or table data block and assign it another unique id.

Now that you have the two elements with unique ids in place with your intended copy you will then write the JavaScript or jQuery code that will switch the copy from one to another. Please refer to the examples below for proper execution.

jQuery:

$(document).ready(function(){
   $('#div2').html($('div1').html());
   $('div1').html('')
 });

JavaScript:
 parent.document.all('div2').innerHTML = document.all('div1').innerHTML;
 parent.document.all('div1').innerHTML = '';

What is CSS positioning and what are floats? CSS positioning allows you to assign how your element is to be positioned on the page. The most common types of positions used are absolute and relative. Absolute positioning means it will be placed wherever you assign it to be within the pages body while relative positioning means that the element will be positioned relative to its placement within the page. A float is typically used to make an element float to the left or right of the page.

Assigning element positioning:
position:absolute;
position:relative;

Floats are typically used for creating a columned layout or just for making elements that have other elements floating around them. When using a float for example you can have an image or a block of text that floats to either side of a body of text or paragraph data. When using floats or even position assignments you might want to assign the element block level status.

Assigning float status:
float:left;
float:right;

Assigning block level status will make sure that the element properly wrap to the bottom of that element. The other thing you will want to do when stacking floats is to make sure that the float level is properly terminated by assigning clear all in-between float levels.

Assigning block level status:
display:block;

Assigning clear terminator:
clear:all;

That is all for this blurb. More to come soon!

If you have had the chance to work with osCommerce or are thinking of working with it check out some of the modules I have developed or modified! With osCommerce you can run your own personal online store without having to pay any kind of software licensing fee as it is free and open-source. It is also built using open source technology such as PHP and MySQL and runs best on the open-source Apache HTTP server!

osCommerce can is built to easily scale from holding a couple products in your catalog to holding thousands of products. When installing osCommerce you typically have multiple options including the plain vanilla install from the osCommerce site or the use of distributions such as OSC Max. Being that the software itself is open source there are of course many tens or hundreds of personally modified versions that exist in one form or another. OSC Max and some of the modified versions typically include modules for search engine optimization, you will of course want these options installed if you want your website to be easily found by search engines. Customer Magnetism search engine marketing has a specially modified cart that offers search engine optimization features at great prices!

Links of interest:
http://www.oscommerce.com/
http://www.oscmax.com/

My osCommerce links:
osCommerce forum profile
community add-on profile