We Eat Bricks :: Web Development Blog

By keywords here I mean words that people will type into their search engine and by title I mean the words inside the tags in the HTML of the webpage.

Search engines use the words in the title to determine the relevancy of the page to a search. Use specific, descriptive keywords to improve the relevancy.

Try think from the perspective of the person doing the search when phrasing those titles. That’s it for SEO TIP #2.

Good luck!

I’ve signed up with BlogRush lured by the potential of exponential traffic increase. The idea is you put the blogrush script onto your blog,(scroll down to the left hand side to see mine). Post sfrom blogs similar to yours appear in the list and posts for your blog will appear in blogrush boxes on other blogs.

The neat thing is if some one out there signs up to blogrush from the box below, my post will be promoted on their blogrush box. And if someone else signs up from that persons blogrush, my posts will be promoted on their blog too. And if another person signs up from that person who signed up from the person……
You get the idea.

Check to the video on the BlogRush page for further explanation ( i.e. better explanation)

Later.

A timely reminder to all geeks out there, me included.

Top Ten Geek Business Myths
3 More Geek Business Myths

In this SEO series of articles I aim to provide a list of practical tips to optimisation your blog or website for the search engines.

Let’s start off with “Pretty Permalinks” using the Apache mod_rewrite.

Compare the following urls.

http://www.weeatbricks.com/?p=25

and

http://www.weeatbricks.com/2007/09/01/in_place_editor_field-method-in-ruby-on-rails/

The second is friendlier than the first. It gives an idea of the content of the article whereas the first is a mystery. Those all important search engine spiders can use those “pretty” urls to gain further data on the content of the article which in turn can increase the page rank of the article.

I use wordpress as my blogging platform. I created a .htaccess file in the root directory of the blog then turned Pretty Permalinks on in the Wordpress Admin.

That’s it and so ends the first SEO tip.

Stay tuned for more.

I kept getting this error with attempting to use the Ruby on Rails in_place_editor_field method.

Called id for nil, which would mistakenly be 4—if you really wanted the id of nil, use object_id

It was driving me nuts! This method is supposed to attach some script.aculo.us javascript to some text, to allow the text to be edited by clicking on it. Not the nasty error above.

Much too much googling later returns of a solution…

“If you’re receiving this error while using the in_place_editor_field method, chances are you’re iterating through a list of objects and you’re passing the variables to the method incorrectly.

To fix this problem, set the current iteration as an instance variable and you should be fine.

For example:

<% for person in @people %>
<% @person = person %>
<%= in_place_editor_field :person, :name %>

Further explanation.