I find it quite stupid that some SEO softwares offers META keyword generator within their software features. It seems quite stupid and pointless if you want to get top ranked in the major search engines such as google, yahoo, live, ask, etc… Once again meta keywords are not search engine optimisation!

The reason being is that they do not read the meta keywords at all as they do not like to be dictated what the content of the page is holding. The only thing they mostly care about is the meta description so that they have something relevant to display underneath the title of your page on their search page. Then yet some of them do not include them even if you persist on the meta description. The rest of the meta is just BS for the search engine.

The only search engine that uses meta are meta search engines and they are not as accurate as google’s, yahoo’s or msn’s one. But nevertheless that it is not as useful to popular SEO it still seems that you could get some users out of it.

But I keep my stand that meta keywords are not SEO but more of a optional practice for beginners.

After reading a blog entry (which i lost the link to) this morning on seo. I started to think that a lot of companies that invest a lot of money into SEOing their pages to get them top in one keyword or several may not have the right content to help the user.

What I mean by this is that online businesses may have SEOed their pages but the actual page content may be totally irrelevant to the keywords or just not answering the visitors query.

What our main goal would be when optimising our pages would be to clearly make the Search engine understand what content is being presented to them and what is exactly relevant to that page content. That is what I call SEOed pages; clearly identifying the information to the search engine for them to properly assign keywords/phrases to that page. Thus would help the users on their queries.

Well that last sentence was a bit to extreme on the rationality that people on the internet would think of helping others for free. In reality a lot of companies fall into the black hat SEOing of the pages so that it gets them in top in some keywords and yet deliver some really poor content. Thus not helping the users on their queries and making the search engine fail to deliver you good content.

A small quicky blog that I forgot to mention on my last post. But here is a link to my flickr favourites.

The reason for this is to help you starters in designing to get some imagination. They are really good pictures with good color composition. Where you can use the technique of picking colors from pictures to get some color strips working for you.

It’s good inspiration for imagination.

P.S. I have set up a link on this blog so that it links to it so that if you ever do lose the link you’ll know where to find it.

signing out….

I recently was doing some new skin for icelabz’s main page and as I am used to code making my pages xhtml 1.0 valid I thought every thing was going well. I was wrong, nowadays I lot of websites do have the xhtml 1.0 valid icon on them but not the CSS valid.

You see all browsers have a different way on interpreting css and all other markup languages. One of the most annoying browser is IE6. If you were to give that browser the command to go left it would go right, thats how I feel about the browser. My point is that each browser has a different way to react at the markup and css language you give them. Like for example this blog works fine in Opera, firefox and ie7 but not ie6.

On ie6 the site is just really messed up, that is because i am not using a valid css code. I will fix it soon though, when i get time.

So this mean even though you have the most strictest rule of xhtml run on that page it will still not look ok in at least 2-5% of the time on all browsers because we designers neglect the validity of the CSS.

After my recent post on How to find the right colors for your site I decided to post some color scheme every now and then to give my viewers. As it takes me a few minutes to do them.

Todays menu is Brown mint

Picture:

Color scheme:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/83931415@N00/425296461/

A lot of peopl find it hard in choosing colors (colours) to start designing their own forum theme/skin/template *whatever you guys call it these days*. One of the best way to do it is to find pictures that relates to your site. To do so find some pictures on flickr and then you can start picking some colors out of that 1 image to help make a color strip for you to use.

Here is one that I choose for a site about teddies, kids toys or one about children’s. But let just say its for a site that sells teddies. So I went on Flickr and search teddies and pick the first one that I saw.

Now that we have a picture that relates to our site we can now start picking colors out of it. I am going to use my usual image editor to pick colors out of it. Be sure that we take quite a fierce amount of colors to our pallete to build out color strip.

Below is what I got from picking colors that I thought defined the shape of the parts of the teddy bear and just the ones that stood out from my perspective.

And from there I would just add some more colors to it if I wanted to and tweak it here and there to make it suitable for display. Now with the colors sorted you would need to play around with these colors to see which one you would prefer to use as text, content, or background. Remember that you will need to make the page attractive and readable with the colors you chose.