E.T. Coding

Just spent a day trying to solve that.

For a developer with mostly .NET background Iphone development is.. very unenjoyable process, for me anyways.

Anyway, this post on SO really helped (though I had to repeat it couple times).

Now just need to fix “Bundle identifier differs from reserved bundle identifier” and “Application failed codesign verification” exception.. Apple is fun (not).

Needed to create a Sql CREATE TABLE for an object another day and thought – I do this quite often.. So made a small lib that generates that for me.

I’m actually surprised there isn’t one already (not well-known, anyways, or I just don’t know about one). I could use EF code-first, for sure, but I’m not adding EF to a small app where i need to store and retrieve a single class – it’s just an overkill.  I’m using Dapper for querying, which is nice and small, and will use this to generate tables – no manual SQL, oh yeah!

So just added a library to github.

Link: https://github.com/etcoding/Obj2Schema

Spent a good amount of time today trying to figure out why the jQuery’s toggle works on first element, but doesn’t work on the following ones.

I had this code:

function ToggleComment(id) {

$("#comments[data-id=" + id + "]").toggle({ "effect": "clip", "speed": "1000" });

}

where id is a number, and a few divs with id #comments-x.

It would toggle the first div, but not the subsequent ones.

This is the fix:

$("#comments[data-id='" + id + "']").toggle({ "effect": "clip", "speed": "1000" });

Note the ” around the id.

Did some research on SEO today, so here are the points. Most are kinda common sense, but some are new to me.

 

Analyze your keywords

Think about which keywords describe your products/services.

Use keywords tools, like Adwords keywords tool, or WordTracker. This will give you a list of most searched keywords related to your search term. These are keywords you want to use on your site.

Avoid using text (esp. headers) embedded in images – robots don’t do OCR. Flash or PDF are a bit better.. but are far from pure html. If you need to use specific fonts – use cufon and the likes, those don’t affect SEO.

Avoid frames – they will be orphaned in search results, that is the framed page will be displayed on its own, without the parent page.

 

Links and URLs

Use descriptive names in URL. Instead of /news.html a better choice would be /my-product-news.html. Same with urls with queries like /product.aspx?id=222 – a /my-product.aspx would be a lot better.

Keywords in links carry a pretty high weight – use them wisely.

Use dashes to separate words instead of underscores (recommended by Google).

Use keywords in links. Instead of “To find more information about my product click here”, its better to use “Find more information about my product here”.

Create links to your site. Write articles about your site or product, ask your friends or collegaues to create a link to your site, put your site address in your signature on forums, and so on.

 

Site

Don’t create a hierachies too deep – 2-3 levels at most.

Add a 301 redirect from yoursite.com to www.yoursite.com – this way robots will know that these are same sites.

Camel-case your site name – makes little difference for robots, but are easier to read in search result (conversion!).

 

Title tag

Is used to create a link in search results. So it should contain keywords specific to the page (not just the company name!). It shouldn’t be longer than about 60 characters – longer ones will be truncated in search results.

The words at the beginning of the tag will weight more – so putting keywords at the beginning makes more sense. Use title case, and throw out the words that don’t convey the actual information (conversion!)

 

Meta tags

Description is important. This will be used to provide a text in search results (the text below the link). The text in description carries very little weight towards the ranking, but this is what a user sees (conversion!).

About 120 characters are displayed on search results page.

Keywords are not used by search engine. They were abused so much, that search engines don’t pay attention to them anymore.

 

Other

Avoid using JavaScript to generate the navigation – robots don’t run the JS, so they won’t be able to pick up your navigation, and can miss pages. Same with flash. If you have to use JS or Flash – add a link blocks to other pages at the bottom of the page, or create a site map. Actually, probably a good idea regardless.

H tags carry more weight than span, so make a good use of H1(H2, H3) for keywords. Google does pay attention to the markup, so make your keywords standout – bold them, italicize them..

Use keywords in image alt tags. Use keywords in image file names (e.g. my-product.jpg).

If you’re providing local services, you can use geo tags in meta tags. Put your address on pages, including your postal code/zip. Add your business information to local directories of search engines (www.google.com/places, www.bing.com/businessportal, listings.local.yahoo.com). Add as much text with keywords as possible, add images and videos.

You can use ubl.org to submit your listing to a bunch of directories.

Create an XML site map – those are read by search engines, and help them to navigate the site. Many CMS systems have this functionality built-in, or just google for xml sitemap generator. Generated map can be submitted to Google and Bing.