Welcome to the April 2012 issue of ZooNews, from professional website design company Zoonini Web Services.

Every once in a while an ideal example of "what not to do" comes across my path by accident and cries out to be shared here.

While I was researching a small town in Ontario I came across their tourism site that helpfully provides separate pages listing different types of restaurants, linked from an overview page like this:

What's wrong with this picture? Using the words "click here" as the linked text is a huge missed opportunity for search-engine optimization. Clickable words are called "anchor text" and are given added weight by Google and other search engines, so it's a good idea to include relevant keywords. For example, linking the words "coffee shops in Port Hope" to the coffee-shop page would tell Google the page is a treasure trove of information about where to get a coffee in the town of Port Hope. The link should look like this instead:

Always take advantage of the opportunity to link from keyword-rich descriptive text, instead of "click here."

On-page SEO is a term that describes techniques to tweak your website so people can more easily find it in search engines. They aim to make your site as search-engine friendly as possible by incorporating appropriate keywords in browser titles, heading tags, website copy and anchor text, as described above. Other factors that help on-page SEO include having a fast-loading site that's easily crawled by search engines. On-page SEO works in tandem with off-site SEO, which takes into account aspects that are not directly part of your site, such as incoming links to your site from directories, social-media networks, and other good-quality sites.

Got a technology term you'd like demystified in ZooNews? Send it to questions@zoonini.com.

We were recently tasked with building a multipurpose email template for San Francisco Bay Area educator/author/artist Eileen Pardini. Inspired by the richly textured site remake by Allie Creative, we created a flexible, versatile email template that matched the look-and-feel of Eileen's newly redesigned site. It will be used in the Aweber email marketing system to send out branded newsletters, autoresponders and blog updates.

A recent study concluded that WordPress runs nearly half the world's top 100 blogs, as defined by the Technorati Top 100 – far more than any other content-management system, and up from 32% in 2009. Custom-built CMSs were in second place, powering 14% of the top 100 blogs, with the once-mighty Movable Type running a mere 7%.

À la prochaine,

kp
aka Kathryn Presner