In my opinion stylesheets are one of the best things ever. It makes things so much easier to update if you use stylesheets for your website.

For example if you want to increase the font size of the site, you only need to change it in one place, and it will change it everywhere in the site:

“BODY, TD {
font-family:arial,helvetica;
font-size:14px;
}”

We have also started to use them for making layouts instead of using tables. So the site is made with layers. One of the examples that you can look at is Pirates Cove Marina. There are many other sites that we are working on right now that are using layers.

One of the main reasons you want to use stylesheets is for search engine placement. The reason is because of load time. The more html code that you have in the page, the longer it takes for the page to load. So instead of having all of the font tags, bold tags, etc., you would want to use a stylesheet for these things.

So in the end, everyone should use stylesheets in making his or her own web site.

I am a very big fan of the Google Toolbar. I use it everyday. Here are the items that are included with the Google Toolbar: Google Search, PageRank, Pop-up blocker, and Google Options. I will discuss these options in further detail.

Google Search – Instead of going to their website (www.google.com), you can type in whatever you want to search for in that text box. Very handy.

PageRank – Most people don’t understand what this is used for. I take a look at what our PageRank is weekly because Google takes that into account when indexing the sites in their search engine. It is based on two factors; the number of links that are pointing to your web site and the value of the links pointing to your web site. So when someone asks you to put their link on your web site, you need to see if their site is relevant to yours and what is the value of their web site.

Pop-Up Blocker – This is relatively self-explanatory to use. If a site has pop-ups, it will block them unless you click on the button at the top. Then once you click on the button, it will allow pop-ups for that particular site.

Google Options – These options allow you to turn on or off any of the above options.

In summary, the Google Toolbar is a very cool tool to have. Download it now!

This is an extension on what Eric discussed about Site Search. If you want to know how many sites are linked to a particular site, you need to type the following in the search engine:

link:http://www.yahoo.com.

This information is important because links are very important in search engine placement. The more people that link to you that don’t ask for a reciprocal link the better.

Not all web sites have their own search feature that allows you to search only that particular web site. So what do you do? Easy. Most search engines have a nifty little feature that allows you to do a search and restrict it to only one web site. Here’s what you do:

* Go to your favorite search engine.
* Enter your search term, then enter site:www.sitename.com, where “sitename” is the name of the web site you wish to search.

Example:

Let’s say you wanted to search Visionary Enterprise’s site for instances of “web design”. Open your favorite search engine. Then type in the following:

web design site:www.visionaryweb.com

Using Google to restrict the search to www.visionaryweb.com, you find exactly what you’re looking for.

So the next time you come across a site where the webmaster thought a search feature wasn’t necessary or the one that’s there doesn’t work, you can use this trick to get around that little problem.

There are several things that you should and you shouldn’t do with your website to make it search engine friendly. I’m just going to go through a few of these. Here is a list of a few things that you should do with your website:

1. Have your title tag and your meta information towards the top of the page. You want this information at the top because the spider reads from top to bottom and if you have that information more towards the middle of the page, the spider might think it isn’t as important.
2. Add relevant links to your site with a high PageRank.
3. Use h1 or h2 as your headers for your pages. This is because search engines recognize these as the most important rather than using classes for them.

Here are a few things that you shouldn’t do with your website:

1. Don’t use all flash for your website. Search engines don’t index those sites very highly because the spiders can’t recognize them very well. So if you want to add flash to your website, you just want to add some to your homepage.
2. Don’t use link farms. You don’t want to add every link under the sun to your site because Google especially doesn’t like that. You only want to add relevant links to your site. You could get dropped completed from the search engines if you continue to do that, and it is very difficult to get indexed back on the search engines.

As you all may already know, search engines are a big game. Google, Yahoo and all of the major search engines change their algorithms daily so you need to keep an eye on them very closely to see what they are changing next.

One of the news articles that I read is Site Pro News – http://www.sitepronews.com. This article is very interesting. The articles mostly pertain to search engine placement, picking a domain name, setting up your website, picking a solid web host, etc. I would recommend everyone reading these articles. This can boost your search engine ranking significantly if you implement some of the things that they talk about in these articles.