I’m no SEO expert, but I’ve been using a few free resources available on the web to help optimize my sites without going through a pricey consultation.  They certainly won’t give the custom tailored solution best for your website, but it’s a good first step and you might learn a few things.

Let me first take a step back and describe what SEO is.  It stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and basically it’s just trying to get your site to show up as high as possible on google and other search engines.  The first three sites listed on google get the majority of the clicks and the number of clicks quickly falls off after that.

The services that I use, in no particular order, are:

http://www.reactionengine.com/
http://www.pearanalytics.com/
http://websitegrader.com/
http://www.webseoanalytics.com/free/seo-tools/web-seo-analysis.php
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

I’ll also list off a few rules of thumb I’ve learned about SEO.  However, SEO is a constantly changing beast so these suggestions may be a bit out of date.

• The URL is very important.  Make sure that there is some pertantant words in there to the content of the page itself as in: someurl.com/article_keywords.html  Don’t put too many keywords in the URL though, as it might be interpreted as spam.  Somewhere between 3-5 words is a good rule of thumb.
• Have one H1 tag on the page that quickly summarizes the page.  The important of H2 tags is debatable, but it can’t hurt and don’t worry about limiting those.
• The title tag should have your company name and a title pertinent to the content of the page.  The company name should show up second because when your result come up in google the user is more interested in your content, and might become confused if they see your company name and just skip over your listing.
• The importance of Meta Keywords is debatable, but they can’t hurt.  Don’t go crazy with keywords though.
• The Meta description doesn’t do much mpre then allow you to control what show comes up under your pages title in Google.  So either ignore this or write one for each specific page.
• bold, italicized, alt text, and image file names also roll into SEO.  I wouldn’t lose sleep over these, but it won’t hurt.
• Validating your page is good for many, various, other reasons, but is also good for SEO.  Validated pages are happy pages 🙂

I’m no expert, but I know a few things about getting started on pod casting. As far as equipment goes you may already have everything you need!  Many newer computers come equipped with an internal mic/web cam.  Of course the audio might not be top notch.  I recently purchased a blue snowball microphone, I’ve been very happy with the clarity but I do need to be quite close to the mic to get good pick-up.

Using Skype to conference call is a very easy way to connect with your co-stars.  If you’re all “skype-ing” over the internet it’s also 100% free.

Then comes the issue of recording on the audio…there are some free options for PC, but on a Mac you’ll have to shel out some coin.  I’ve worked with Audio Hijack pro. What I liked about this program is that it’s versitall.  You can record audio from any program you’re running, and it also omes ith a lot of exra features.  It won’t record video from skype though, which is less than ideal.

After you’ve connected and recorded your podcast it’s time to edit it!  For 100% free you can use Audacity.  Another nice freebie is Mixcraft. If you’re on a mac you probably also have the choice of garagebad, and there’s also some audio editing software that comes with certain Adobe bundles.

Last but not least is your podcast feed and hosting.  There are some free servies for hosting podcasts, but if you’re looking to monitze your production you might be better off handling hosting yourself.  For creating a feed apple has some specs.  I would also recommend finding a professional podcast’s feed and take a look at their source code to get a feel how how yours should look.  It’s also free to submit your podcast into iTunes…the only issue is that you need to give your credit card info to even sign-up for iTunes :/  If you have a friend who is already signed up I’d suggest asking them to submt your feed for you.

There are a lot of great online converters available to encode video.  They may take a while and might not be able to process your file, but you get what you pay for!

http://w12.media-convert.com/convert/
http://www.mediaconverter.org/
http://www.zamzar.com/
http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/
http://handbrake.fr/

If you have Adobe you may already have a video encoder called “Adobe Flash Video Encoder.”  It will only encode videos to the .FLV format and won’t work for every format, but is a bit more reliable and faster than online encoders.

If you’re on a Mac I really like the free application iSquint. It works on a wide range of formats and has some advanced options as well H.264 encoding.  It will only convert to the .Mp4 format, though.

For PC I’ve heard good things about dvdvideosoft which has a very impressive listing of tools.

For both platforms there is also a powerful free application available called squared 5, and MPEG Streamclip.

Another trick for encoding video files as well as transferring them is to go through youtube first.  Some of the HD encoding from youtube isn’t that bad.  Once it finished you can download it using:

http://www.downloadhelper.net/

When creating a website being able to insure that it will look right for everyone can be a real hassle!  The next best thing to having every version of every browser and OS available for testing is being able to get snapshots of what the site looks like in those browsers.

A few caveats are that the snapshots don’t tell you if your interactive elements are working, they’re just images so you can’t test out any features for them.  Your website also needs to be hosted online in order to get screen shots.

I only know of three websites that offer this service for free (albeit abode is only free for a limited time).  In no particular order they are:

http://browsershots.org/
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php
https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html

Browsershots has the best selection of browsers out of the three, but it’s free service can take hours to render a screen shot, and parts of the screen shot can be blocked by error messages.  It does offer premium services, but at $30 a month I don’t think I would use it enough.

Netrenderer is great for IE, but it only does IE.  And if there’s to much traffic you are not getting your screen shot. period.

Adobe Browser Lab is really fast, and unlike the others it offers much longer screenshots.  It doesn’t have as a wide a variety of browsers as browsershots, but does offer other features like onion skins and side by side comparisons.  For now they’re offing this service for free for one year, and after that it’s $20 a month.

For the cheaper price and extra features I would choose the Browser lab over premium Browsershots.  I would like to see a few more browsers here, but it does cover the majority of the market.  That $20 does include a few other services – but nothing I would actually use.  Although, they may add more later so it could become quite worthwhile in the future.

A few web related terms communicated in the simplest way I know 🙂

Pagination refers to the process of creating multiple pages for content items.

Vertical Scaling refers to adding memory, ram, or disk space to a server so it can support a larger website

Horizontal Scaling refers to splitting up a website between multiple servers to support a very large and popular website

Front End refers to the side of the site that the end user sees, and can also refer to “front end” or open source languages which are HTML, DHTML, Javascript, and CSS.

Back End refers to actual code of the site, typically the non-open source language that processes the page and determines what will be displayed without the user knowing.  Such as PHP, CGI, and Ruby.

Caching there are several ways to cache.  Basically caching creates a copy of content on a website so it can be loaded faster.

Server Side Scripts Server Side scripts are the codes that generate the page through the server before the user ever sees a thing. (PHP, PERL, ect.)

Open Source Open sources languages consist of all languages that you can view when viewing the source of a page from a browser which includes CSS, HTML, and Javascript.  Open Source can also refer to applications where all the code has been released to the public.

Online Community A forum where users can interact online, can also be expanded on to a Social Network which offers many more features where users can find and interact with each other.

Social Media Twitter, Facebook, and any application where users create and share content with each other

Streaming this is the process where a video or audio file will download while you watch/listen to it so you don’t need to wait for the entire file to load

Syntax The rules that must be followed to write properly structured code