Spammers ruin good things fast. What I mean by that is that MySpace used to be a great place to go and every now and then post a bulletin or classified ad while you are adding friends and networking with new people. Now, you will be lucky if anyone sees your classified on MySpace because nobody really looks at those except for the people posting them.

To get around the feel of spam and still use a social networking website to generate traffic you have to be smart. Simply interacting with your friends and associates on MySpace is the way to go. MySpace allows you to post comments in html format, if the friends profile is set to accept html comments.

This being said, you can create custom comment images and link them to your website. You can also provide those same image codes for free to your friends and visitors so they are marketing your website while interacting with people they know.

We recently started doing this and taking it more seriously. You can see our previous blog post about it. We have been monitoring our stats and noticed a large amount of clickthroughs from MySpace profiles where the comment image was posted. By doing this you can actually generate hundreds, or even thousands of unique visitors to your website fairly quickly.

Check our past blog post if you need a custom MySpace image and code. We only charge $20 for regular ones and $30 for animated ones.

For those familiar with the need to create search engine friendly pages on dynamic urls, you may or may not know about why you need to use rewrite on static html websites as well.

On dyamic pages you would use the mod_rewrite feature that appache has. It is a wonderful thing. In static page websites you would need to setup a rewrite in the .htaccess file so that when visitors and spiders go to http://yoursite.com they will automatically see http://www.yoursite.com instead. The two urls may look the same, but they are not. The difference is pretty big because you can accidentally lose PageRank. Spiders see two separate urls even though the content is the same and the same page is loading.

The .htaccess rewrite for static pages is a common item that is overlooked by designers. A designer that is also an seo expert can spot these things instantly and save you from trouble in the future.

Most people who own a service based website have static pages. These are pages that have to be edited in the html code in order to display changes. Because of this it makes it hard for non-designers to update their website with new content.

If you notice, this content you are reading right now is posted in a blog. Our website has static pages so we decided to integrate a blog. The blog allows us to write new content using a simple administration interface and post it instantly for you to see.

When you install a blog for a static website it goes in a new directory. A standard blog installation is pretty ugly though. They will not automatically match your existing design. Because of this, it is necessary to incorporate your existing design from your static pages into a blog template. That way the entire website looks the same no matter where your visitor goes on your site.

Incorporating the design into the blog theme is rather simple. You just create a new theme directory and copy an existing theme into it. Then you insert your design into theme pages, and insert the blog code into the right places where you want items displayed. It may seem intimidating when you first have a go at it, but with patience and some general knowledge of css, php, and html you can get it done pretty quickly.

We had some issues with the archives, categories, and search results displaying incorrectly. These issues have been fixed. We appologize for the issues and thank everyone for your patience.

Stick around for some great tutorials and tips coming soon.

The post title is pretty straight forward, however people do not understand that they must follow certain rules to get listed in directories like DMOZ for example. You can find the rules on the top of the categories at Resource Zone but people still go in there and complain that their editor application has been turned down or their website has not been listed.

If someone were to do a simple search in the RZ forum they will find literally hundreds of threads stating that they no longer answer submission status requests for websites. They can also easily find the guidelines for listing a website. You couldn’t imaging how many people ignore the basic rules and submit a website using marketing hype and keyword stuffing in their description. Maybe a spell check will help also.

Before you go post at RZ about how you hate them and you think editors are corrupt, why not do some research first and follow directions. In the end you have to understand that the editors are volunteers and they DO NOT have to add your website. They don’t even have to look at it.

An editors job is to find quality websites with original content that is useful to researchers using DMOZ. They are allowed to edit in their spare time and they are not paid. So show some respect.

Also, do not attempt to bribe an editor ever. Regardless of what you may have heard, if you bribe an editor and get listed, not if but when the editor gets caught he/she will no longer be an editor and all of the links the editor has added in the past may be deleted. Then you will have wasted the money you used as a bribe. Just submit your website once and make sure everything follows guidelines. Then forget about it. That is all you can do.

Search engine optimization is something that should be done during the design phase. If you are hiring a designer it is best to make sure they know search engine optimization in detail before you sign up.

Seo goes into how you name your files; htaccess rewrite rules for dynamic and sometimes non-dynamic websites; the amount of times you display a target keyword in your pages text; the h1 and h2 tags, and much more.

If you do already have a website and you are concerned that the designer did not optimize it then you are not out of luck. You can still change filenames to match keywords then create permanent redirects from the old files to the new ones so you do not lose any indexed pages or PageRank you may have gained. You can also optimize the meta tags to match page text.

Seo is a lengthly process so I cannot go on and on here about the various techniques used, however you need to know how it works and how it works best.

We will be adding a myspace code section to Web Design Taxi pretty soon. The codes will be made available for free.

Example:

Want the obama code? Just ask for it…

We do offer custom comment images for only $20 and they are animated. Just contact us and ask for a custom blingie.

We are inviting outside graphic designers, and developers to join Web Design Taxi as a tutorial author. As an author you will be provided with a profile where you can include a short bio along with a link to your website.

To qualify:

1. You must be able to show examples of tutorials you have written in the past.
2. You must have example portfolio for the tutorial subject you are writing about.
3. You must be able to write at least 1 tutorial every 2 weeks.
4. Tutorials must be well written and checked for grammatical errors and typos.
5. Tutorials must not have links in them. Readers will be able to access your URL by clicking on your username.
6. Tutorials must be up to date for the latest software in the industry.
7. Tutorial images must be no bigger than 452 pixels wide.

If you are interested in becoming a tutorial author and gaining exposure simply fill out our contact form with your information and any relevant work samples that we can view online.