Here is a site that will allow you to upload any picture to be converted into a favicon.
www.html-kit.com/favicon/

This is especially handy for the individuals that want their logo converted into a favicon and doesn’t want to bother with picture editing.

List credits: AppStorm
Here is a list of free Mac applications that you can download and use for your Mac.

Internet and Browsers

AllBookmarks – AllBookmarks adds a new item to your Mac OS X menu bar giving you quick access to all your bookmarks. All your Safari, Firefox and Flock bookmarks are shown and can be selected. AllBookmarks also gives you access to your 1Password 1Click bookmarks so you can navigate to a page, fill the form, and submit it, all with a single click!

Aptana Studio – Aptana Studio is a complete web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with thousands of additional plugins created by the community.

Camino – Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users.

Cruz – A web browser with innovative multi-pane browsing and an integrated Twitter feed.

DownloadMonitor – DownloadMonitor enables your computer to automatically react to specific conditions of your downloads.
You choose how, when, and which downloads the computer ought to react to.

Flock – The award winning social browser (Twitter, Facebook and blog integration). The people here at Flock are committed to building a browser unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before – because we start by focusing on user needs. We take pride in solving for common behaviors on the Web that seem clunky today, and will seem ridiculous tomorrow. We’re taking you there.

Fluid App – Fluid lets you create a Site Specific Browser (SSB) out of any website or web application, effectively turning your favorite web apps into desktop apps.

Mocha – Mocha is a tool that monitors your network activity and keeps a record of Ip / Mac address pairings and firewall logs. It will give a warning when it notices any suspicious activity, like any changes in Mac address or any connection attempt to the firewall.

NetNewsWire – Looking for an easy-to-use RSS and Atom reader for your Mac? You’ve found it! The Eddy award-winning NetNewsWire has a familiar three-paned interface and can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs.

Newsfire – Simple to use and packed with features, NewsFire makes it a joy to keep atop the constant flow of information on the web. It’s easy to filter and organize your news with NewsFire’s smart groups. Build your own feeds with custom rules, or drag and drop to create groups of related content.

Opera – Surf the Web with lightning speed, using the fastest browser ever. Everything from how Web pages load to how you open tabs is optimized to happen almost instantly. You can even speed up browsing on slow connections, with Opera Turbo.

Quiet Read – Quiet Read lets you save any link for later. Simple as dragging a link onto a menu bar item to store it.

Simple CSS –  is a good way to specify the styles of fonts and other page elements on your sites. It makes it easier for you to update styles too, because when done right, you only need to make a single change to update the styles on multiple pages and elements..

SiteSucker for Mac OS X – SiteSucker is a Macintosh application that automatically downloads Web sites from the Internet. It does this by asynchronously copying the site’s Web pages, images, backgrounds, movies, and other files to your local hard drive. Just enter a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), press return, and SiteSucker can download an entire Web site.

Sunrise – Sunrise is an open source web browser based on WebKit for Mac OS X. The main window of Sunrise has the browser, bookmarks, downloads, source codes and find bars. You do not need to look for the hidden panels because the one window has all of them.

Wyzo – Wyzo is an awesome new browser that optimizes your online media experience. It will accelerate your web downloads, let you download

Application

photo credit: nDevilTV

aLaunch – It is an application launcher, and is operated via the status menu. You can chose to display icons at 16 pixels – 64 pixels. Files and folders can be registered with aLunch as well. Folders will be opened in the Finder. Different categories can be registered by using groups and separators.

Google Quick Search Box – Quick Search Box is an open source search box that allows you to search data on your computer and across the web. With Quick Search Box you can search for information from just about anywhere. You can then perform actions on the search results, such as launching applications, emailing friends, or playing a song.

Quicksilver – A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data. Quicksilver is an application launcher on steroids. Though no longer in development, it can still provide plenty of additional functionality to your system.

Picture & Data Editing

photo credit: EMECEfreeStyle

Bean – Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor (or more precisely, a rich text editor), designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. Bean is Open Source, fully Cocoa, and is available free of charge! MS Word, OpenOffice, etc. try to be all things to all people. But sometimes you just want the right tool for the job. That is Bean’s niche.

Blender – Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. Discover the wide toolset available in Blender, defining a complete pipeline (from modeling to sequence editing) controlled by a flexible and consistent user interface.

DrawBerry – With DrawBerry, you have all the possibilities the vectorial drawing offers you in a free, easy to use and powerful application. If you don’t need applications such Illustrator or Inkscape and you want to create some simple (or less simple) illustrations, DrawBerry is for you.

Fraise – Fraise is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.6 which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to neither confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced users. It should work perfectly for a whole variety of needs – like web programming, script editing, making a to do list and so on

GIMP – GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. Numerous digital photo imperfections can be easily compensated for using GIMP. Fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt simply choosing the corrective mode in the transform tools. Eliminate lens’ barrel distortion and vignetting with a powerful filter but a simple interface.

Google SketchUp – Google SketchUp is software that you can use to create 3D models of anything you like. Redecorate your living room. Design a new piece of furniture. Model your city for Google Earth. Create a skatepark for your hometown, then export an animation and share it on YouTube. There’s no limit to what you can create with SketchUp.

Inkscape – An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

OpenOffice – OpenOffice 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Picasa – Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Sharing your best photos with friends and family is as easy as pressing a button!

Pixus – The AIR pixel ruler application. A handy tool for web and interface designers. Measure the screen objects in pixels using both mouse and keyboard control. Preview your design with skins and presets.

Seashore – Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing.

Scribus – Scribus is an Open Source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4/eComStation and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout.

TextWrangler – A general-purpose text editor for light-duty composition, data-file editing (where the data files consist of plain [unstyled] text), and manipulation of text-oriented data.

Entertainment

photo credit: esper.art.br

Boxee – Boxee is the best way to enjoy entertainment from the Internet and computer on your TV. Watch shows, listen to Pandora, stream Netflix and more.

Handbrake – HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. (Translation: Rip DVDs to your Mac.)

Hulu Desktop – Hulu Desktop is a lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer. It features a sleek new look that’s optimized for use with standard Windows Media Center remote controls or Apple remote controls, allowing you to navigate Hulu’s entire library with just six buttons.

MacTheRipper – MacTheRipper is a DVD ripper (extractor). It removes CSS encryption, Macrovision protection, sets the disc’s region to ‘0? for region-free, and is capable of removing RCE region checking. It can also copy ARccOS copy-protected DVDs. This is to backup your legally-purchased DVDs onto your hard drive.

Miro – Download torrents and podcasts, play any video, and do it with style. It can play almost any video file and offers over 6,000 free internet TV shows and video podcasts. Miro has a simple, gorgeous interface designed for fullscreen HD video.

Miro Video Converter – A super simple way to convert almost any video to MP4, Ogg Theora, or a specific phone or iPod. Miro Video Converter has presets that will convert video to the correct sizes and formats for popular phones, iPods, and other media players. Just convert your video and copy it to your device.

Pandora Boy – Love Pandora.com, but tired of having to run it from a web browser? Ever wish you could control pandora without even being at your computer? Well then, look no further. PandoraBoy allows you to control your music with global hotkeys or your Apple Remote.

SizzlingKeys – Have you ever wished you could control iTunes without leaving your current app? SizzlingKeys is an iTunes controller that lets you do just that – and more – in an intuitive and unobtrusive way.

VLC Media Player – VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player supporting most audio and video formats (H.264, Ogg, DivX, MKV, TS, MPEG-2, mp3, MPEG-4, aac, …) from files, physical media (DVDs, VCD, Audio-CD), TV capture cards and many network streaming protocols.

It can also convert media files, transcode and act as a streaming server over unicast or multicast and IPv4 or IPv6. It doesn’t need any external codec, program or codec pack to work.

Business

Anxiety – Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. Its aim is to provide a streamlined, easily accessible interface to add and check off your tasks, while remaining poised to melt into the background at a moments notice.

Backboard – I love my Mac and my Backpack Account. Both together gives me not only the possibility to write my notes and tasks down, but more important to write them down EASILY!

Evernote – Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your notable life using your computer, phone, and the web. Everything you capture is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable. If you like, you can add tags or organize notes into different notebooks.

Lumina – Lumina is focused to show you a simple way to track your time. The concept of Lumina is based on three columns: Projects: A project is a bundle of tasks, Tasks: A tasks is a bundle of durations, Durations: A duration is the smallest brick to calculate your total time.

Pluto – Pluto menubar is an easy-to-use tool for the management of your events, tasks, projects and notes in the most effective and productive way possible. Pluto menubar is seamlessly integrated with iCal on your Mac, on MobileMe and the iPhone.

QuickNote – QuickNote is a combined notepad and clipboard manager, useful to quickly jot down ideas and todos, store quotes, code snippets or whatever.

QuickNote is easily accessible from the menu bar, or with keyboard shortcuts: one to pop up a new note, one to edit the clipboard and one to save the clipboard without any further ado.

Snippely – Snippely is a basic text and code organizational tool. Instead of storing bits of code, quick notes, and memos in text files all over your hard drive, this application will let you save and organize “snippets” in one convenient location.

Task Mate – The to-do list made simple again. Just click to add, remove or complete tasks. Your completed tasks are easily accessible. Export your tasks to other applications via TextEdit.

Think – Let’s limit our attention to one application—any application—at any time. Let’s make it easy to change focus when we have to. Let’s allow ourselves to bring other apps up quickly if we need them, but put them out of sight again just as quickly.

Data Transfer & Sharing

CloudApp – CloudApp allows you to share images, links, music, videos and files. Here is how it works: choose a file, drag it to the menubar and let us take care of the rest.

CyberDuck – Cyberduck is a libre open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac. It features an easy to use interface with quickly accessible bookmarks.

Dropbox – Dropbox is software that syncs your files online and across your computers. Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they’ll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you’ve installed Dropbox on.

droplr – Droplr is the best way to share files from your Mac on the internet. Period. Whether you want to link to an image or embed one somewhere, Droplr makes sharing images on the web easy.

Filezilla – FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.

Jing – Snap a picture or take a video of your screen and share instantly over the web, IM, email.

Transmission – Transmission is a cross-platform BitTorrent client. Transmission is designed to balance power and usability. We’ve set the defaults to Just Work and it only takes a few clicks to configure advanced features like watch directories, bad peer blocklists, and the web interface.

System Utilities

photo credit: KnOizKi

AddressBookSync – AddressBookSync is a free Mac OS X application to download profile pictures and other Facebook data to Address Book cards. This is a handy tool to keep your contacts’ pictures updated if you have numerous Facebook friends in your Mac OS X Address Book.

AppCleaner – AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps. Installing an application distributes many files throughout your System using space of your Hard Drive unnecessarily.

AppFresh – AppFresh helps you to keep all applications, widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up to date. All from one place, easy to use and fully integrated into Mac OS X.

Camouflage – Do you have way too many items on your desktop? Do you hate cleaning up that mess? Camouflage is the right utility for you. It hides all the icons and leaves nothing but the pure wallpaper.

ClipMenu – ClipMenu can manage clipboard history. You can record 8 clipboard types, from plain text to image. To paste a recorded item, you just pop up menu by invoking the shortcut key, and select a menu item from the menu.

coconutBattery – coconutBattery isn’t just a tool which shows you only the current charge of your battery – it also shows you the current maximum capacity of it in relation to the original capacity your battery had as it left the factory.

Burn – There are a lot of ways to approach burning discs. Burn keeps it simple, but still offers a lot of advanced options. Keep your files safe and share them. Burn your files to a disc so you can access them later on.

Caffeine – Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ?-click) the icon to show the menu.

Carbon Copy Cloner – Spinning for years at 75MPH, your hard drive’s catastrophic crash could really hinder your productivity. Use CCC to make a bootable backup of your digital life today!

DateLine – DateLine displays a linear calendar on your Mac desktop which provides easy access to iCal and your events. The appearance of the DateLine is endlessly customizable and themeable.

Desktop Curtain – Desktop Curtain displays your favorite desktop picture just in front of your real desktop, so you won’t have to clean up each time you need to take a screenshot. And it’s really easy to control — just control- or right-click on Desktop Curtain’s desktop picture to access its settings or quit.

Dock Dodger – Sometimes, you find an application that you really, really like, but when you run it, the icon takes up valuable space in your Dock. With Dock Dodger, you can rid almost any application of its Dock icon, giving you your Dock back.

DockSpaces – A tiny application that allows you to have up to 10 different docks and swap anytime you want from the menu bar.

FlyGesture – FlyGesture is activated like Exposé or Dashboard, bringing up a transparent window of “guides” to move your mouse through. Moving your mouse through the guides lets FlyGesture know what action or actions you want to be performed, such as closing a window or opening an application.

Ghost – There are lots of files on your computer that you can’t see. Apple has conveniantly hidden many system files from you, so that your computer doesn’t look like an ugly, cluttered mess.However, they have not provided any easy way to create your own hidden files, or even to view theirs.

Growl – Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications. Notifications are a way for your applications to provide you with new information, without you having to switch from the application you’re already in.

Jumpcut – Jumpcut is an application that provides “clipboard buffering” — that is, access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut’s interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard’s history.

Monolingual – Monolingual is a program for removing unnecessary language resources from Mac OS X, in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space. I don’t know about you, but I use my computer in only one (human) language — English.

NameChanger – NameChanger Rename a list of files quickly and easily. See how the names will change as you type.

Name Mangler – The Finder is good at a lot of things, but renaming a lot of files is not one of them. Automator can help, but it can be a bit intimidating to use. Enter Name Mangler, which makes short work of all your file renaming tasks.

Paparazzi – Paparazzi! is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages. It’s written in Objective-C using the Cocoa API and the WebKit framework. It was inspired by webkit2png, a commandline tool written by Paul Hammond in pyObjC.

SaveCircle – SaveCircle is a little tool that can save in chosen time the document of the frontmost application, so that you don’t have to worry about loosing some work. This is simple, transparent and efficient and work with every applications.

Shoo Apps – Shoo Apps allows per-application granularity in hiding inactive applications to keep your workspace uncluttered.

SnapNDrag – SnapNDrag lets you take a screenshot by just clicking a button and dragging the resulting screenshot off. For example, to email a screenshot, you would drag the screenshot from SnapNDrag to the Mail application.

Teleport – Teleport lets you use a single mouse and keyboard to control several Macs. Simply reach an edge of your screen, and your mouse teleports to your nearby Mac, which also becomes controlled by your keyboard.

TinkerTool – TinkerTool is an application that gives you access to additional preference settings Apple has built into Mac OS X. This allows to activate hidden features in the operating system and in some of the applications delivered with the system.

Todos – Sometimes you just don’t want to take time going to your Applications folder or searching around your hard drive. Just click a quick hotkey (Command-Option-Control-T) and Todos will simply appear. Todos’ job is simple. Todos doesn’t do more than it says. Like its definition in Spanish, Todos will show you everything. Todos shows you all your applications in a complete dock.

Wallpaper Clocks – Vladstudio and Softshape Development proudly introduce Wallpaper Clocks – desktop wallpaper which refreshes every minute to keep your time and date precise as well as stylish in many artistic ways!

YemuZip – Drag, drop, done. Making zip files cannot be any easier. YemuZip is an easy-to-use application for making zip files. Just drag, drop, name your zip file and you’re done. The Finder’s Archive function makes zip files that contains Mac-specific information that, when extracted on a PC, looks like garbage. YemuZip lets you choose between a PC-compatible format and a Mac format that preserve all the Mac-specific metadata.

Communication

Adium – Adium is a free and open source instant messaging application for Mac OS X, written using Mac OS X’s Cocoa API, released under the GNU GPL and developed by the Adium team. Based on the libpurple protocol library, Adium can connect you to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services (see further down for the list) and then chat with other people using those services.

Colloquy – Traditionally, chat clients on the Mac have been anything but glamorous. Colloquy is an advanced IRC, SILC & ICB client which aims to fill this void. By adhering to Mac OS X interface conventions, Colloquy has the look and feel of a quality Mac application.

Google Notifier – The Google Notifier is an application that shows you alerts in your menu bar, so you can see when you have new Gmail messages or upcoming Google Calendar events without having to open a web browser.

ooVoo – With ooVoo, you can connect with anyone, anytime, with video calls, video messages, phone calls, text and more. Use ooVoo to get face time with people you can’t meet in person (and save travel time and money!). ooVoo makes life easier and more fun.

Skype – Skype is software that enables the world’s conversations. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files with other Skype users. Everyday, people also use Skype to make low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles.

Thunderbird 3 – Thunderbird, as a messaging system, is uniquely positioned as the tool that users can use to integrate as many of their communications as they want. By combining an open architecture, a powerful extensibility and customization framework, and a person-centric perspective on communications, Thunderbird is a powerful yet enjoyable tool to help individuals manage their online interactions — whether that’s email, instant messaging, social networking messages, or other types of message.

Misc

Bodega – Welcome to Bodega, the world’s most innovative way to discover and obtain the hottest and latest applications for your Mac. Bodega is like a storefront right on your Mac’s desktop, one that’s chock-full of software apps from Mac developers around the world. Just download and install the Bodega app, and you have access to an ever-growing catalog of software to meet your every computing need.

iPhoto Library Selector – Select your iPhoto library before launching!

Here is a list of step by step process of setting up a website with a limited budget. I’m listing these sites only because they have free stuff to use with the web development phase or it’s the cheapest for great quality web products:

1. You need a domain name. $1.99 Domain Names – ex. www.thestylistportfolio.com:

2. You need web space for your website. Web Hosting starting at $4.99:

or

If you’re going to sell products instead of a business webpage. They have over 800 designs to choose from. $9.99 a month E-Commerce website:

4. If you want a website where you can change content daily, on the go, or from your smartphone. I would go with a wordpress blog (I’ll explain how to setup a wordpress blog later). This site has wordpress themes which you can buy and upload into your wordpress database.

Sites that have free WordPress Themes:

www.smashingmagazine.com

www.wordpress.org

If you gotten this far and you’re ready to move further let me know. I will guide you in.

photo credit: seantoyer

Many people would be surprised to find that pen based computer technology dates back to the 1890’s.

Elisha Grey’s invention- the Teleautograph, was the breakthrough that lead to pen based Tablet computers. The problem as it originated was trying to find a way to get a machine to read hand written characters. Although the Telegraph could pass on messages written in alphanumeric characters, it could not reproduce something like a map or a signature. Also, noise made it impossible at times, to hear well enough to record a telegraph, like when passing orders during WWI. Flashforward over 100 years later and here we are, anxiously awaiting the release of Microsoft’s Curier, or something like it.

So, the question has become is this a pipe dream or will it become a reality?

Is it real? Could it be true? My background started in Microsoft but I also played around with earlier mac products. I can’t explain to you how happy I was when I got my first 20″ iMac. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to integrate it into my existing network, install a digital camera (without loading driver CD), setup printers (without loading driver CD), and No AntiVirus. I didn’t stop there I purchased an Iphone when it came out and my latest purchase was a MacBook Pro fully loaded. I just started migrating my clients off of Microsoft servers and onto Apple Xserve which BTW is a powerful out of the box server. I highly recommend for all you Microsoft system admins/engineers to give it a try you will love it and your boss will love you.

Now I’m reading Apple could possible be coming out with a MacBook Touch??? I will be the first in line because I’m one of those – got to have the new toy child. Here is a video I found on you tube:

Possible specs:

Size: 9.75″ W X 6.81″ H X .75″ D
Weight: ~2.5 lbs
Display: 10.5″ LED-backlit Widesreen
Aluminum Enclosure

Hardware:
1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (1.8 GHz optional)
80GB HDD (Optional 64 GB Solid State Drive)
Intel GMA X3100 graphics processor
Built-in iSight camera
Built-in stereo speakers and microphone
802.11 n Wireless Networking
Built-in Wi-Max
Built-In GPS
Internal Accelerometers
Bluetooth 2.1
2 USB 2.0 Ports
Mini DVI
Audio In/Out Jack

Price: Starting at $800

Other Options:
External USB SuperDrive
Powered docking station with external bluetooth keyboard

Search Engine Optimization: The Basics
Why SEO?
Search engines provide the majority of traffic to websites across the Internet, regardless of website focus. Therefore, if  your site cannot be properly located and indexed by the leading search engines, you are missing out on the best opportunity to drive targeted visitors and potential revenue.

What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is the process by which pages are improved to increase their organic search engine rankings.  This is done by assessing what the individual search engines are looking for and providing that.  The outcome of an SEO Campaign is to create high organic rankings for the keywords/phrases for which the client is indeed an authority.  This will ultimately create an increase in targeted traffic.

A good SEO campaign includes the following three aspects:
• Keyword Analysis
• Onsite Optimization
• Offsite Optimization

Keyword analysis is the process by which you analyze and select keywords based on traffic, competition, and relevance.  If you are not selecting the proper keywords, then the rest of the optimization is really a lost cause.  The text and theme of the site needs to revolve around these keywords and very much define how the site appears to both users and search engines.

Onsite optimization deals with changes made to the site itself.  This involves making changes to the text content,
architecture of the site, HTML code, and page layout.  This is the most commonly understood aspect of SEO, but only accounts for about 40% of a site’s rankings.  This is where your keywords are placed throughout the code to show the search engines what your site is about.

Offsite optimization deals with changes made outside the scope of the site.  This mainly involves increasing the quantity and quality of inbound links to the site.  Approximately 60% of Google’s current ranking algorithm is based on inbound linking.  Your goal is to maximize the site’s exposure on the Web and get as many sites as possible to link back to your site.

What is a good keyword and what is not?

This is the ultimate question we have to ask ourselves when judging keywords.  There are many variables you have to take into account when selecting exactly what keywords your site will be optimized for.

Use the following criteria to determine the viability of a keyword:

• The estimated amount of searches for the keyword in a 24 hour period
• The number of sites competing for the keyword
• The quality of the sites competing for the keyword
• The ability of the site to support the keyword
• Relevance between keywords
• The target audience of the site

Keep in mind that your number one goal is to accurately depict what the site is about through the keywords (and the eventual text content).  If your site is not properly described by the keywords then either the site is targeted wrong or you’ve selected the wrong keywords.

Search engines like sites that are targeted to a specific topic.  If a site is spread too thin as far as topic goes, then it will be much harder to appear as an authority for any one topic.  Search engines do favor large sites, but generally it is better to have a smaller targeted site than a larger broad site that is about many topics.

It’s not uncommon to discover site theme issues when doing keyword selection.  Oftentimes, it leads to a reassessment of the site as a whole (which is a positive).  In this way, general marketing, user experience, and SEO overlap.  If you do not feel your site is targeted towards the correct keywords and themes, it is important that you retarget the site and its content prior to optimization.  You should understand your audience, the purpose of your site, and its themes before even starting an SEO initiative.

It is also common for sites to get caught up in industry jargon.  You have to look at your keywords as your target audience would.  If you’re targeting the general consumer and you use lots of industry jargon, then you cannot expect much of a return on investment.

Another thing to watch out for is overly generic keywords.  If you are attempting to optimize your site for keywords that can mean many other things, you are bringing in a whole lot of new competition.

So, we have a small list now of what to avoid.

• Keywords that are not relevant to each other
• Keywords that do not fit the theme of the site
• Industry jargon if it is not applicable to the audience
• Keywords that are too generic / overly competitive

META Headers

Optimizing the META header is the first and easiest step in onsite optimization.  There are four main areas that you should be concerned with:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords
• Robots

Depending on the keyword selection, the Title should be made up of the first two keywords.  This provides high density and prominence for both keywords instead of using it all on one.  Of course, the Title should make sense and be descriptive of the page.

The Description borrows the same idea, but expands on it a little.  It is ideal to include both the primary and secondary keyword in a short sentence describing the page.

The Keywords field is simply a list of the keywords separated by commas with no spaces in between.

The Robots tags tell the search engine spiders what to do with the page.

Links “Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important.’”  -Quote from Google’s website

Link popularity is one of the most important factors search engines use in determining where you will rank in the search engine results (SERPs) for your keywords and phrases, as it helps them to determine how important or popular your site is and what its reputation is. Link building, as part of the offsite optimization process, is the process of finding related/relevant websites and receiving a link from them to you. Natural linking occurs when a site has good content that others will link to without being asked. But to get these links, people have to know about you. It is a catch 22. Building links has become pretty sophisticated over the last couple of years. Today you need a mixture of links from many sources including articles, press releases, social media, blogs, directories and others.

Produced by Steve Devries, Treehouse SEM
www.treehousesem.com/

The Twitter Background Measurements

Please realize the width between the left browser edge and the left edge of the white Twitter posts area is 245 pixels and the width between the right browser edge and the right edge of the white Twitter posting area is 250 pixels. When creating the design of your new background, leave five pixels space on both sides.

photo credit: celine nadeau

These are the general standard measures accepted by majority of Twitter background designers:

Image width: 1920 pixels
Image height: 1200 pixels
(this is good for user that have larger screens – you can adjust as you get better at creating)
Left graphic width: 245 pixels
Right graphic width: 250 pixels

Background Design

If you want to create a custom Twitter background which represents your business you should have your logo, your photo, your blog’s URL, and your slogan handy.

Photoshop, Fireworks, Power Point, or Paint are ways you can create the background.

1. Create a new graphic that is 1920 x 1200. This is the background image for your Twitter profile.
2. Create a box starting from the left edge out to the right no more than 245 pixels. I like to create the box to extend the height of the image 1200 pixels. (in this case my background color is white but you can choose any back ground color – the box I chose black but whatever you like that’s what matters)
3. Insert a picture on the left side of background image. (I make sure the image doesn’t pass my right side box I created – this is my ruler)
4. Now add your logo, design, name, or whatever.
5. Now add anything else you want.
6. Now save the file (if you have photo software Fireworks, Photoshop save the file as png or psd this will allow you to go back and edit the image with ease for future changes)
7. Export your graphic as either a GIF or JPG file. Make sure its no more than 800K. This is the maximum size allowed by Twitter for a background image. Now its time to upload.

How To Upload Your New Twitter Background Image

• Login to your Twitter account.
• Click on Settings in the menu at the top.
• You will now see a Picture Here tab.
• Click on the one marked Design.
• Scroll down to the bottom and click on the Change Background Image>> link.
• You will see a text field with a Browse button next to it.
• Click on that button so that you can search and upload your new Twitter background image.
• Once you finish, make sure the Tile Background check box is empty. Otherwise your new image will repeat on the screen.
• Click on the Save Changes button at the bottom, and you are done!

Additional Resources

Graphic design applications like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks are a few good design apps.

• Twitter Background Guidlines via Comcast.com has additional info on designing a background around Twitter’s layout.
• Where can you find good images? via Presentation Zen has a thorough list of royalty-free stock images.
• Improve PowerPoint’s GIF, BMP, PNG, JPG export resolution via PPTools has additional info on exporting slides as images with PowerPoint.
• Twitter Treats has a growing collection of free custom Twitter backgrounds.
• Several personalized Twitter backgrounds can be found on Flickr’s Extended Twitter Background screenshot Pool and under the twitterbacks tag.

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(text & links provided by Web 2.0)

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