Google makes adding custom fonts to your site super easy

Posted in: Web Design by Scott on July 29, 2010

About a month ago Google introduced the Google Font Directory.  It allowed web designers and developers to introduce the fonts in the Directory to be added to sites using their API.  (Albeit it is a limited number of fonts).

Well now they have gone a step further and made it even easier.  Now they have added the Google Font Previewer, what this adds is the be able to see the effect of letter, word and line spacing changes and similar changes, live in your browser.  Additionally the preview tool will create the CSS necessary for you to add to your stylesheet to get the effect you have tried out.  (It’s also easy to tweak it further after Google gets you started).  But the most important part is that you can copy and paste a line of code from the Font Previewer which will retrieve the font from Google’s servers.

To back up for a minute and explain to the non or new designers:  When designing a web page you need to be careful about what fonts you use, as just because you have some fancy font that came with Photoshop that doesn’t mean your users will.  The result will be that the font will be replace with another more standard font like Arial and your design will not look the same for your users.  In the past we got around this by using things like Cufon, but it is tricky to implement.

What happens with Google’s Font API is that the fonts are always pulled from their servers – and are thus available across the web, to everyone.  Pretty cool.

Microsoft Security Essentials – freeware antivirus that actually works

Posted in: Technology by Scott on October 1, 2009

Microsoft yesterday brought out Microsoft Security Essentials – their freeware antivirus software, and it is actually pretty good.  I am a Mac user but I installed it on my wife’s Windows laptop last night and I was happy to see that it was not nagware and actually worked.  It’s not for everybody – if you are really concerned about viruses I would still probably recommend Norton Antivirus simply because they have been doing this for so long and are the industry leader.  But MS Security Essentials is probably good enough for everybody else who is careful about where they browse and what they download.   Check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Google Does Not Care About Keyword Metatags

Posted in: Blog, SEO, Web Design by Scott on September 30, 2009

To finally put it to rest, on Monday Matt Cutts posted on the Google Webmaster Central Blog about whether or not Google uses keyword meta-tags for search ranking.  The answer is no.

What is all this about:  In the old days websites would pack their meta tags with keywords that should have described their respective websites.  Search bots would then crawl the site and pick up on those meta-tags and would use that to define what the site was about. The problem was this got abused – and websites that had no relevant content at all would pack their meta-tags with the most popular keywords just to get searched.  The result was that Google stopped searching this information because of the abuse.  Some search engines still use this information, but Google does not use it for determining search ranking.

Two of the meta-tags in a site which are the most critical and searched and indexed by Google are the Description meta-tag and the page Title tag.

The Description meta-tag should be just that – a short description of the contents of the page, don’t make it long than 150 to 200 characters long because it will be the text that will be shown on the Google search page.  And here is a key thing:  In your description use the keywords that describe your site – because that will be what Google actually searches for relevant content.

The Title tag is also important, and is in fact one of the most important places to put your keywords and phrases.  But don’t overload it, that will just annoy people, it should be kept to less than 12 words, and often much less.   The title tag will be the main heading on the search results page, and it is what we humans will look for in deciding whether or not to click on that link.  A good practice for Title tags is that they take the form:

<title>page title | organization or site name | short keyword rich phrase</title>

This gets the important information to the front the title – where we humans will read it.  Then the keywords are at the back of the title – where the bots will read it.

For more information go to this LINK at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

SEO and the Google Canonical Problem

Posted in: SEO, Uncategorized, Web Design by Scott on

Sounding a bit like something out of the Da Vinci Code – the Google Canonical Problem can actually spell trouble for good SEO.  Basically what it means is that Google sees URLs with our without the preceding www as completely different sites, therefore http://blinkdesigns.ca is seen as a different site from http://www.blinkdesigns.ca.  The result is that the problem may negatively effect the site’s page rank and thus it SEO.  Mainly because incoming links will either be split between the two sites, or may go to one or the other site entirely.

One can detect this problem by using the Google Page Rank tool in the Google toolbar and go to each site and note the page ranking; if the page ranking is different the Canonical Problem is probably the issue.

You can use a redirect to remedy this problem, but that too can negatively effect your page ranking, as Google sees redirects as a possibility that the site is not legitimate.

Another way to solve this problem is to use mod_rewrite (in Apache, and ISAPI filter in IIS).  Mod-rewrite is an Apache module which can rewrite URLs when specific patterns are detected.  What we want to do is that when a request comes in for the URL without the WWW that we force the web server to send the browser to the URL with the WWW.  We do this by writing the following code to the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

All of that cryptic stuff is regular expressions, and all you have to worry about is that it is for pattern matching, the Apache module is looking for a particular pattern of URL request, which it will then re-write.  Apache reads the .htaccess file each time it sends out a response to a request.  (This also means that it is a very critical file to your web server, so be careful to not screw it up).

Once you have edited the file restart Apache, then whenever you go to the site without the WWW on the front of the URL Apache will re-write your request to add the WWW.