We here at OSWC are students of the newest design trends in the biz. We love shiny new things. If there is a new toy out, we have GOT to get our hands on it. We don’t know why, but that’s how it works with us. The same goes with web design trends. jQuery is very hot right now, and we’re getting our hands on it and playing with it like it’s the newest smart phone. We already employed some of the hippest CSS2 trends when we built this site, like image sprites, background image hover effects, and purely CSS drop down menus. Since then, we’ve leveraged a lot of the newest jQuery techniques too, beginning with the Twitter plugin, continuing with a validated AJAX contact form, adding in some nifty portfolio sliders, and rounding it out with some cool quote rotators (e.g. the Outer Spice Buzz panel on the Services and Portfolio pages, as well as the bottom-right panel on every page). So, we’re continuing that trend today with a few more features.

Our shiniest, most notable new feature is the star animation in the header. Undoubtedly you’ve already noticed, but just in case you missed it, scroll to the top of the page and check it out – Outer Spice is now flying through space! There is a subtle animated image made up of stars that slides across the original image in the header, making it seem as though we’re meandering through space on a galactic quest of domination and adventure. Those are indeed strong words, but once day you’ll see – we will take over the universe. The animation is done using jQuery (no flash here!), specifically by leveraging a plugin called Spritely. Check it out for yourself, it’s pretty awesome. And we’re only using about 20% of what it can actually do (we’re not actually using the “sprite” feature – just the “pan” feature for now, but we’re planning to implement some sprite animation in the future).

The other feature we just implemented is the brand new Google Font Directory via the Google Font API to produce awesome fonts that render in any browser without the use of jQuery or images. That means the page loads faster and is much more SEO friendly. We were previously heavily using a font called Yanone Kaffeesatz in images as headers and text all over the site. However, Google just added that font to their directory of free fonts, so we were able to do away with all those images and lighten up the site a bit.

Check out this awesome font – it’s really a font – no image or jQuery is used!

Cool, huh? We were going to employ the cufon font replacement technique, which uses jQuery to transform embedded fonts into images on the fly, but thanks to the Google Font API we were able to go one step further and put our special font directly on our page. Natural. Pure. Indexable. Gracefully downgrading. That’s what we like to hear at OSWC. Stay tuned for changes to our portfolio and services pages!

We will build your website according to best industry practices for search engine optimization.  The code will validate and the content will be easily indexable.  We agree with SEO industry leaders who preach ‘Content is king’ – and recommend producing consistently unique, interesting, content that centers around the search terms and subjects you want to score high with.

White hat (good) SEO techniques

Content is king.

Every so called SEO guru will tell you – the best possible way you can increase your SEO is to create consistent, quality, content.  Now be very careful when you go down this road.  Just because you put out content, doesn’t mean its good or that it will automatically be ranked better.  For instance – take these 2 SEO related websites.

http://seo-tutorial.seoadministrator.com/ – Great collection of data centered around all things SEO

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/google-personalized-search/ – Very lazy article and thinly veiled attempt at linking.  Below is the entire content of the post written by the author of the site:

David Harry of the SEO Dojo has pulled together an interesting study about Personalised Search (how Google changes rankings based on various metrics included being signed into a Google account) [enter article quote here]  This is a very difficult area to monitor and draw conclusions from – and an area I’ve certainly neglected. Hence the link. Worth a read.

That’s it!  The entire post. This is very lazy.  Great content will bring more visitors than cross-linking every single time.  Spend the extra time on extremely high quality articles and blog posts.  You’ll quickly stand out over the regurgitating news linkers littering the Internet.

Related, incoming links

Notice I’m not talking about any types of links.  Your goal should be to get your website URL as a link on sites that are directly related to what you’re doing.  If you have a video game review blog, you want to try and get your website URL on the front page of a video game store, video game online magazine, etc.  You do not want to have your website URL linked on the front page of a yarn wholesaler, or a recipe website.  Search engines will see you are not contextually relevant.

Consequently, when you are choosing the links that you will publish on your front page, remember this same technique of contextual relevancy.

Communities

If your site is one that can attract and hold a community, having a forum is a wonderful way to engage your target market and score higher with search engines.  Think of all the indexable content coming from multiple new posts every day!  If you can manage them and keep them on topic, your own users can help you increase your search rank.

Black hat (bad) SEO techniques

These are techniques that are penalized when identified by search engines or administrators.  They are unethical and lazy.  They range from trying to game the system to flat out deception.

Hidden content – white text with a white background stuffing keywords in hopes that search engine crawlers index everything.
Meta crazy – in the meta tags of the header, people will stuff keywords here like crazy.
Link farms – groups of websites all linking back towards each other in order to spam the index of a search engine.
Gateway pages – content stuffed with keywords that auto-redirects when you go there to another page they want you to see.
Cloaking – a human reading the website would see different things than the search engine spider read.

Grey hat (shady) SEO techniques

Here’s the ‘grey’ area.  They aren’t strictly forbidden among all circles, but they aren’t exactly on any white list.

Paid links – I pay to get my link on your website which has a ton of traffic.  This high traffic value will increase your search rankings.
Duplicate content – micro-site interlinking or having links that link back to your own site, perhaps with duplicate or simple content.  This technique is starting to slide into the black hat seo area.

There are many other techniques constantly being tested and refined by SEO’s every day.  Just like nearly everything in life; consistent, hard work will pay off.  Great content is truly the king of search engine optimization.