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Basic On-Page Search Engine Optimization for Web Developers

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another discipline of the web — albeit one not exactly relevant to design or development. More broadly, SEO is “web marketing.” More narrowly, however, for your purposes as a web developer — SEO is simply the process of making your website more understandable to search engines. Even if you do not plan to be a web marketer, when you build a site you should usually adhere to basic SEO standards. This information is primarily relevant to on-page SEO. There’s such a thing as off-page SEO, too, where you focus on gaining links to your website […]

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Things to Change After Installing an SSL Certificate

The actual process of installing an SSL certificate will vary by server. This is not a guide for how to install an SSL, period. This is for all the other stuff that can slowly break when you install an SSL certificate — stuff you might not notice immediately. For SSL purchasing, I recommend Namecheap. I’ve used them as a domain registrar for a while now, and I’m very happy with them. They’re the only cheap SSL certificate ($10/year) I’ve found that seems reputable (i.e., other SSL certificates I’ve found for similar and lower prices have seemed to come from disreputable […]

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Not a Google Webmaster Tools Owner of Your Site?

At work, we had a weird situation wherein one of our properties wasn’t “owned” by our account in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). The differences between Owner and non-owner accounts are minor, but significant. An Owner has full control, while non-owners are more restricted. They can’t make certain changes to the property — perhaps the most important of which is linking the property to a Google Analytics (GA) account. This causes some data share between GWT and GA, which is important to have. It seems whoever set the site up had only added our account as a non-owner. This might be […]

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