Welcome to Brittany Websites

Welcome to Brittany Websites

This is the Blogger version of our main website... www.BrittanyWebsites.com

We will be updating this site on a weekly basis to keep you up to date with what is going on with Brittany Websites.

We shall also be handing out some hints and tips for those of you who are running your own websites and blogs.

Favicons for Free

In order to make it easier for people to add favicons to their Blogger blogs, I have set up a site that offers a range of hosted favicons for free.

Please rush over to www.Favicons4Free.com to take a look - now's the time to get rid of that orange Blogger favicon and insert one of your own!

Creeping up the Search Engines

I've been keeping an eye on how well http://www.BrittanyWebsites.com is doing in the search engines.

The phrase I search for is website design brittany

The results are...

Google: 11th place - this puts me top of page two - not ideal but, about what I expected.

Bing: 10th place - thus, bottom of page one.

Yahoo: - nowhere to be seen. Not sure why this is but I need to do something about it.

Although I don't engage in any jiggery-pokery to optimise the sites I produce for the search engines (I prefer good content to any trickery), there are some things that I do in order to help the search engines index my sites (and my clients' sites). These are best summed up in the list below....

Name your images!

I used to be bad at this - then I learnt my lesson!

The images I used on my website used to be called images01.jpg or similar.

Now, the images are called beautiful_gite-in_southern_brittany02.jpg, or similar.

Google understand this; all Google understands from image01.jpg is that it is an image file - well, it knew that anyway!

My experience shows that this is one of the most important improvements you can make on an image heavy site!

Furthermore, every time you display an image on a website, you may include an ALT attribute and TITLE attribute for that image.

Alt and Title Tags for Images

As well as naming any images you use, you should also give those images Alt and Title tags. These help the search engines to index your site and, more importantly, help your visitors to navigate round your site.

Title Tags for your web pages

Title tags matter. It's what the user first sees on Google results.

Your title tags must contain your keywords. This way, the keyword will be included as link on the search engine index. Give a different title to each page, use keywords related to the page. Page Title and Meta Description gets displayed in the Search Engine results. Make it something interesting that people will want to click. Don't fill it up with keywords. Just make a quick message that entices the user to click. This way when you attain higher rankings, you'll get a better click-through rate !

Anchor Text

Use the keywords related to that page for any link text. Search engines algorithms are taking into consideration the text used for the link itself (anchor text) - "click here" is meaningless. But "Website Design in Brittany" corresponds exactly to your subject, and this specific page, even independently of its content, will be considered as an interesting page for "Website Design in Brittany" by the search engines.

For example, the following link has a meaningful title (rather than "click here") and, when the mouse is placed over the link, explanatory text is displayed... www.BrittanyWebsites.com

This all goes to help getting your site indexed by Google and the other search engines.

Your Own Favicon for Blogger

One thing that sets the otherwise excellent Blogger Blog apart from the really professional site is the standard NavIcon that is displayed in Address bar and Tab of the browser.

To change from the standard FavIcon is easy though, all you have to do is follow these simple steps...

1). Create a FavIcon - I always go to http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/ for this.

2). Once you have created your FavIcon, download it to your computer.

3). Now upload the image to a filesharing/image hosting site on the internet

4). Now you need to edit the HTML of your template and insert the 3 following lines into the template just below the line that reads < head>

< link href='http://www.brittanywebsites.com/images/favicon.ico' rel='favicon url'/>
< link href='http://www.brittanywebsites.com/images/favicon.ico' rel='shortcut icon'/>
< link href='http://www.brittanywebsites.com/images/favicon.ico' rel='icon'/>

Please not that you will have to change the address of those three lines to indicate the address where you have saved your favicon.ico to (unless you want to use my FavIcon on your site - LOL!)

You will also have to remove the space between the < and link at the start of each line (I only inserted it to keep Blogger happy - and that's something we should always do, isn't it?)

All the best

Keith (www.BrittanyWebSites.com)

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If you want a professional looking website/blog, why not let www.BrittanyWebSites.com do all the work for you? It's cheaper than you think.

Remove Blogger NavBar

Although Blogger makes blogging easy, the Navbar at the top of the screen can detract from the professional look that you may wish to give to your blog or website.

To remove the NavBar, all you have to do is insert some code into your template. This is easy if you follow these instructions....

1). From you Blogger DashBoard, choose the Settings option for your blog/website.
2). Choose the Layout Tab and then click on the Edit HTML option (you may want to back up your template first - always a good idea!)
3). Now insert the following line of code into the template Immediately above the line that reads... body {

#navbar-iframe {height:0px;visibility:hidden;display:none;}

4). Save the template and view your blog - the NavBar will have disappeared.

All the best

Keith ( www.BrittanyWebsites.com)

Static Top Post in Blogger?

Although Blogger is very easy to use, many people would like to have a post that always stays at the top of the blog - a sort of Welcome Post.

This is easy to do - all you need to do is create your Welcome Post and publish it. Then go back into that post (as though to edit it), go to Post Options and change the Posting Date and Tme to some arbitrary date well into the future.

For an example, look closely at the first post on www.BrittanyWebsites.BlogSpot.com - the one that reads Welcome to Brittany Websites and is always at the top of the page.

All the Best

Keith ( www.BrittanyWebsites.com)