SEO Web Design Blog » Code

List of U.S. States for a CForms II Select Box

Claye Stokes — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:03:37 +0000

Here’s a list of U.S. States in a format that you can copy and paste into your Cforms II form:

#Alabama#Alaska#American Samoa#Arizona#Arkansas#California#Colorado#Connecticut#Delaware#District of Columbia#Florida#Georgia#Guam#Hawaii#Idaho#Illinois#Indiana#Iowa#Kansas#Kentucky#Louisiana#Maine#Maryland#Massachusetts#Michigan#Minnesota#Mississippi#Missouri#Montana#Nebraska#Nevada#New Hampshire#New Jersey#New Mexico#New York#North Carolina#North Dakota#Northern Marianas Islands#Ohio#Oklahoma#Oregon#Pennsylvania#Puerto Rico#Rhode Island#South Carolina#South Dakota#Tennessee#Texas#Utah#Vermont#Virginia#Virgin Islands#Washington#West Virginia#Wisconsin#Wyoming

And here is the entire string, including “State” as a label:

State#Alabama#Alaska#American Samoa#Arizona#Arkansas#California#Colorado#Connecticut#Delaware#District of Columbia#Florida#Georgia#Guam#Hawaii#Idaho#Illinois#Indiana#Iowa#Kansas#Kentucky#Louisiana#Maine#Maryland#Massachusetts#Michigan#Minnesota#Mississippi#Missouri#Montana#Nebraska#Nevada#New Hampshire#New Jersey#New Mexico#New York#North Carolina#North Dakota#Northern Marianas Islands#Ohio#Oklahoma#Oregon#Pennsylvania#Puerto Rico#Rhode Island#South Carolina#South Dakota#Tennessee#Texas#Utah#Vermont#Virginia#Virgin Islands#Washington#West Virginia#Wisconsin#Wyoming

Cforms II is the best Wordpress Plugin out there for building forms – visit their site for more information.

Testing HTML Emails

Claye Stokes — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:38:48 +0000

I have been designing a lot of HTML email newsletters, flyers, reports, and order summaries lately and testing is obviously a must, because sending structured HTML and images in an email can be quite tricky. If you need to test a HTML email, Campaign Monitor is the best free tool I’ve found.

Anyone who designs HTML for emails on a constant basis should set up a testing server but for someone like me who only has to create a couple HTML emails, max per web design project, I found Campaign Monitor to be the best free option, hands down.

They allow as many free test emails as you want – I just set up a free account and within seconds I was putting the email together in an incredibly user-friendly interface (great work, guys). I really enjoy this tool – I can’t say much about their email campaign management features, but I am very impressed with the testing interface so I’m sure it’s great.

They also allow you to test the email in a large selection of email clients (I only really cared about gmail and Outlook but they have pretty much everything), which is obviously a must for large-scale email campaigns.

The Problem With Coding and Sending HTML Emails

You can’t send standards-compliant HTML with a nice stylesheet to structure the layout, you have to use tables, spans, and (sad but true) the font tag.

And of course, the main reason you want to send a HTML email (flyer, newsletter, or whatever) is so that you can send in-line pictures in that email. The problem is, you can’t simply send the images as attachments, you have to actually install them on your server (same server you’re mailing from) and link to them with absolute paths – that’s where testing them becomes extremely inconvenient.

Using the META Robots Tag

Claye Stokes — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 04:14:13 +0000

Tutorial: How to use the Meta Robots tag — code examples, meanings, and all the major REP directives.

I’ve seen a whole lot of websites lately that are wasting space (and the time it took to write it) by implementing the Meta Robots tag like this:

If you want search engine bots to crawl and index your website, then just leave it alone. By default, search engines will crawl, index, and archive every page on your website that they can find by following links. You also don’t have to say “all” — every bot that obeys the Robots Meta tag will obey it by default.

So not only is that example pointless because that is the default, it is repeating the same command twice!

Here are some handy uses for the Meta robots tag (these work for Yahoo!, MSN, and Google bots):

Normal talk: Just ignore this page – don’t keep a copy because I don’t want to see it in search engine results. I don’t want you to follow the links on this page, either.

Code:

(surprised that it’s not “noindex, nofollow”? – that’s just a long and unnecessary of telling search engines to ignore the page completely)

Normal talk: I don’t want to see this page in search results, so don’t keep a copy of this page. You can follow the links on this page, though – those websites deserve credit.

Code:

Normal talk: Take as many copies of this page as you want and hook me up with traffic from your search engine results. Don’t follow the links on this page though, those websites aren’t that great anyways.

Code:

Normal talk: You can make a copy of this page to plug into your algorithm, but don’t give anyone access to it with the “cache” link in search engine results.

Code:

Normal talk: I don’t want you to pull any text from my website to use in search engine results. Just a link will do. You’re free to index this page and follow all links.

Code:

Normal talk: Stop using my Dmoz.org listing description in search results – I want you to use a snippet of text from the page to show users the contextual relevance of my site to their search query.

Code:

(NOODP is an acronym “No Open Directory Project”)

Some Useful Googlebot Meta Tags:

These Meta tags work exclusively in Google (all of these would work with the “robots” name, but since Googlebot is the only bot that officially follows these REP directives, I’ll use “googlebot” or “google”, in the case of the notranslate tag):

Normal talk: Ignore the images on this page – I don’t want to see them in Google Image Search.

Code:

Normal talk: Heads up – this page will be out of commission (deleted, expired, moved, etc.) on this day.

Code:

Normal talk: Don’t translate the content on this page into other languages.

Code:

! Notice that in this case, the Meta name is “google”, not “googlebot”.