The Venture Skills Blog

With recent problems with Cross site scripting (XSS) at Reddit (though massivily over hyped) I thought it was a good time to discuss its use in SEO.

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If you are serious about social networking (and not just studying it like me!) Then you need friends and do you know what all 100 Top Stumblers and 98/100 Top Diggers have in common?

That’s right they all use an avatar picture…
An avatar image is a strong visual brand and identity that people quickly associate with a person many bloggers know who Darren Rowse is, simply by the picture he uses as his avatar, Lyndon from SEO Cornwall is another good example with his distinctive red background. The power of brand and visual identities is simple people notice you. Recently I had a conversation with MegT an Australian Blogger (its her avatar shown) We had both started to notice that every where we went we bumped into each other, now we have interests in similar niches but the reason we noticed each other was down to the fact we both use the same avatar in every location and by doing so we both have recognisable profiles and a sphere of trust.
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So following in the vein of our accessibility drive and then our layouts we now turn our attention to some of the best ideas and tips when it comes to using Fonts and typography in your CSS based sites.
In case you were wondering…

Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type is the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing) and letter spacing.Wikipedia

These as always are in no particular order, but hopefully will help at least one or two people out.
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I wish to tell you a tale of how the on-line world can suck you in, it all started when I joined the Stumbleupon beta group you can to! The beta group gets to try out all the great new things like the new user interface, it also give you new buttons to press! and here is where it all went wrong…

As you can see the new interface is a much more polished feel to it then the old one, it also now made some features that were perhaps buried more easily accessible one of them is “stumble sites they like” button so now you can start going through other stumblers likes and dislikes all your secrets are mine muhuhhhhaaaa
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How British is your site? Is it British enough to get into google.co.uk?
Regardless of where you come from you will no doubt have a regional Google be it China or Brazil but getting into these various search engines can at times be difficult unless you know what to look for.
We have discussed this subject before but now I want to give some sort of ranking to the various factors so here is our guide to Geo Targeting.

Through out this article we refer to regional rather then country tld (top level domain) and search engine, while most regional search engines are country specific a couple are not and with new domain names making up a series of countries such as .eu (urgh Europe ) we are starting to have to think of Geo Targeting on many levels.
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So we brought you some great CSS tips to help with accessibility over the weekend, and we discussed how layout helps users get into your page with our look at stumblers and Diggers habits, now its time to introduce the layouts…
These are our favourite CSS layout sites and scripts, enjoy
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Like our Previous Stumbleupon vs Digg article this is based on statistics gathered from various sources, including clients, ourselves and friends and just about any one we could beg. However unlike our previous piece we had a much smaller data set as we only counted stumbles and Digg that brough 200 or more unique visits. Further more the data set was reduced simply by the fact we didn’t have the mouse tracking scripts enabled during the majority of our experiments however the data set is large enough to use so here goes…
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I’m getting a little bit excited, less then 2 weeks to go till myself and David Castle open All about Asking a two day SEO residential course here in the UK in Nottingham.

We have announced details of couple of the workshops
I’m particularly looking forward to semantic markup and search engine optimisation, this is a subject that’s dear to my heart and I have been busy preparing several practical tutorials and bits for people, along with a set of scripts, css and html templates for people to take away. The second workshop which has been announced in detail is getting in the right search engine. This workshop is focusing on getting your site into the various search engines, regional, local mobile etc. Again its really a practical session with everything from XHTML geo targetting tracks to working with CHTML being discussed and played with.
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We are in the last few bits of the new site and while designing it a major focus has been on accessibility and not just for search engines.
For us accessibility is built into the design its about reaching as many people as possible and giving as many people as we can the chance to read about our work and to enjoy our highly entertaining blog posts (no really they are). In European countries the various EU and country specific laws are pretty rigid and all web designers should by now be familiar with WAI Level 1 & 2 and be reaching and exceeding these standards as the norm. One of the major criticisms is that by following the standards you are left with dry boring sites, this just is not true! you can still have amazing sites and we are going to show you 5 neat tips to make your standards compliant site look just as good as it always did.
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Oh yes welcome to another sarcastic Friday round up, this week has been a little farcical for many aspects of the web.

Digg Eats itself

Unless you have been sitting under a stone you can’t help but noticed that Digg community had a bit of a bad time last few days, you can read the full story on my own blog, though by far the best commentary is coming from Greywolf.
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