1. Optimize your meta tags. Pick a blog title and stick with it, but update your meta description and meta keywords to provide primary and supportive keywords. When using keywords, don’t list the plural or past tense of words — search engines don’t differentiate. Also, give those meta tags a boost by using the same keywords in heading tags and image attributes.
2. When it comes to inbound links, focus on quality rather than quantity. Inbound links from two PR3 or PR4 blogs can mean a lot more than inbound links from ten PR1 or PR2 blogs.
3. Don’t neglect your attributes. And by attributes I mean the “alt” and “title” tags you can add to links and images. On a related note, give images and other files file names that contain your keywords.
4. Keep your content fresh. Aim to update your blog at least three times per (7-day) week in order to maintain optimal blog freshness.
5. Be a special snowflake. When it comes to Google, the more unique you can be, the more highly the search engine giant will think of you!

Escape codes are special entities that allow you to post raw HTML and XHTML within webpages. Because HTML is used to construct and display webpages, many characters are reserved, which means that they cannot be used and will not be displayed within browsers. These characters include left and right angle brackets and other significant markup characters.

So what do you do if you want to show off some HTML? Use escape codes, of course!

Here is a list of a few popular ones:

Copyright symbol (©): ©

Registered symbol (®): ®

Trademark symbol (™): ™

Left angle bracket (<): &lt;

Right angle bracket (>): &gt;

Ampersand (&): &amp;

For more escape codes, check out EscapeCodes.info!

The favicon (favorites icon) is a small but appreciated and delightful detail to add onto any website. A favicon is generally 16 x 16 or 32 x 32, and it appears on the far left of the address bar when the website is being viewed. It may also be saved & displayed along with the site’s title (or bookmark’s name) within a browser. I use favicons for all of my websites, and you should too!

To make a favicon, simply create a 16 x 16 or 32 x 32 image in your graphics program. Save it as a transparent .gif (transparency is recommended because some browsers use colored themes or color schemes, and thus the backdrop to a favicon may not be white) (you can choose .jpg or .png, but .gif is recommended because it is universal and can be processed by all browsers and operating systems), upload it to your server, and add it to your website by inserting the following code before your tag:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.domain.com/path_to_your_favicon.gif" type="image/x-icon" />