Check out this AP typo about potential John McCain VP candidate Joe Lieberman.

It is important for you to adhere to Google’s guidelines which will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you elect not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which will outline some of the “illegal” practices that could lead to your site being removed entirely from the Google index or being penalized in some other fashion much to the detriment of your organization.

• When you are ready to launch your site link your site to other sites within your industry, this will improve your page rank. The Alphabetix SEO team can help you do this with ease.

• Submit your Web site to Google at http:www.google.com/addurl.html

• Submit your Sitemap as part of Google’s Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to educate itself about the make-up of your site and to increase Google’s indexing of your web pages.

• Submit your site to all the major directories, especially the Open Directory Project and Yahoo! As well as other industry-specific sites that can link to your own thus increasing your page rank.

• Ensure all relevant sites that should know about your web pages are aware that your site has been launched.

Content and design rules

• Create your site to have a clearly defined order of importance as well as text links. Every page should be accessible from a minimum of one static link.

• Implement a site map to enable users with links to be directed to the key pages within your site. If your site map is more expansive than 100 links, break the site map into different pages.

• Build a useful, informative, robust site including pages that clearly articulate your content.

• Brainstorm about words that browsers would use in search fields in order to find your site, AND USE THESE KEYWORDS IN YOUR CONTENT. The Alphabetix SEO team can do this for you.

• Utilize text embedded within your content rather than images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawlers don’t recognize text contained as images, this will help increase our page ranking as well if done properly.

• Check for broken or degrading ineffective links.

• Take note that not all search engine spiders crawl dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short as well as their numbers.

• Keep the links to your pages to fewer than 100.

Technical rules

• Utilize a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much like Lynx would. If elaborate features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash prohibit you from seeing your complete site in a text browser, search engine spiders will encounter difficulty crawling your Web site.

• Permit search robots to crawl your Web site without session IDs or arguments that monitor their pathways throughout your site. These tricks are useful for monitoring individual user patterns, but the access pathways of robots is completely different. Using these tricks may result in incomplete indexing of your Web site, because bots might not have the ability to eliminate URLs that appear different but in fact direct towards the same page.

• Ensure your web server compliments the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has been modified since they last “crawled” your site. Utilizing this feature saves you money and bandwidth.

• Always utilize the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories have the ability to be crawled. Ensure its current for your site so that you don’t accidentally restrict a “Googlebot” crawler.

• Should your organization purchases a content management system (CMS) ensure that the system can export your content so that it is crawlable by search engine spiders.

Quality guidelines

The quality guidelines covered here are to protect you from making mistakes that will be interpreted as manipulative or deceptive behavior. Google will most likely penalize your site for deceptive behavior and practices such as misspelling well known websites and other such “dodgy” practices. Naughty! Naughty! Google has many practices which are prohibited and you should check Google’s proprietary Webmaster’s Guidelines page to see what is approved and what is punishable. Webmaster’s who adhere to the rules and play fair provide a much better user experience and enjoy a higher page ranking!

Quality guidelines and basic principles

• Design you Web pages primarily for browsers, not search engines. Don’t manipulate your browsers or present different content to search engines than you display to your browsers.

• Do not implement tricks intended to illegitimately improve search engine rankings. A good rule to go by is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining your fraudulent behavior to your competition.

• DO NOT take part in link schemes designed to improve your site’s ranking or PageRank, as your own rank may be affected adversely by those links.

• DO NOT use prohibited computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume bandwidth and violate Google’s Terms of Service.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

• DO NOT incorporate hidden links or text!

• DO NOT utilize misleading redirects or cloaking practices.

• DO NOT seed pages with irrelevant keywords.

• DO NOT design pages to be malicious, such as incorporating phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other prohibited programming…

Alphabetix will optimize your web site according to Google webmaster guidelines.

By Kurt Vonnegut

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful– ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won’t ramble on about that.

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

4. Have guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

6. Say what you mean

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify — whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

8. For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers

Palm Sunday (New York: Dial Press, 1999), 65-72.

That being said, it is a time honored tradition in the web design community to utilize these colors as a badge of expertise.  Great web designers can do wonders with a limited color palette.

So with so many new computers out in the universe, is the browser save color palette obsolete?

Either way, here they are in all their glory!

I am dating a very, very nice man. There’s just one problem: his language skills. He was not taught to speak properly. For example, he consistently uses the wrong verb tenses in speech and incorrect words such as “hisself” instead of “himself.”

I’m in my early 30s and reluctant to reject a good, kind man because of this seemingly small thing, but it is an increasing concern.

Although Amy gives the standard advice of using tolerance, it’s interesting to see that grammar does matter to people, and especially to people in relationships.

So think about how you speak.

It could cost you the love of your life.

List of Essentials

• Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
• Submissive to everything, open, listening
• Try never get drunk outside yr own house
• Be in love with yr life
• Something that you feel will find its own form
• Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
• Blow as deep as you want to blow
• Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
• The unspeakable visions of the individual
• No time for poetry but exactly what is
• Visionary tics shivering in the chest
• In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
• Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
• Like Proust be an old teahead of time
• Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
• The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
• Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
• Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
• Accept loss forever
• Believe in the holy contour of life
• Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
• Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
• Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
• No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
• Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
• Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
• In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
• Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
• You’re a Genius all the time
• Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

  As ever,
  Jack

Jack Kerouac “Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials” from a 1958 letter to Don Allen, in Heaven & Other Poems, copyright © 1958, 1977, 1983. Grey Fox Press.

This is a common typo that a spell checker will never find.