How do you make a webpage that stands out from the crowd, drives and converts traffic and helps to boost your Google PageRank (PR)? It seems like there is so much to consider: SEO, page speed, internal links, backlinks... and the list goes on.

There are three main aspects to building a webpage that turns your site into an Internet marketing machine:

Up until recently it has been necessary to use images to create cool page shadow and page curl effects. Not anymore. design-a-webpage.com demonstrates how a super cool page curl shadow can be created using efficient and clean CSS3.

Being able to use CSS3 is a huge advantage over images because there is a massive difference in data size. Instead of transferring images (some of which would need to be quite large) you can now simply write a CSS3 gradient declaration to do the same job.

Social integration is a critical part of any blog's Internet marketing strategy. Social sharing combined with SEO enhanced, targeted and relevant content can help drive huge volumes of traffic through your blog.

It also has a tremendously positive effect on your PageRank and position in organic search, helping you to place high up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). this is because social sharing drastically increases your reach and therefore the likelihood of people quoting your content or back-linking. Quality back-links are a key component in the PageRank calculations.

I've always been a staunch proponent of inbound marketing - in particular, I think creating genuinely useful, highly-relevant, SEO enhanced content can, in the long run, benefit pretty much any type of online endeavor you can imagine.

I also need to make it clear that this particular article focuses on a benefit of SEO that might take some time to develop - it won't happen overnight. It also relies heavily on having a good web platform. By "good", I mean flexible and powerful. Something like Drupal, as opposed to more cookie cutter type websites that, while easier to set up, are not as flexible or easy to modify.

There's a been a lot of talk recently about the propensity for bloggers, marketers, business owners and everyone else, buying into the hype about this or that. Currently, the "big thing" is social media, and businesses are forking out big bucks to follow the crowd... quite literally.

Peter Shankman highlighted this point in his excellent article entitled Why I Will Never, Ever Hire A "Social Media Expert". In it, he makes the point that just because something is currently all the rage doesn't make it "right" for you or your business.

Linkdoozer's mission is to create a stimulating and engaging environment that allows people to discover suitable websites and webpages based on their interests. By providing exciting and diverse content, linkdoozer can help readers make genuinely good browsing decisions. Because its directory focusses on quality websites of great value and interest and not volume, readers can enjoy the process of discovery knowing that they are only exposed to high quality websites.

Urban challenge (www.urbanchallenge.co.za) wanted a snappy, energetic website that could help to promote their business and manage it at the same time. Managing a stable of classes takes no small amount of organizational prowess, but a lot of the work is a great candidate for automation and this can seriously streamline the business and make it super competitive.

While Drupal is, on aggregate, one of the best web platforms around, there's always room for improvement. Drupal 6 has one fairly important failing when it comes to files and file handling. During site configuration you are required to decide whether or not files are downloadable directly by the public or whether Drupal should maintain control of the downloads. This is/was a fairly inflexible system and one that led to further problems down the line...

At some stage almost everyone running a website based on Drupal will find that they want to add a view somewhere on the site where it can't easily be done. Most often, views can be added to blocks to accompany content types or pages and the block visibility rules can be used to tweak who gets to see the view and when. Views can easily be added to panel pages, and most have their own dedicated page anyway. Despite all this, you might still need to know how to add a view manually...

Being able to accurately control the size and dimensions of images is vital for any modern website. Nowdays, different media types are commonplace because broadband has become ubiquitous. Because of this, websites have the opportunity to show off far superior and more interesting pages to the average visitor. But being able to handle images on the fly is not something that is necessarily too easy to do - unless you have a well designed web platform.