Monday, February 15, 2010
Please don’t let Buzz beat Twitter!! Twitter why are you not online?
Google are really pushing Buzz which by my experience is really difficult to deal with and no where as pretty to deal with - is that maybe discrimination against women cos it is well nerdy!!! - a useful legal point I think! Shouldn’t discriminate against women.
Anyway, Twitter is again down tonight! Not good enough!
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
SEO and Web Design Checklist VII - Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous Points
1. Use Analytics to track visits to your website particularly when running any advertising or promotion campain. See which promotion methods produce most visitors with lowest bounce rate, ideally less than 50%.
Monitor which pages are landed on and which page most visitors leave from. Do they leave your site from that page because they have lost interest or is the leaving page the order page. If it is the order page are you getting a corresponding number of orders or are people leaving your site at this stage because this page is too complicated or confusing and they are leaving because it is too difficult for them to complete their purchase.
Check what search terms in search engines bring most visitors to your website, do you ned to increase your website optimisation to include more similar phrases to those search terms or alternatively is this a search term that is not relevant to your website’s contents so do you need to re-write the website content to include more appropriate phrases.
2. Check that you have not over-used your keywords and phrases, ideally they should form 3-9% of the page content.
3. Do not buy or sell links.
4. Do not Spam by leaving links in forums inappropriately or leaving spam links as comments on blogs etc as spam software will classify your IP as a source of spam and your website’s performance will be affected.
5. Do not have your website set up so that the search engines are fed one page but visitors see another, this is called Cloaking and will result in penalties.
6. Check regularly in Webmaster Tools to see what the Googlebot sees, this will ensure you will spot any hacking of your website. Some hackers insert code so that although visitors see your normal webpage, search engines are directed off elsewhere. If you find malware remove it.
7. If you have hidden text on your website it will be penalised - don’t do it.
8. If you are setting up some online directory listings for your business do not just copy some of the text off your website as duplicate content can cause problems in search engine results as Google’s algorithm trys to ensure that the search results are unique and relevant so that searchers are not confronted with a list of pages that essentially all have the same content. Consequently you could find your website dropped from the search results in favour of them showing the directory listing.
9. Make sure you register your domain with Google Webmaster Tools.
10. Submit your website’s sitemap to Webmaster Tools every time you change your website’s structure.
11. Set up 301 redirects every time you change a page’s url or the domain on which your website is hosted.
12. If you have regularly changing content on a blog or ordinary website set up an RSS feed and use Feedburner to notify Google etc when new posts are added and set up automatic updates to twitter etc to ensure your new items come up in real-time search.
SEO and Web Design Checklist VI - Backlinks
Backlinks ie other websites mentioning and linking to your website are important as they indicate in general terms to the search engines how popular your website is, however it is not quite as simple as that and you do need to be careful about who is linking to you. Obviously you do not have control over which websites link to you but there are some simple thigs you can do to keep a check on your backlinks. The most obvious way to ensure good quality links to your website is to write good quality updated content ensuring that you do not use words or phrases that indicate spammy or bad subjects or websites.
One easy way to keep a check on which websites are mentioning or linking to you is to set up Google alerts for your company name and domain address. The other is to regularly check the backlinks listed in Webmaster Tools.
1. Look at the quality and Relevancy of websites linking to your website paying attention too to the content of the page that the link is on. If these websites have absolutely no relevancy to your website consider emailing the webmaster to ask for the link to be removed. You cannot oblige them to do this but it is worth asking.
2. Backlinks from websites on servers different to your own website host are more valuable, you want a variety if IP addresses linking to your website.
3. Try and ensure that there is some diversity in the links to your website, if most of your incoming links are from social networking websites try and find another source of links, maybe by submitting articles to article directories or respected blogs for your industry.
4. Look at the anchor text used for the inbound links and ensure that the link text includes the keywords and phrases that you are wanting to target. If the anchor text for a particular link is not what you want again try emailing the webmaster to ask for it to be changed if possible.
5. Try and gain links from different TLDs eg .gov, .com, .co.uk,
6. Obtaining high authority links for example from BBC, CNN etc is particularly valuable.
7. Try and make sure you do not have backlinks from bad neighborhoods eg malware, spam or inappropriate content websites.
8. Reciprocal links are of little value, however if you do participate in this try and ensure that your link is not just listed on a page but forms part of a paragraph of text relevant to your business.
9. Check the speed of adding backlinks to your website, a sudden increase of say a hundred links every few days will flag your site as buying links in and your website will be penalised in searches. Try to increase inbound links at no more than 30 or so a week. If there is a sudden increase in the inbound links to your website check where those links are coming from, this can easily be done in Google Webmaster Tools.
10. If you can get mentions and links in Wikipedia and Dmoz these can be very valuable.
11. Check the location of an incoming link, links in the footer or navigation of a web page have less authority than a link within a relevant paragraph within the body text.
12. Check the alt attributes of images linking in to your website by looking at the source code for the web page linking to you. If this alt attribute does not include keywords for your business then consider emailing the webmaster to ask for it to be changed.
Website Speed and Admin Pages
If you have been monitoring your website’s load speed under Webmaster Tools you may well have seen that the slowest page is your admin or login pages. However these pages are not relevant to normal visitors if this admin page is simply for you to edit the website content. As the times for loading these pages can be quite high we justifiably are concerned that having the load time for admin pages included in the calculation for load speed will adversely affect our performance in search results following Google’s announcement that website load speed will become increasingly important. Naturally I assumed that Google would be excluding these pages from their calculation however not so! I found a recent thread in the Webmaster Central Forum where a Google employee confirmed that even if you have excluded pages using your robots.txt file, it will still be included in the page speed assessment. This really is not fair as these pages have no impact on the visitors viewing experience and so websites with admin login for editing should not be penalised in this way. See below the answer given;
12/22/09
Is there any way to exclude part of the website being counted toward stats in the Site Performance?
I have a self-hosted Wordpress blog and it appears what the admin section of my blog is the slowest part of the website (9 of 10 pages in “Example pages” are related to Admin section), however I am the only person who loads those pages.
I am very interested to know the stats for the rest of the website, which my visitors are exposed to.
Is there any way to exclude Admin part stats being counted towards the Site Performance?A Google Employee on 12/23/09
Susan Moskwa (Google Employee)
Paraphrasing a response from another thread: “Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to exclude them from the display at the moment. In the future, we might consider removing roboted-out URLs, so if you robot the admin pages out (in addition to password protecting them), that will be the correct and sufficient.”
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Browser Safe Fonts in CSS
When we design our web sites one thing that we make sure of is that it will look correct in everyone’s browsers on both PC’s and Mac’s. It is crucial that a font is chosen for the webpage that is present on everybody’s computer otherwise the browser will automatically substitute it for one of its own and the whole look of the site could be lost.
Using CSS style sheets, we specify the font-family to use for the web page (or portion of) with a list of (similar) fonts to use:
font-family: font1, font2, font3, generic;
If ‘font1’ is not present then ‘font2’ is used. If ‘font2’ is not present then ‘font3’ is used. If ‘font3’ is not present then a browser generic font is used.
There are four generic styles of font: sans-serif, serif, cursive and monospace. This gives the browser safe fonts as follows:
Sans-Serif:
font-family: “Arial”, “Helvetica”, sans-serif;
font-family: “Arial Black”, “Gadget”, sans-serif;
font-family: “Impact”, “Charcoal”, sans-serif;
font-family: “Lucida Sans Unicode”, “Lucida Grande”, sans-serif;
font-family: “Tahoma”, “Geneva”, sans-serif;
font-family: “Trebuchet MS”, “Helvetica”, sans-serif;
font-family: “Verdana”, “Geneva”, sans-serif;
font-family: “MS Sans Serif”, “Geneva”, sans-serif;
Serif:
font-family: “Georgia”, serif;
font-family: “Palatino Linotype”, “Book Antiqua”, “Palatino”, serif;
font-family: “Times New Roman”, “Times”, serif;
font-family: “MS Serif”, “New York”, serif;
Cursive:
font-family: “Comic Sans MS”, cursive;
Monospace:
font-family: “Courier New”, “Courier”, monospace;
font-family: “Lucida Console”, “Monaco”, monospace;
You can simply copy a line above and paste into your own style sheet.
Web Development and Code Resources and Reference
Here are the main resources that we use in our web development:
Web Development Resources
HTML 4.01 Specification
Title: HTML 4.01 - HyperText Markup Language Specification
URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
XTML 1.0 Specification
Title: XHTM 1.0 - The Extensible HyperText Markup Language Specification
URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
CSS 2.1 Specification
Title: Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification
URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
PHP Function Reference
URL: http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/funcref.php
Zeus Web Server 4.3 User Guide
URL: http://support.zeus.com/zws/media/docs/4.3/ZWSUserGuide.pdf
Writing Robots.txt Files
Restricting Search Engine Indexing using ‘robots.txt’ File
Search engines determine which pages of your website to index by looking in the ‘robots.txt’ file residing in the root folder on your website.
To make changes to this file, firstly get the file either via FTP or a File Manager type program provided by your domain host. Then, after making a backup of the file, edit it in a text editor such as Notepad. If the file doesn’t exist yet in your root web folder, then you can just create a new file in your text editor and then save it as ‘robots.txt’.
There are a number of options (called directives) to allow and disallow certain robots from crawling your site but in most cases you just want to allow all the robots to have a look at your site. So the first line of your ‘robots.txt’ file should be the directive:
User-agent: *
The * says that the rules that follow apply to all robots.
Then, in your file, you list the folders and files (one per line) that you don’t want the robots to crawl (don’t leave any blank lines in the file), giving:
User-agent: * Disallow: /keep-out/ Disallow: /no-entry/ Disallow: /come-in-here/but-not-in-here/ Disallow: /a-folder/private.htm
The robots will not crawl the contents of ‘/keep-out/’, ‘/no-entry/’, ‘/come-in-here/but-not-in-here/’ (or any files or folders within these), and will not look at the file ‘/a-folder/private.htm’. The robots will, however, crawl the root directory, ‘/come-in-here/’, and ‘/a-folder/’ plus any other folders that exist.
This above example is generally all you need. There is another directive called ‘Allow’ that you can use to allow the robots to crawl certain folders and files that are contained within ‘Disallowed’ folders. This directive is not supported by all search engines and so is best avoided if possible. But if you had the following file ‘/no-entry/look-at-me.pdf’ that you did want indexed then the above example can be changed to:
User-agent: * Disallow: /keep-out/ Allow: /no-entry/look-at-me.pdf Disallow: /no-entry/ Disallow: /come-in-here/but-not-in-here/ Disallow: /a-folder/private.htm
Note that it is very important that the Allow directive occurs before the Disallow directive for the folder in question (‘/no-entry/’ in this case) as most search engines go through the ‘robots.txt’ file from top to bottom until a match is found.
Finally, if you didn’t want your site to be indexed at all then your ‘robots.txt’ file would be:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
Once you are happy with the changes, save the file and upload it to the root of your web site.
Redirecting On a Zeus Server
Zeus Page Redirects
When you move a page on your website you will want both the users and the search engines to know where it has moved to and be redirected there automatically. This is vital if you, firstly, don’t want users to get the annoying ‘Page Not Found’ error message from a page they’d previously bookmarked or clicked on in Google and, secondly, for keeping hold of the search engine page rank for the page that you’d spent ages building up.
There are a number of methods available for doing a redirect (such as using META redirects) but the only truly search engine friendly way is to add some lines to your .htaccess file in the root of your web folder.
Firstly get the .htaccess file either via FTP or a File Manager type program provided by your domain host. Then, after making a backup of the file, edit it in a text editor such as notepad. If the file doesn’t exist yet in your root web folder, then you can just create a new file in your text editor and then save it as .htaccess.
At the end of the .htaccess file you will need to add a line for each file/folder you want to redirect in the form:
redirect permanent old-url-path[*] new-url
Each parameter is separated by a space (spacebar) character, where:
‘redirect’ is an instruction that a page has moved.
‘permanent’ implies that the page has been permanently moved. There are other options but this is the only one that keeps hold of your page rank.
‘old-url-path[*]’ is the old path to where the page used to be (The * is an optional wildcard).
‘new-url’ is the absolute url to the new page.
Note the ‘new-url’ can be the path from the root of your web site (eg /folder/file.txt) but to be completely reliable you should include the domain also (eg http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/folder/file.txt) – this can be just copied from your browser address bar.
Here are some examples:
Page Moved
You’ve renamed your page in the root folder from ‘old_file.htm’ to ‘new_file.htm’:
redirect permanent /old_file.htm http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/new_file.htm
You’ve moved your page ‘file.php’ from the ‘subpages’ directory to the root directory:
redirect permanent /subpages/file.php http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/file.php
You’ve spaces in the original page name ‘old file with spaces.txt’, so you need to put it in double quotes:
redirect permanent "/folder/old file with spaces.txt" http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/folder/new_file.txt
Folder Moved
You’ve renamed a folder from ‘old_folder’ to ‘new_folder’ and the files are the same within:
redirect permanent /old_folder http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/new_folder
Domain Moved
You’ve moved all your pages, files and folders from www.old_domain.co.uk to www.new_domain.co.uk , in the .htaccess file on the old domain:
redirect permanent / http://www.new_domain.co.uk
Multiple Pages to Single Page
You want all pages on your domain to redirect to the home page:
redirect permanent /* http://www.yourdomain.co.uk
You want all pages in ‘folder1’ to go to a single page ‘page.htm’:
redirect permanent /folder1/* http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/page.htm
You want all folders starting with ‘folder’ (eg ‘folder’, ‘folder1’, ‘folder2’, ‘folder345’) to redirect to ‘new_folder’:
redirect permanent /folder* http://yourdomain.co.uk/new_folder
Once you are happy with the changes, save the file and upload it to the root of your web site. Test thoroughly the changes by typing the old web address into your browser and making sure it redirects to your new page.
NB. Zeus servers are different to Apache however in that they cannot deal with redirects where the path name, that you are wanting to direct, contains file.php or file.html etc. ie if you try and set up the folder to page redirect as shown above but with a file name in it it will not work.
redirect permanent /index.php/folder1/* http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/page.htmwill not work.
We have searched the internet but cannot find the answer to this. If you know how to achieve this on a Zeus server please let us know.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Redirecting non-www to www on Zeus Servers
Duplicate content is a problem that can penalise your search engine ranking. If your domain is present at both ‘http://yourdomain.co.uk’ and ‘http://www.yourdomain.co.uk’ then a duplication exists. This can cause dilution of the benefit of links to your website as some websites may link to the non-www and some to the www domain. A redirection needs to be set up to redirect the non-www domain to the www version. Although there are plenty of instructions on the internet as to how to achieve this on Apache servers there is very little information relating to Zeus servers.
Here is how you redirect a non-www domain to the www version on a Zeus server.
Firstly, you need to create a text document (Notepad will do) and put the following code into it…
match IN:Host into $ with ^yourdomain\.co\.uk$
if matched then
set Response = 301
set OUT:Location = http://www.yourdomain.co.uk%{URL}
set OUT:Content-Type = text/html
set Body = Go <a ref="http://www.yourdomain.co.uk%{URL}">here</a> instead.
endif
NB Replace ‘yourdomain’ with your website domain name (in 3 different places above) noting that on the first line each ‘dot’ in your domain name needs to be preceded with a back-slash.
Save this file as ‘rewrite.script’. Once saved, the file needs to be uploaded to your website in the ‘root’ directory either by FTP or other file manager interface provided by your website hosting company (refer to your ISP for details).
Now, when you type in ‘yourdomain.co.uk’ into your browser, you will automatically be redirected to ‘www.yourdomain.co.uk’ and so will the search engines.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Google Webmaster Central Quiz
Google have now released the answers to their quiz. It is a useful list which you can read here.
The answers aren’t always much use without the questions so find these here. however note that this quiz is now closed.
The answers to the webmaster quiz form a useful checklist covering many different areas associated with web design.
