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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 2

ashish — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 08:23:27 +0000

In the previous post (Part 1), I had talked about what is SEO and why should a person use this for his / her blog. I also introduced a plugin called All-in-one-SEO which can get a person quickly introduced to doing some amount of Search Engine Optimization right out of the box.
Google has a set of tricks and techniques for doing SEO, and actually promotes using such techniques, with a certain amount of warning about not using techniques that can cause your blog harm. I recommend that you go through the following page and learn more about starting on this route (link to article). Here are some quick excerpts from the site that will show what all you can learn:

Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.
No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google
You should never have to link to an SEO
What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?
here are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It’s far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:
owns shadow domains
puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
offers to sell keywords in the address bar
doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google

Get the PDF about a starter guide for SEO from this link.

Quick Security Checklist for Webmasters – from the Google Blog

ashish — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:54:25 +0000

For many people, getting content onto a web page is the most important part of developing traffic and ensuring that you increase the chances of earning revenue. However, consider that you need to ensure that your page remains on the internet, and does not get hacked, something that is happening with a higher frequency nowadays. But what can do you ? Well, you can find out more, learn about the steps you can take to increase the security level of your site, and you can read the information at this Google Help Page (link to article)

Check your server configuration.
Stay up-to-date with the latest software updates and patches.
Regularly keep an eye on your log files.
Check your site for common vulnerabilities.
Be wary of third-party content providers.
Try a Google site: search to see what’s indexed.
Use Google’s Webmaster Tools.
Use secure protocols.

Some design guidelines from Webmaster Tools at Google

ashish — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:40:27 +0000

Making your website easy to use and fast are tips always recommended for ensuring that you site loads quickly and easily for your visitors. Avoiding rich and heavy stuff such as videos (when they are not necessary) is particularly important in this regard; this is also because your visitors may have a variety of different browsers, and on some of them, the site may not load up as you desire. I have seen cases where some fanciful designs have refused to render on Internet Explorer 6, but work on Firefox (and the opposite also holds true). Imagine that you have a very fascinating menu that appears when you move your mouse over a link, but have you stopped to consider whether this works for all your users. Further, keep in mind that the search engines index your site using a bot that is similar to a text based browser, and which ignores all fanciful work, ignores all graphics (unless they have an alt attribute mentioned), and so on. In many cases of course, if you are designing a site rich in multimedia such as the fan site of a rock group, or so on, you will need to have all these things in place. Getting visitors from search engines is incredibly important, you need to ensure that you do whatever is necessary so that the search engine indexes your site and all its pages.
One site that really helped in giving a huge number of tips for creating a faster site that is accessible to search engines is the tips page at Google Webmaster Tools (link to site):

Some tips from the site:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

There are a lot of tips on that site, explore and learn from there; these will help in making your page much better.

Using Yahoo! YSlow to analyze web pages for performance (and more tips)

ashish — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:18:22 +0000

Improving the speed of your pages is normally pretty critical. If your pages are slow to load, then people quickly switch over, and even viewers who find the information on your pages useful tend to hesitate to come to your page more often; as for casual viewers, you can be pretty sure that they will switch fast if they find your page taking a lot of time to load.
You can take a number of steps to improve the performance of your page, but before that, you should be spending time to determine how the performance of your page actually is. You can get some idea just by loading your page and comparing the loading times of other pages, and there are a number of other tools that can help you determine the performance of your page. Many of these tools also help in giving you more details about which sections of your page cause overall bad performance.
One tool that can help you evaluate the performance of your sites is called Yahoo! YSlow (link to page):
Details about the tool are below.
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.
Details about performance optimization at Yahoo Developer Tools (link)

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.
Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. Combining files is more challenging when the scripts and stylesheets vary from page to page, but making this part of your release process improves response times.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen.

The article above (link) contains a lot of details about how to increase performance, so make sure that you have read the page and evaluated which of these apply to you.

Instructions for creating a Facebook Fan Page

ashish — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:53:13 +0000

In previous posts, I had talked about the need to use Facebook as a blog promotion tool (link), as well as the benefits of having such a Fan Page (as opposed to using your own personal profile) (link). And in the last post, I had promised to detail the instructions for how to create a Fan Page of your own, along with screenshots. So let’s start on the journey:
1. You need to have a Facebook account of your own. If you don’t have one, then it is fairly easy to create one. Go to http://www.facebook.com and click on Sign Up.

2. Login into your Facebook profile, and click on this icon in the bottom left hand side.

3. Click on this link.This will launch a page where you see an interface for Pages and Ads. Click on the Pages link so that you can now create a new Page.

Then you need to click on the “+Create Page” link. This will open the interface for creating a new page.

4. Once you click on the button, you get to a page where you can select the category, such as whether this represents a local business, or an important personality, or some Brand or Organization. Select this option, and select Website under this category. Add the name of the page. Suppose you want to create a Fan Page for a website on health that you have. In my case, I do it for this site (http://www.good-health-tips.com/) and enter the name of ‘Information about health’. Then select the option of ‘Create Page’.

5. And your new Fan Page is created. One thing you should do is to click on the ‘Become a Fan’ button, as well as click on the ‘Settings’ button to enable Fans to also post to the page. And once you have created a Fan Page, you will need to take the next step of promoting your Fan Page, and setup a process for importing the contents of your blog. I will outline the steps for this in the next page.