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May 19th, 2009UncategorizedSEO refers to the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via natural or organic search results. Whether your website gets very little or massive amount of traffic depends a great deal on how much effort you have put in to optimize your website for SEO. In this article, I will describe some SEO on-page optimization factors in which you can very quickly make on your site to improve your search engine ranking. This will give you a boost to your home business ideas you promote in your website and start to make money now.
Keywords Meta Tag
It would do you good if you keep your keywords and phrases not exceedingly long, perhaps not more than a dozen. A mistake some marketers make is putting popular keywords here but why would people want to do that. Would you put a popular keyword like diet if you are promoting home business ideas? The tip here is to use keywords that are actually found in your website content. In reality, a lot of search engines ignore keywords meta tag and some marketers remove this tag completely and focus just on the content page. for more details visit to www.offline-promotion.com. But there is really no harm putting them, as there are many search engines which still index this tag. You also do not know when search engines change their strategies.
Write Unique Content
You’ve heard of the saying “Content is King”. If you consistently write good content and update it regularly, chances are, you will have more people visiting your site and looking at your interesting home business ideas. If you own a blog, always write not only unique content but update it regularly too.
Using Keywords In The Headline
Document title is what users see at the top of the browser. It is very important to put most of your main keywords in here. It would also help to remove any prepositions like “and” and substitute them with a “|” key. I would also go as far as to say, besides the content of the document such as your article, the title is the second most important factor which determines your SEO ranking.
Using Keyword Phrases
Don’t focus on single keyword but rather keyword phrases. There are five million pages on the web that contain the word “cat”, so a search for just that term produces meaningless results. If your page is actually about cat care, then that’s the keyword phrase you want to have on your home business ideas page. Similarly, make money and make money now produce very different results too.
Make Use of alt image tags
Include an image tag on every image or graphic and put your relevant keywords there. An example would be “weight loss picture graphic” or “safe weight loss image” using both words of graphic or image so that search engines do not view them as spam.
Add header tags (h1 and h2)
Add one header tag (h1) and place our most important keyword there. The header tag should be as far towards the top of your home business ideas homepage. When Google reads a webpage, it views the text from the top left hand side of the page to the bottom right hand side of the page. So, it‘s best to place your (h1) header tag on the top left hand or top/middle portion of your page. You can think of an (h1) header tag as a title for whatever content you have on your page. Similarly put your secondary keywords in h2 header.
Page Optimization Is A Skill
When a user enters terms into a search engine, the engine starts to scan the web looking for those words. If the engine finds the words on a page, it will count how many times the words appear and also determine whether the words appear in conjunction or on their own. For more information logon to www.keyword-swipe.com .If the words are grouped together, it’s more likely that the page is a good result. So, how can you associate your page with certain keywords? It’s simple really. Put them on your page. Put the keywords in the title element, the headings, the file name, and the text of the home business ideas homepage.
Keywords In Domain Name
A website with keywords in the domain name often ranked higher. So if you have not chosen your domain name, you have a great opportunity now to take advantage of this well known secret.
SEO is the process of optimizing a website as to obtain a high rank in search engine results pages. Search engine positioning and increased traffic essentially comes down to 3 basic elements. Keyword and keyword phrase selection, search engine friendly SEO, and good off-page SEO which includes your backlink management and strategy. Additionally, writing and posting articles, press releases and even videos can substantially help SEO placement and ultimately making money now for your home business ideas.
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May 18th, 2009Uncategorized
The web is full of duplicate content. Search engines try to index and display the original or “canonical” version. Searchers only want to see one version in results. And site owners worry that if search engines find multiple versions of a page, their link credit will be diluted and they’ll lose ranking.
Today, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (links are to their separate announcements) have united to offer a way to reduce duplicate content clutter and make things easier for everyone. Webmasters rejoice! Worried about duplicate content on your site? Want to know what “canonical” means? Read on for more details.
Multiple URLs, one page
Duplicate content comes in different forms, but a major scenario is multiple URLs that point to the same page. This can come up for lots of reasons. An ecommerce site might allow various sort orders for a page (by lowest price, highest rated…), the marketing department might want tracking codes added to URLs for analytics. You could end up with 100 pages, but 10 URLs for each page. Suddenly search engines have to sort through 1,000 URLs.
This can be a problem for a couple of reasons.
- Less of the site may get crawled. Search engine crawlers use a limited amount of bandwidth on each site (based on numerous factors). If the crawler only is able to crawl 100 pages of your site in a single visit, you want it to be 100 unique pages, not 10 pages 10 times each.
- Each page may not get full link credit. If a page has 10 URLs that point to it, then other sites can link to it 10 different ways. One link to each URL dilutes the value the page could have if all 10 links pointed to a single URL.
Using the new canonical tag
Specify the canonical version using a tag in the head section of the page as follows:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>
That’s it!
- You can only use the tag on pages within a single site (subdomains and subfolders are fine).
- You can use relative or absolute links, but the search engines recommend absolute links.
This tag will operate in a similar way to a 301 redirect for all URLs that display the page with this tag.
- Links to all URLs will be consolidated to the one specified as canonical.
- Search engines will consider this URL a “strong hint” as to the one to crawl and index.
Canonical URL best practices
The search engines use this as a hint, not as a directive, (Google calls it a “suggestion that we honor strongly”) but are more likely to use it if the URLs use best practices, such as:
- The content rendered for each URL is very similar or exact
- The canonical URL is the shortest version
- The URL uses easy to understand parameter patterns (such as using ? and %)
Can this be abused by spammers? They might try, but Matt Cutts of Google told me that the same safeguards that prevent abuse by other methods (such as redirects) are in place here as well, and that Google reserves the right to take action on sites that are using the tag to manipulate search engines and violate search engine guidelines.
For instance, this tag will only work with very similar or identical content, so you can’t use it to send all of the link value from the less important pages of your site to the more important ones.
If tags conflict (such as pages point to each other as canonical, the URL specified as canonical redirects to a non-canonical version, or the page specified as canonical doesn’t exist), search engines will sort things out just as they do now, and will determine which URL they think is the best canonical version.
The tag in action
This tag will most often be useful in the case of multiple URLs pointing at the same page, but might also be used when multiple versions of a page exist. For instance, wikia.com is using the tag for previous revisions of a page. Both http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=4901&oldid=4819 and http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=5401&oldid=4901reference the latest version of the article (http://watchmen.wikia.com/wiki/Comedian%27s_badge) as the canonical.
The search engines stress that it’s still important to build good URL structure and also note that if you aren’t able to implement this tag, they’ll still keep the processes they have now to determine the canonical. For instance, at SMX West on Tuesday, Maile Ohye of Google explained how Google can detect patterns in URLs if they use standard parameters. For instance, with these URLs:
- http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike
- http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=evil
- http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=good
Maile explained that Google can detect (particularly when looking at patterns across the site) that the sort parameter may order the page differently, but that the URLs with the sort parameter display the same content as the shorter URL (http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike).
While it’s rare for the search engines to join forces, this isn’t the first time they’ve come together on a standard. In November 2006, they came together to support sitemaps.org. And in June 2008 they announced a standard set of robots.txt directives. Matt Cutts of Google and Nathan Buggia of Microsoft told me that they want to help reduce the clutter on the web, and make things easier for searchers as well as site owners.
This new tag won’t completely solve duplicate issues on the web, but it should help make things quite a bit easier particuarly for ecommerce sites, who likely need all the help they can get in the current economic conditions. Site owners have been asking for help with these issues for a really long time so this should be a greatly welcomed addition.
In PHP 5 you can make your life a lot easier by writing an autoload function. This function will automatically load your classes, so you do not need to repeatedly include classes on every page.
It is best to create an autoload function in a file that is included on every page. Typically when I develop a site I like to have a configuration file that I include on every page which does database connections and other site wide operations, so I’ll put mine in there.
function __autoload($class) {
require_once ‘classes/’.$class . ‘.php’;
}
What the above function will do is run whenever you create a new object and attempt to include the class file for you, on the fly! So now whenever I need to create a new object I just need to do the following, and the class file will be included for me.
$news = new News();
You can expand this function to be a little more intelligent. Firstly by checking that the class file exists, and secondly you may have more than one directory holding class files. This can be done like so:
function __autoload($class) {
$classpath = ‘classes/’.$class . ‘.php’;
if ( file_exists($classpath) {
require_once $classpath;
}
$classpath = ‘libs/’.$class . ‘.php’;
if ( file_exists($classpath) {
require_once $classpath;
}
There are some occasions where you would want to export your site’s information in CSV or similar text format. You might want to do this so you can view reports in a spreadsheet, or you might want an export of your product information to upload to a service like Google Products. Either way the method and end result are essentially the same.
First lets think about what steps need to occur to get our end result. First, we need to get our information from the database. Then we need to put that information in the correct format. Finally we want to save the result as a file with a “.csv” or “.txt” extension.
Getting our information from the database
I will presume readers will know how to create the database connection itself so I won’t dwell on it here. In our example I am querying a ‘products’ table from an online store ready to create a product feed.
$db = new mysqli(’localhost’, ‘root’, ‘password’, ‘database’);
$result = $db->query(”SELECT * FROM products”);
while ( $record = $result->fetch_assoc() ) {
}
The code above is a pretty simple SELECT statement and a while loop through the results.
Putting our information in the correct format
Now we have our query sorted and looping through the results, we need to start creating the contents of our file. At the very top of the CSV file we might want to include column headings, so before our loop through the query results let’s create the first line of our file.
$file = “Product ID,Product Name,Description,Image,Price,Stock\r\n”;
Next, in our loop we’ll start adding rows to the file, including each product’s information.
while ( $record = $result->fetch_assoc() ) {
$file .= $record['id'].’,’.$record['name'].’,’.$record['description'].’,’
.$record['image'].’,’.$record['price'].’,’.$record['stock'].”\r\n”;
}
You might be wondering what the “\r\n” is, this is formatting that will create a new line in the file. You can only use these in double quotes in PHP.
Save the file
Now we should have a variable called $file that contains all the contents of our CSV file ready to be saved. We can do this like so:
header(”Content-type: application/csv”);
header(”Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”.date(’dmY’).”_csvfile.csv”);
echo $file;
This will cause the page to prompt the user to download our file when it is opened in a browser. You can call the filename whatever you like, in this example I have included a date for reference.
Xenu Sleuth is one of the most important open source tools in web development and search engine optimization. Xenu Sleuth performs the task of crawling and checking links in a domain just as other bots such as Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp do.
Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI) has released data showing the level of multitasking taking place when people watch television - specifically how much they are watching TV and surfing the ‘net at the same time.
During weeknight television viewing (Sunday-Thursday)…
- Viewers spent an average of 9.3 percent of primetime viewing minutes also online
- The breakdown between cable and broadcast television was 8.2 percent and 11.0 percent, respectively
- Time spent watching broadcast television while surfing the Web more than doubles as the week progresses
- 5.8% of primetime media minutes are also spent concurrently on the web on Monday, the low for the week, while Thursday is the highets at 15.9%
“This trend of going online while watching primetime television represents a significant opportunity for advertisers who want to target viewers with a message to visit content online,” said Matt Reid, director of strategic initiatives for Integrated Media Measurement Inc. “The landscape is moving at a steady pace from multiplatform advertising to simultaneous multiplatform advertising.”
AutoTrader.com is announcing the launch of AutoTrader Acccess, a new online advertising network designed to help advertisers reach in-market buyers. AutoTrader.com sees 15 million unique visitors a year. Their new Acces network can target buers by demographic, behavioral, and geographic characteristics. Access will aggregate a portfolio of sites which gives advertisers the ability to make one media buy across multiple publishers.
“As one of the top sites for in-market car buyers, AutoTrader.com’s visitors — who spend an average of 30 minutes a month on our site — are a highly engaged, attractive audience for companies trying to influence car purchase decisions,” said Anne Steinhauer, AutoTrader.com vice president of national accounts. “By creating this network, AutoTrader.com can efficiently deliver our own highly engaged audience and, through the network, the highly targeted audiences that our advertisers also want to reach.”
Has Google banned porn advertising or has the adult industry just found that they cannot make money using Adwords anymore?
I was doing a search for googleporn.com - a domain they happen to own - and hello.com that was once a site that contained a lot of adult material also owned by Google - but is now offline.
When there used to be numerous advertisers, it seems as if the ones left are fringe sites that may not even be making money from the ads. Gone are the major companies that used to pull great ROI from Google ads.
Google has had problems with porn content in the past. Okrut and Picasa have both come under fire and had legal problems.
It has been panned by site owners, but Digg are sticking to their DiggBar. This means we have to add workarounds to break out of their URL-stealing frameset.
Thankfully, this problem was fixed back in the 1990’s, the last time spammy sites tried to do this. Lots of code is out there but here are the two best approaches …
Digg obviously love their frameset because it inflates their traffic figures. Whereas before they would send hundreds of thousands of page views to linked sites directly, now it appears as one more click in their stats.
But these people are not looking at content at Digg.com, they are looking at your content.
- They might not realize, because the URL still says Digg.
- They can’t bookmark, because the URL still says Digg.
- They can’t copy and paste the URL into an email, because the URL still says Digg.
- and on top of all that, you don’t get the full Google-friendly link benefit that your site deserves.
Funny, up until now it has been the old media that has had this abusive relationship with new media content producers. Digg just raised the game to new levels.
Now just for balance, Digg does not owe us anything, it is their site, and many people do lust after the traffic Digg sends, toolbar or no toolbar.
Fact though is most sites will never get to the front page where the real traffic comes because despite what the people who run Digg say, it’s not really all that democratic. In fact the big-media owned Reddit is far more democratic for the average user.
So it’s up to you what you do, but if you find your site trapped in the DiggBar, two bloggers have solutions for you:
- Use Javascript to remove the frames, ala BloggingTips
- Use referrer to supply a targeted message, ala DaringFireball
Via an email to affiliates, Amazon.com announced they are scaling back their associates program in North America by disallowing direct linking from paid search results:
After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you’re not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.
As of May 1, 2009, Associates will not be paid referral fees for paid search traffic. Also, in connection with this change, as of May 1, 2009, Amazon will no longer make data feeds available to Associates for the purpose of sending users to the Amazon websites in the US or Canada via paid search.
As the paid search market has matured and competitive research tools have improved the value of using affiliates for discovering new keywords has been sharply reduced. Other merchants will follow Amazon’s lead. Some might wait for the economy to pick up first, but the fact that Amazon is trimming this in a down market (recession/possible depression) shows how little they feel they benefit from affiliate arbitrage of paid search results.