Posts Tagged ‘site popularization’

Beginner`s Guide to Web Hosting

September 22nd, 2009

Not too long ago, I was a newcomer to the web hosting, and I can clearly recall the utter confusion and frustration I felt at how inaccessible the whole process seemed. With all of the options available in the web hosting industry these days, it is understandable that hosting newcomers often find themselves feeling lost and confused. Before you decide to give up, however, it is important to understand that web hosting is not an inherantly difficult venture, but actually a quite easy one, and in that sections we at Host-ed.net will provide you with the information you need to get your site up and running in no time!

Step One: Choosing a Domain Name
The first step in getting your web site ready for the web is selecting and registering a domain name. This name will serve as your online identity, and help your visitors remember what your site is about.

Step Two: Creating Your Website
Once you have successfully registered your domain name, the next step is to create your website to give it the look and feel you want. When coming up with a design for your website, it is extremely important to do a good deal of research to see what works for a website like yours, and what doesn`t. If you are a true beginner, you may want to consider hiring a design company to help you create your web pages. If you are on a tight budget we recommend you ready made template sites like freewebtemplates.com (free) and templatemonster.com (paid, but with better quality)

Step Three: Choosing Your Host
After you have finished your site, the next step is to choose a server for your site that makes the most sense for both your site and your budget. If you are reading this article you are most probably a beginner and would probably need to peak up from our shared hosting plans.

Step Four: Uploading Your Site
Once you have selected your plan of choice, the next step to getting your site up on the web is uploading your page, text, and image files to your server. With most sites, you will need to use an FTP program, which these days are relatively simple. The role of an FTP program is to upload your created web pages, text, and image files to your server. Once you have uploaded your files, your page files will then be served to users who enter your site. Some of the more popular programs are Cute FTP and Filezilla. Once you have successfully uploaded your files and pages to the web, your site will be up and running! Do not forget to update your domain name servers from your domain control panel. If you use our plan you have to adjust the name servers to ns1.host-ed.net and ns2.host-ed.net.

Step Five: Promoting Your Site
Ok, so now your site is up on the web, you can sit back and relax, browsing your beautifully crafted web pages, right? Wrong. Simply having a functional web site on the Internet is only the first step down the long and winding road to web success. In order to make sure your site enjoys the best chances of success, it is essential that you do your fair share of promotion. Before you go out and start passing out flyers or putting up billboards, make sure you register you site with the major search engines. For more information about web promotion and serarch engine optiomization vizit our SEO articles section.

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Posted in FAQ for beginners, General questions and answers

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How to write friendly URLs?

September 21st, 2009

Search engines always take into account the title text and keywords used in the URL of a web page while determining rankings of that page in search results. The influence may be small but keywords mentioned in the URL do carry some weight.

search title urls

For instance, if all other factors remain same, a web page at abc.com/iphone-review may rank higher for a search query “iPhone review” than, say, xyz.com/best-phone or xyz.com/apple-phone-review because of the keyword iPhone that’s present in the URL.

*Most blogging platforms allow you to write custom URLs (aka post slugs in WordPress). If you are on Blogger, read this hack on how to create your own permalinks.

Now if you’re keen to master the art of writing good URLs that are descriptive and search friendly but without getting into any black hat SEO tricks like keyword stuffing, follow the style of Matt Cutts. He generally uses descriptive titles for blog posts but his URLs are short, neatly written and use only relevant keywords. Some examples:

Title: I do not wish my screensaver to lock my computer, thank you.
URL: disable-screensaver-password

Title: Get your search fix with two videos
URL: free-search-seo-videos

Title:  Protect yourself: get a free credit report
URL: free-credit-report

Title: How to back up your Gmail on Linux in four easy steps
URL: backup-gmail-in-linux-with-getmail

Title: How to stop junk mail
URL: stop-junk-mail

Title: I love my pedometer
URL: best-pedometer

Title: Crap. My Ubuntu machine won’t boot
URL: ubuntu-freeze-no-resume-image

Title: What are the best iPhone applications?
URL: best-iphone-application

The above list is pretty self explanatory and may have given you a good idea but let’s just walk through the important points:

1. Search engines generally ignore common words like “the”, “a”, “are”, “is”, “of”, etc – your URLs will therefore do just fine without them.

2. Phrases like “How to do this” or “Which is the best” or “What are the options” or “When did this happen” make titles attractive but you need not put these words in the URL.

For instance, Matt is using the URL “best-iphone-application” for a page titled “What are the best iPhone Applications.” In another example, the url is “stop-junk-mail” for the article “How to Stop Junk Mail.”

3. If something important doesn’t fit in the page title, put it in the URL. For instance, the URL of a page titled “Get your search fix with two videos” is like “free-search-seo-video” – so you have two new words (”free” and “seo”) in the URL that were not in the title but do help in describing the underlying web page.

4. Use hyphens (or dashes) to separate keywords in URLs though Google can now also read underscores.

Google probably assigns some fixed weight to your URLs which gets distributed across different words used in that URL. Now the weight per keyword will obviously dilute when you have long URLs.

Therefore, it will help if you can manually create URLs with lesser number of keywords but they should also be relevant to the context of your content. It requires a little extra effort at the time of writing your blog post but the may reap good benefits in the long run.

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Posted in SEO

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Increase your blog rankings

September 10th, 2009

Optimize your Descriptions

Give each category a decent description, and use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field. After that, write a description for each post or page that you actually want to rank with. The descriptions has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what’s in the page they’re clicking towards, and that it gets their attention.

Automated descriptions
In my opinion, auto generating descriptions is a load of bull, most plugins pick the first sentence, which might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject, or another sentence with a keyword in it, which might be completely wrong to pick as description. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you’re thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet… If you don’t use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.

Auto generating a snippet is a “shortcut”, and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress) SEO (none that work anyway).

Optimize the More text

Another neat featuer of HeadSpace is that you can use it to optimize the more text, so if you use a more tag on the frontpage, you can replace the default “Read more” link with something meaningful for every post. It’s small things like that that make your WordPress SEO the best.

Image Optimization

An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is how you handle your images. By doing stuff like writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the files, you can get yourself a bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that, you’re helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what’s otherwise hidden to them.

You should of course be writing good titles and alt tags for each and every image, however, if you don’t have the time for that, there is a plugin that can help you. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images, and it can automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image’s alt and title tag:
SEO Friendly Images settings example” src=”http://netdna.yoast.com/uploads/2008/04/seo-friendly-images.png” alt=”SEO Friendly Images settings example” />

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Posted in SEO

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SEO Optimization for your WordPress Blog

September 9th, 2009

Breadcrumbs

You’ll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO“. They are good for two things:

  • They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
  • They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one. For that to work, adapt single.php and page.php in your theme, and use my breadcrumb plugin.

Headings

Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an <h1>, and nothing else. Your blog’s name should only be an <h1> on your frontpage, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an <h3>.

These are easy to edit in the post.php and page.php templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.

Clean up your code

All that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates clean, as they’re not doing your WordPress SEO any good. This makes sure your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don’t have to download them most of the time.

Aim for speed

A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do two things to increase the speed of your WordPress.

  1. Optimize the template to do as small an amount of database calls as necessary. I’ve highlighted how to do this in my post about speeding up WordPress.
  2. Install a caching plugin. I highly recommend WP-Super-Cache, which is a bit of work to set up, but that should make your blog an awful lot faster.

Also, be aware that underpaying for hosting, is not wise. If you actually want to succeed with your link-bait actions, and want your blog to sustain high loads, go for a good hosting package. I’ve recently switched to WestHost myself, and they’ve proven to be better than anything I’ve ever seen in hosting.

Rethink that Sidebar

Do you really need to link out to all your buddies in your blogroll site wide? Or is it perhaps wiser to just do that on your front page? Google and other search engines these days heavily discount site wide links, so you’re not really doing your friends any more favor by giving them that site wide link, nor are you helping yourself: you’re allowing your visitors to get out of your site everywhere, when you actually want them to browse around a bit.

The same goes for the search engines: on single post pages, these links aren’t necessarily related to the topic at hand, and thus aren’t helping you at all. Thus: get rid of them. There are probably more widgets like these that only make sense on the homepage, and others that you’d only want on sub pages.

Some day you will probably be able to change this from inside WordPress, right now it forces you to either use two sidebars, one on the homepage and one on sub pages, or write specific plugins.

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Posted in SEO

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Link building and SEO

September 8th, 2009

Link building is the most important thing you can do in SEO. Without links, your website will never gain authority and thus never move up in the search rankings. When people go out and get links, they just go get links. They think the more the better. But that is not really true. Yes, you want a lot of links to your site but you also want quality links to your site. For example,

If Site A links to Site B, Site B will out rank Site C. (Site B has 1 link while Site C has 0)

If Site A links to both sites, then a number of other factors like pagerank, domain age, content, and relevancy determine who ranks higher.

If Site A links to Site B and Site D links to Site C, who ranks higher when all links are equal? Whichever linking site has more links to it. If Site A has 2 links to it and Site D has 10, D is a stronger site so passes more authority to Site C which will rank higher.

Additionally, (stick with me here!) if Site B and Site C both have one link, the quality of that link then determines who ranks higher. Site B is linked to by the NYTs and Site C by me. Obviously the NYT is a higher quality site so its link “counts” more.

So not only does quantity matter but so does quality. So what makes a quality link? Here are important factors to consider when getting links.

Anchor Text of Links- When a web page gets linked with anchor text they are trying to rank for, it will help them to move up in Google’s rankings. However, you always want to vary your links. Why variation? Because if you have 100 links and all of them say the same thing, it looks like you are manipulating the search engines. Logic would say that an infinite number of unconnected people would use a variety of different anchor texts to link to your site.

Location on the Page- A contextual link in a post on the topic your link points is worth a lot more than a blogroll, sidebar, or footer link.

Topic Relevance of Linking Sites/Pages- If you’re trying to rank for “red widgets”, the ideal links from other sites that also talk about “red widgets” or “widgets” in general. Links from sites in your niche or the overall niche (i.e. travel) are what you want to go find. Links from non related sites don’t count nearly as much and have a lot weaker value. The further from your niche, the less the link will help you.
This rule also applies to pages linking to you.

Size of Your Site- Bigger sites are better resources. Would a site about travel with two pages cover as much as a site with 200 pages? Probably not. So the more pages you have on your site, the easier it will be to get pages to rank high on Google.

Domain Name Registration Length- This isn’t a big factor but it still is important. Google hates spammers. A spammer just wants to rank high quickly, make quick money, and then run. They don’t want to register domains for a long time because they know their sites will get banned so why waste the money? A legitimate site owner is in for the long haul. If you register your domains for 2 or more years, you’ll see a slight benefit.

Links aren’t always about quantity. Getting one quality link can be worth it’s weight in gold and sometimes enough to move you further up the rankings than a bunch of smaller links.

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10 SEO Rules

August 28th, 2009

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a vital component of any website. As a web designer or blogger, it’s important you understand how SEO works. Here are ten easy rules that will immediately improve the SEO on all of your web sites.

You may also be interested in how to get free advertising on google.

Rule Zero: Do Not Cheat. Period.

If you walked into a room full of genius scientists with PHDs, do you think you could outsmart them all? No. Google has hundreds of rooms full of genius scientists with PHDs, and their job is to work 60 hours a week to make sure you can’t fool Google. You can’t outsmart them. Ever. Ignore any advice on trying to cheat the system and focus on making great web sites with great content, and your sites will show up fine in searches.

Rule One: Stick to Your Keywords

Pick a few keywords or phrases that describe your site. Use them, and words related to them, whenever it’s natural to do so. Repeating them uselessly is no good (rule Zero), use them in sentences, headlines, and links.

Rule Two: Content is King

Users don’t search for design, they search for content. If your site doesn’t have content people want, no one will look at it.

Every page on your site should follow the Inverted Pyramid. Each page should lead with a relevant H1 tag with one of your keywords, and the first paragraph of text should be a summary of the rest of the page.

Rule Three: Clean Code is Searchable Code

Build your sites in a text editor, and write clean, human-readable HTML. The HTML should follow the conceptual structure of the page, navigation first, followed by the H1 tag, then the first paragraph, etc. Try to use descriptive tags when possible. Use UL for lists, P for paragraphs, H tags for heads and subheads, and STRONG for bolded text. Don’t overuse Divs.

Your site can still be artistic and cool, that’s what CSS is for.

Rule Four: The Home Page is the Most Important Page

Your home page is the key to your site being found by search engines. It should summarize the rest of the site, and give a clear, compelling reason for a user to look at the other pages in the site.

Rule Five: Links Have Meaning

Search engines pay a lot of attention to the links on your site, and the words used in those links. Never use “click here” or “see more” for a link. The link text should describe where the link will take the user, such as “more examples of CSS web design” or “learn how we can improve your SEO.”

The more relevant the links on a page, the more findable the page becomes. Don’t go overboard, and don’t link to anything irrelevant. If your page is focused on minimalist web design, a link to the Design MeltDown page on minimalism will boost your SEO. A link to a hilarious picture of a cat will not.

Rule Six: Title Tags for the Win

Every page in your site should have a title with the site name and a short description of the page. About 60 letters total. Include a keyword. Remember that the page title is what appears in search results, it should give users a clear reason to click on it.

Your navigation links should have title attributes that match the titles of your pages. This looks like <a title=”name of page” href=”link”>. It’s a small thing, but it will give you a significant SEO improvement.

Rule Seven: Alt Tags Matter

Every image on your site should have an alt tag. Especially images that are relevant to the page. If your page is focused on CSS tricks, labelling a screenshot “example of rounded CSS corners” will improve your page’s findability. Labelling it “screenshot” or “image” will do the opposite.

Rule Eight: Ignore Most Meta Tags

A long time ago meta tags were the secret to SEO. Those days are gone. The only meta tag that really matters now is the description tag. Search engines may use it to provide the text under the link to your page in their results. Make sure it describes the page in a way that explains why a user searching for your content would want to look at your page.

Rule Nine: Have a Site Map

Make sure you have a site map. This is an xml file that describes the structure of your page. Make one, and give it to Google.

Rule Ten: Design for Humans

Search engines are designed to find what humans want. That means the best way to make your site findable is to design it for humans. Your job as a designer is to solve a problem, not make art, prove a point, serve your ego or break a boundry. In this case, your problem is to provide your users with a site that is easy to use and full of what they’re looking for. If you can do that, the search engines will find you.

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