Posts Tagged ‘people’

Search engine optimization-Quality Content

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

here are all kinds of link generating systems out there but in my opinion the best way to get links to your blog is to write quality content that people will want to read. You can solicit links with others or sign up for different link building programs or even buy text links on other sites but the cheapest and probably safest approach is to build inbound links in a natural organic way as others link to your quality content.

Search Engines vs Directories

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. Search engines crawl through the web. Search engines eventually find your site and index the pages they find. Page titles, body text (ie, great content), META tags and other elements all play a role in what gets indexed. People then review the results of what was found by the search engine, based on keywords they type into the search engine.

A directory such as Yahoo! Directory depends on human editors to create its listings. You submit a description of your site to the directory for editors to review. A good site, with good content, will be more likely to get reviewed than a poor site. A search of a directory looks for matches only in that directory’s index.

Yahoo! also has a search engine that includes spidered websites along with their directory listings and “Sponsor Results” which are pay per click ads, similar to Google’s Adwords. Originally Yahoo! displayed only listings from their directory. Then in 2002 they added search engine listings from Google. In 2004 they started using their own search engine based on AltaVista’s technology. A few years later they acquired Overture (formerly GoTo) which was the first pay per click program.

How can SEO can help an organization raise awareness?

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

People are looking for information, they use a variety of types of search such as Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask as the predominant channels. There’s also news search , blog search and search within social media sites. Any time something can be searched on, that’s an optimization opportunity. Increasing awareness comes from making it easier for people to find you when they’re looking for information.

ABOUT GMAIL-GOOGLE

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

<gmail.com>: Google’s attempt at free e-mail. Instead of the 2-6 MB of free space that Yahoo and Hotmail used to provide, Gmail gives you 2,600 MB (and growing) of space (this has already caused Hotmail and Yahoo to raise their amounts to 250 MB and more; AOL.com now gives you 2,000 MB free). I have been using it for 1.5 years and it’s terrific and fast. One caveat: Google runs small, text-ads on the side of the screen, based on content of your e-mail messages. That’s scary to a lot of people, though Google promises no human will ever see your messages, just those Google servers (remember, however, that all e-mail can potentially be scanned by various systems). I don’t use it as my primary e-mail. I use it in two ways, with two accounts. One is an account to which I send messages, photos, PDFs, I want to save for future access, including big messages that I don’t want taking up space in my regular inbox - kind of a “greatest hits” collection. The other is an account that get a copy of every e-mail message I get, so that it’s all backed up and available in one place.

Seo:Load Time

Monday, June 30th, 2008

It’s important to make sure that the web site loads as quickly as possible and that people can easily access all the pages. Waiting time should not exceed 30 seconds and links to other pages should be easily accessible. .

SEO:Tips on Search Engine Optimization for your web site

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Build quality links to your site pages from other well ranked sites on your target search engine.

Make sure you provide quality content that have something unique to offer and that have keywords or key phrases people might search to find your site.

Optimize you web site pages by making sure your top keywords appear in your title, meta tags and content.

If you sell products, give something away free (The word “free” is one of the top most searched words on the internet).

Keep a track of your listings/ranking in the top 10 search engines and analyze it periodically. Some tips on this:

Indexed Pages: To know which pages on your site are listed in the search engine and to see how they will appear to searchers type site:www.yourdomainname.extn in the search box, You might need to use host: instead for some of the search engines.

Link Popularity: To keep a track of sites that link to you (and also see their page rank), type link:www.yourdomainname.extn in the search box,You might need to use url: instead for some of the search engines.

PHP:Useful in-browser development tools for PHP

Monday, June 30th, 2008

While debuggers exists, there isn’t much of a tradition for using them in PHP. People have largely come to rely on injecting debugging code directly into the program, for inspecting program scope. The infamous var_dump have served for this purpose and version 4.3.0 of PHP brought us another equally useful function — debug_backtrace.

Tracers and error handlers
Both of these functions produce a rather crude output though, so naturally people have written wrappers around them to remedy this. I think Harry’s pretty bluescreen was one of the first dedicated libraries I’ve seen. Xdebug spouts a similar output on error, although arguably not as pretty. Or blue.

What bluescreen is for debug_backtrace, krumo is for var_dump. Recently, FirePHP — building on Firebug — does a similar thing. FirePHP uses HTTP-headers to send data from server to client, which turns out to be very handy when dealing with non-HTML output (Eg. Ajax stuff). Because it builds on Firebug, it only works on Firefox, and in particular only on Firefox 2 (Another reason for Ubuntu-users to downgrade from Firefox 3).

Frameworks
Apart for these general general tracing tools, a couple of frameworks have their own, more or less specific, tools. Symfony’s Debug Toolbar is probably the most impressive …

Search Engine Optimization

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Search Engine Optimization, popularly known as SEO is a favorite pastime of egotistical webmasters. And that includes yours truly ;-)

I believe that every search engine optimizer must be deriving an evil pleasure seeing his website rising up on the Google ranking scale and beating others in their niche. And when the money starts rolling in… ahhhhh… the pleasure peaks to a new high and we get back to our computers to try and get our site rank even higher! :-)

Ok, so I have spent over 4 years learning the ropes and still I am far from being a true expert. Still, I have managed some good rankings in various search engines for the few clients I have but only through white-hat seo techniques. It takes longer and involves a lot of effort and brings in both visibility and exposure as well as revenues for sites but unfortunately people do not want to pay the fair price for the same.

Representing an Indian SEO Company is not an easy job as there exist a large number of rogue SEOs in the market that offer their SEO services for peanuts and then deploy unethical and shady techniques to get their clients’ website zoom amongst the Top 10.

If only we could convince ourselves to do that, but no! How can we? We love our clients and are proud that we get repeat business from all of them. It is because of the trust they have on us and the way we reciprocate their trust with good results achieved through ethical seo techniques and hard work!

eCommerce Web Hosting

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

One of the fastest growing sectors of the Internet is eCommerce. People are becoming accustomed to buying things from Internet store fronts and every year the volume and value of sales increases substantially. If you would like to open up your own eCommerce web site here are a few basics to get you started.

The first thing you need, obviously, is a product or service that you can sell. If you already have a brick and mortar store you can offer the same items for sale on a web site. The number of products that you sell is a big factor in the type of hosting package you need. If you have let’s say less than 20 items, you could set the whole thing up on a very small hosting account. Listing hundreds of products is a different story – you will probably need more disk space, more bandwidth, and more features such as databases and a secure connection for accepting payments.

Since the most important part of eCommerce is getting paid, let’s look at the various payment options available. There are two basic options – collecting payment information directly or hiring a third-party service to process credit cards.

Web Statistics

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Now that your web site is up and running you want to know how many people are visiting your site and how they are finding it. Most web hosts give you access to this information (and a lot more) in the form of web statistics.

All visits to your site are logged by the server software. Log files contain information about the origin of the visitor (their IP address), the type of browser they were using, which pages they viewed, how long they stayed, whether or not they arrived from a search engine and if so, what keywords they used to locate your site. All very useful information.

The trouble is, raw log files are scary to look at and impossible to make any sense of. They are long lists of numbers and cryptic words that can only reveal their secrets with the aid of a statistics program. There are a few stats programs to choose from. They take the raw server logs and parse them into readable (and sometimes colourful) charts that are fairly easy to interpret.

Most web hosts will include a stats program as part of their hosting package. You should be able to access it through the control panel which is used to make various settings on your account. Some of the popular web stat programs are AWStats, Analog, and WebAlizer. All three of these programs are free.

Stats programs divide the information of the log files into useful categories. A summary of the data may be included at the top of the readout and tell you information such as ‘unique visitors’, ‘number of hits’, and ‘number of pages’.

Not all this information is important. The number of hits, for example, simply counts the total number of requests for any individual part of your site including graphics, script files and any other files that are part of a page. If your home page has 4 pictures and 2 other files the hit count is increased by 7 each time someone views that page.

The number of page views is important because it tells you which pages are popular. This allows you to fine-tune your site by dropping or modifying unpopular pages and making sure that popular pages link to areas that you want to promote.

Popular entry and exit pages are also worth tweaking. Visitors will not always arrive at your site through the home page, especially if they’ve found your site through a search engine. Make sure that popular entry pages contain relevant information and adjust exit pages to be more appealing. Exit pages should provide one last chance for them to buy or bookmark your site for future reference.

Referring sites show you where people are coming from. If they have found you from a search engine you will also see what keywords they used to find your site. This information tells you which keywords are important for optimizing your site.  You can then design new content based on these keywords to attract even more visitors in the future.

Rather than rely on the stats produced by your server, you can hire a third party service to monitor your web site.  These services range from basic ‘counter’ that usually offer less information than your server does, to comprehensive client-side stats collection.

Stats services can be useful if you need more precise information about your visitors. For example, visitors from a large organization may all appear to be the same because they all have the same IP address. Stat services can break down IP addresses into individual users.

These services can be useful for more precise monitoring of your website and for targeting specific niches. Most site owners, however, will find enough useful information in their server’s statistics.