Optimization Techniques

Canonical Links

Hi Jim,

I hope all is well.

I’m still chipping away at this SEO stuff and I still have this problem of my site sometimes being listed under my hosting company rather than the proper url. I don’t know what triggers it, but it drives me crazy because I drop in rankings. I was surfing the web and came across this information on the MarketRaise Blog about canonical links and Google announcing support Feb ’09 for this canonical link element. You know me, I don’t know much html and I think you can designate the url as proper (main) or canonical (duplicate). MarketRaise showed this example and I need to do the opposite and declare the proper url rather than the duplicate.

<link href="http://www.example.com/product.php?id=neat-product" rel="canonical">

I’m thinking maybe I should put this in the header as:

<link href="http://www.mysite.com" rel="proper">

Have you seen this, what do you think?

Thanks,
Loretta

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Disable Website Right Click Copying

Hi Jim,

HELP! What’s the best way to prevent content and images from being copied? Is disabling the right click a bad idea? I’m having trouble with images showing up on other websites without permission.

Thanks,
Z4K

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

PHP In The Only When Necessary

Jim,

I heard that every PHP in the head rquires a trip to the database of a website (ie wordpress website). The busier the server is and the more PHP, the longer it will take to bring up a website, so ther only need to use PHP if some data is changing quickly (like time) that PHP is being used to keep track of, or if the different pages have different information (like title of the pages). If the information is static (ie content type, character set, version, address of CSS) , then it’s better not to use PHP. For example

<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo(‘html_type’); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo(‘charset’); ?>" />

<title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo(‘version’); ?>" />

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />

<link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo(‘pingback_url’); ?>" />

<?php wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly&format=link’); ?>

<?php wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly&format=link’); ?>

</head>

The first line I changed to

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

The second line I didn’t change becaue each of my pages has different titles.

Third line I changed to

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.5.1" /> and every time the version changes I changed the code.

The fouth line I changed to

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.actualcures dotcom/wp-content/themes/actualcures/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

The fifth I changed to

<link rel="pingback" href="http://www.actualcures dotcom/xmlrpc.php" />

Would I leave the sixth line since it involves time (a form of change) so would I leave that as PHP. What does it do anyway?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

link search

My website on Dog Training is listed (ie linked from) a popular website, called Dog Club. However if I do a Google search for link:[my_url] then it returns nothing! There are other websites on the Dog Club site where a search of link:url returns the Dog Club site, and only that site. My website has been linked from the Dog Club site for a year.

So why doesn’t Google know that the site links to my website?
What determines how Google finds linked sites?

NB My website has been submitted to Google and is listed by Google.

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Headers

Jim,

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=300"
</IfModule>

I read a lot about cache control last night but it looks like very few sites explain Headers set cache-control noting it’s requirements – isn’t it true that to get header set cache-control to work you have to use the open and close
Ifmodule mod_headers.c ?

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Outside The US

Jim,

Before I get working on this, do you have any tips on setting up a website to be read in many different languages?

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/11/add-language-translation-to-website.html

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Deflate Form of Compression

Jim,
I was reading that for webhosts using apache 2.x.x and have the mod deflate enabled, you can use this command
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml
to have the server (apache) automatically compress the html of your site.

Does the command go in the HTAccess file, and if so, where in the HTAccess file would I put it? The top line? After a certain line?

Right now my HTAccess file looks like this:

# Use PHP5CGI as default
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .html .php .htm

Redirect 301 /clean.html http://www.actualcures dotcom/hydrogen-peroxide-ends-gingivitis-keeps-tee
….[more 301 redirects]……
ErrorDocument 400 /index.php?error=400
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?error=404
#ErrorDocument 500
ErrorDocument 503 /index.php?error=503

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

#Redirect actualcures dotcom to www.actualcures dotcom
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^actualcures dotcom
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.actualcures dotcom/$1 [r=301,L]

# -FrontPage-

IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*
.
.
…etc….

Thanks Jim,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Backround File position

Jim,

In my CSS for the background (bk.jpg) I have

body{background:url(img/bk.jpg) repeat fixed;font-family:arial, verdana, tahoma;font-size:1.1em;color:#CCF;margin:0;padding:1.5em 2em}

but the background is underneath several files – http://www.actualcures dotcom/wp-content/themes/actualcures/img/bk.jpg

Is there a way to get the background to display faster by giving the server more time to think about what it has to find and then go and find it before displaying the background?

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

CSS Optimization

Jim,
I finally got around to using that CSS optimization tool.
http://floele.flyspray.org/csstidy//css_optimiser.php

I think it works pretty good.

Total validator liked it
http://www.totalvalidator.com/validator/ValidatorForm

and it fixed a couple of problems according to
http://websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

It reduces the size from 4.3 to 3.3 kb (and that wasn’t even the max optimasation; I chose "moderate readability".

You might have to have your computer fairly fresh from turning on your computer becuase if not when you copy the new CSS code from the site (i.e. at 3.3kb) and paste it into a .txt (and then change name to .css) file it may be over 4 kb. It could just be my computer. My site is a little faster becuase now my CSS fits into fewer packets.

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Domain Expiration and SEO

Jim,

I used a tool I found to evaluate my site. Some of the results made no sense but it did say that there is only 8 months left on my domain name subscription and that I should buy more time for better ranking and traffic from search engines. At 1and1.com you really can’t buy more time becuase they only have yearly automated billing. Do you think more time left on a domain registration would get more traffic from search engines? Should I transfer my domain name to a webhost that allows you to buy more than a year subsciption?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Etags

Jim,
I read it’s best to remove Etags. According to "Yslow", a plug in extension for Firefox, I have a number of Etags, like for the CSS file the etag is "397046a-fa6-452070d7717c0". In the CSS I don’t see this Etag at all. How do I remove it?

Thanks Jim,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Domain Trademark

Hi Jim,

What do you think of the Weblo site and claiming/selling domains? Something doesn’t seem right, what is that all about? Is it just another one of those personal networking sites like myspace or facebook?

Should website owners trademark their domains?

Thanks,
Loretta

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

SEO for Different Images For Each page, No IMG tag

Jim,

I was reading, " Browsers usually download the background images after everything else. By loading your background files using css you have an advantage because the text content will be displayed first and, in most cases, this is the content that your visitor is interested in. Here’s an example of a css based background:

In the <head> or stylesheet

.background-image
{ background: url(filename.gif);
width: 200px;
height: 100px }

in the body <div class="background-image"></div>

But with so many images I don’t want to load up my style sheet becuase I read style sheets are loaded into the visitors browser.

One way to do avoid using an image tag is supposedly to use an inline style tag, and use an image tag to not lose the alt attribute, <image src="something.gif" class="background-image" alt="description" />

I don’t see how this second img tag is any less trouble than the first img tag.

Is there a way to handle many different images for many different pages and not use the IMG tag, still have the title nd alt of an image tag and not load up a style sheet with the image addresses?

Thanks Jim,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

PHP Speedy

Jim,

What do you thik of HP Speedy?

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/02/01/speed-up-your-site-with-phpspeedy/

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Search Tags

Jim,
I was reading seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Building-Search-Engine-Tag-Trails/1/ and while I understand what’s being said, I haven’t the slightest idea how to code tags. I recently saw a web page with "Tags: …….." at the bottom. Is that the same thing?

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

GZip

Jim,

What do you think about Gzipping a website. I read that putting
<?php
if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], ‘gzip’)) {
ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
}
else {
ob_start();
}
?>
into the <head> can reduce download time by 60%
http://www.roscripts.com/How_to_speed_up_your_website-175.html

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Cloning Description Tags

Jim,

I think this is a great idea, tell me why it’s not.

When I search the engine comes up with a link of the title and full sentences or a couple or more of partial sentences. When it comes up with partial sentences I can find them in the text on the site. But many times when full sentences show in the search engine results, I can’t find the sentence in the page.
Well I came across this on my own site. What I found was that the sentences I found in the search results that I couldn’t find on the site were the descriptions in the description tags of the site.

So here’s the great idea, if your description in your description tag is good enough for a description tag, you should have the description in the text of your site. I’m aware that at the top of the browser is a copy of the title tag, but it is not the description tag. Also, because you cant really describe a page in 160 characters, a lot of descriptions tags are the main or most important point of the whole page, not a description of the whole page. Certainly you want the most important point or the main point of your page on your page.

This is also very important because, I think, the description should include all of the words/phrases in your page that have a keyword density of 2% or more. Such density often centers around the main point of your page.

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

0 pr rating help!

hi,
I am really not familiar with SEO techniques. I started CampusHero .com with a friend 4 months ago and we are just not able to get past the 0 pr rating. Can anyone tell us what we are doing wrong or need to do. In order to improve our ranking do we really need to have someone else link to us that has a high pr rating or are there problems with our coding. We have over 100 pages of content so I would be hoping we could get a higher ranking on the search engines. We really need some help. Thanks in advance.

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Length of webpage filename

Question:
Like the number of keywords shouldn’t be over 10, what number of characters do think is the most you would want to use for the names of the webpage files. I think a few of mine are too long.

Answer:
2083 total, so subtract http://www.01234567890.com/ (27) from 2083 and you have your answer.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427 hints that the http:// is part of the length, so I would just play it safe and keep it under 2056

I try to keep them as short as possible, but you do have flexibility

Note: this is for IE. Other browsers will take more, but you might as well go with the lowest number for compatibility.

Regards,

Jim.

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Google Sitemaps – What to Include

Can anyone please explain the pro’s and cons for including anything else other than my HTML pages in a Google sitemap. (All my pages are HTML)

I notice that images can be included, but why would you include them? – and anything else for that matter.

Regards,

Bazza

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Whiteness

Jim,

I finished my optimizing of my template. I have a problem with it I can’t even figure out what area of the code is causing it. At the bottom of the page (of the index page) is about an inch of white space. Long time ago it occured at the top and it was solved with padding: 0px and margin:0px as the first instructions in my css (/ac.css). If you have a chance, please see if you can fiind the cause of the whitespace. Other than that no problems. Reduced the number of tables on this template beast from 33 to 13.

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

No Google PR Rating

Hi Jim

On the google PR Rating our website (myfancydress.com) has no rank. Even though its been up for nearly 12 months we have not seen the google tool bar even move once.

We have XML Sitemaps, HTML Sitemaps a good few links from other sites (still going up in number).

If you could offer any advice i would be grateful.

Regards

Slick

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Utf-8

Jim,

I get this warning all the time,
"Specified input coding (UTF-8) does not match actual input encoding (UTF-16)"

I don’t want to change of the characters I use – I heard UTF 8 doen’t include quote marks. What would you recommend for this line
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

robots.txt

Jim,

Is there anyway I can make my robots.txt file any more accessible?
Right now I have
User-agent: *
Disallow:

and my awstats for my site, albeit the free version (6.6), for example google stats are 64 +4

and
"Robots shown here gave hits or traffic "not viewed" by visitors, so they are not included in other charts. Numbers after + are successful hits on "robots.txt" files."

Can you think a way to improve the + number or doesn’t it matter becuase I don’t make as many changes to my site as I use to.

Thanks Jim,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

revolving changing backgrounds

Jim,

I want to design a page where the background is different every time the page is visited.

I know the starting code would be
<body background="image.gif" bgcolor="#??????"> and I would store a bunch of images I want as backgrounds with my site at my webhost, but how would I get the code to use a different image every time some one calls for this page? I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to use that PHP no caching code you showed me. <meta name="Expires" content="<? echo gmdate (‘D, d M Y H:i:s’, time()+00*08*00)?>">

I went to http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/quicklist.html but couldn’t find anything.

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Programming

Jim,

I’ve got the Gg search box working pretty well, although those Gault, ALC, LBGC and ohter settings weren’t much fun to figure out. Couldn’t figure out three of them (those three^).

How can I get it so that when someone chooses a button labeled shop and types in a search term it takes them right to Gg shop search engine with that term they typed into the search box?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Seeking SEO suggestions for a new site

Hi Jim,

Steve, the license plate guy here. I hope that all is well for you.

I and a friend have built a website for another friend. We’ve built it according to his instructions to achieve the "look" that he wants. My concern is that it isn’t built very well for SEO purposes.

When you, or anyone else on the forum who is knowledgeable about SEO, has time to do so, please take a look at it and offer suggestions. The site is:

SimpleLifeDevelopment.com

I would appreciate any useful suggestions that anyone has to offer.

Thanks,

Steve

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Foward Slash

Jim,

I noticed that at the end of a lot of lines of code of yours, you have a space and a forward slash. How do these ends help and what types of lines of code should they be used on.

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

What Percent of the Time Do You ..

Audit MY PC Readers,

What Percent of the Time Do You make online purchases of consumer merchandise as a consumer (not as an employee while working) where the lighting above you and the computer is florescent lighting?

A lot of dark colors, like burgandy, are almost invisible under florescent lighting, so why not avoid dark colors when writing a website, but how many people make consumer purchases at work or in school anyway?

Alot of visually intersting designs have dark rich colors that can only be viewed in normal incadescent (tungsten filament) lighting. It’s hard to stand out with a white background when everyone has a white background.

Member: per cent
Actual 0%

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Awstats and www

Jim,

For the first time I have "actualcures dotcom/gain.html" in my awstats, even though "/gain.html" has been in awstats counts (and still is) since the beginning. When I hold the cursor over "/gain.html" at the bottom left of the browser it shows "actualcures dotcom" – there’s no www. How can both be in the awststs counts since all my links to my own pages have www in the address? Is there something to correct?

I went to Start, Search, Files and Folders, in the drop down for "Look in:" chose "Browse…", chose the file that contains all my pages, hit ok, under "Containing text" I typed the address of the index page without the www and no files at all came up, with www and all the files of the pages came up- yet the counts in awstats have no www.

Thanks Jim,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Etags

Jim,
From http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#etags
The end result is ETags generated by Apache and IIS for the exact same component won’t match from one server to another. If the ETags don’t match, the user doesn’t receive the small, fast 304 response that ETags were designed for; instead, they’ll get a normal 200 response along with all the data for the component. If you host your web site on just one server, this isn’t a problem. But if you have multiple servers hosting your web site, and you’re using Apache or IIS with the default ETag configuration, your users are getting slower pages, your servers have a higher load, you’re consuming greater bandwidth, and proxies aren’t caching your content efficiently. Even if your components have a far future Expires header, a conditional GET request is still made whenever the user hits Reload or Refresh.

If you’re not taking advantage of the flexible validation model that ETags provide, it’s better to just remove the ETag altogether. The Last-Modified header validates based on the component’s timestamp. And removing the ETag reduces the size of the HTTP headers in both the response and subsequent requests. This Microsoft Support article describes how to remove ETags. In Apache, this is done by simply adding the following line to your Apache configuration file: FileETag none "

What is my Apache confuguration file? HtAcess file?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Any Faster?

Jim,

I noticed that one of my JPGs was in the format src="alz.jpg" on a page of mine and not in the form src="http://www.mysite.com/alz.jpg" and appeared to take almost no time to come up in the browser. Is that coincidence or as far as speed of graphic loading using only the file name and extension(jpg) is faster for downloading. I remeber the problem of rouge bots stealing pages that don’t use the whole address. I’m not worried about bots copying my graphics.

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Home Made Doorway Pages

Jim,

I looked up some term a while back to see what the number 1 site was. I can’t remeber whose site it was, but the home page was a 15 line paragraph with the keyword used many many time. It managed to be well written, and no doubt the keyword concentration was pretty high. Is that a bad idea to write some sort of opening page using the most popular keyword as many times as possible, and then have an arrow or whatever to take the vistor to your regular page?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Looks Mean A lot

Jim,

Do you have a short list of sites where I can see what my site looks like like on all major browsers? There’s 5 or 6 of them I thought.

Also, do you know of any sites that critique sites?

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Google or Not to Google

Jim,

Was updating my sitemaps with your sitemap Generator. Worked great, maybe a little to well for Google. I noticed the times for my different pages to load were very long, eventhough the KBs are pretty low. My clean.html page is only 18kb yet if I understand the stats correctly, it took 10 seconds to load. I owe it all to Google analytics. I’m thinking about getting rid of G.analytics code on my pages. It’s nice to see my numbers, but I think it’s costing me visitors. My webhosts version of awstats comes up with some mysterious numbers sometimes, atleast I don’t have to pay for it with visitor patience. What do you think?

Thanks Jim,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Testing php code

JIm,

Do you know of a site where you can test php code. I couldn’t find anything at W3C, not even Google and Yahoo. I also couldn’t find anything in ultra-edit. Am I going have to make a page /phptesting.html and just upload my tests?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Efficient .css file

Jim,

I have a long list of code in my external CSS file. Is there a certain efficient order for these css tags, selectors, other than the requirements for the mouse over stuff?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

HTML$ Strict

Jim,

Websiteoptimization.com had a list of ways to speed up the downloading of a site from the user side. Their number one was to write the HTML code in <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

I’m trying to do that but using the W3C validation service I get 10 errors related to my use of ALIGN BGCOLOR WIDTH HEIGHT and TARGET.

I found this page on the list of tags that pass HTML4 Strict

http://www.december.com/html/4/, although even they (december) wrote their site using transitional.

I didn’t see any tags in their list to fix my HTML4 strict errors. Is it really worth changing to HTML4 Strict?

If so I guess all these errors are fixed by using inline CSS or external CSS, but what about that TARGET error?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

E-Mail from 1and1

Jim, I have recently recieved an e-mail from 1and1 stating I am using an disproportionate amount of resources. Does this mean I am having to much content for my plan or to much traffic…. I have the 9.99 plan and thought this was plenty for the sites I have.

************************************************** ***

Recently we have noticed that your web site(s) is consuming a disproportionate amount of server resources (including memory and/or cpu time). Because of this, we now request that you consider purchasing a Managed or other Dedicated Server in order to continue hosting with 1&1 Internet.

The decision to move your account was made by the system administrators in order to improve the quality of service for the rest of our clients on the shared server from which you were previously hosted. The resources consumed by your account threatened the ability of that server to capably operate as as a shared host, so it was required that your account be moved in order to mitigate server load. Though we could move your site back to the original shared hosting server, it is not recommended. Your account activity has demonstrated that your site deserves its own server to better suit its performance needs.

Please visit 1and1.com to review the server products we offer. You will have one (1) month to make a decision and migrate your account over to a 1&1 server or another host provider. You can choose to return your account back to the shared server, provided that you take steps to reduce the load generated by your websites. If the account has to be moved off the shared server system again you will only have the option of purchasing a dedicated server account to continue hosting with 1&1 Internet.

Please reply to this email promptly. Further questions/comments should be directed to admin at 1and1.com.

Thank you for your compliance in this matter.

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

DeOptimization

Jim,
If I have
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<style type="text/css">
in my header instead of just
<style type="text/css">

Can that disrupt the page being found or counts by awstats and google analytics?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Optimization Techniques

Hey Jim ,I have a question for you. I have a new site called net-span.com, I use your speed test very nice by the way. My question is on meta tags and search engine Optimization. I seem to only get 15 to 20 views a day on this one. I have loaded the site with all the majors and some directories just as Broadband-speed-test.com. For some reason Net-span.com hasn’t worked as well as the first. Now I consider myself a novice and work with WordPress on these so can you please take a look and let me know in laymans terms where I might have gone astray.
Thanks
Gater

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Get Google to tell you about your pages!

Just found out this information on having Google inform you when they add one of your webpages and thought it would be useful, here is how:
Visit http://www.google.com/alerts

Fill in the form like this, for backlinks:
Type ‘link:www.yourdomain.com’ (Without quotes) in the ‘Search term’ field
Change ‘Type’ to ‘Web’
Change ‘How often’ to ‘as-it-happens’
And write your email address in the ‘Your email’ field.

Google will send you an email with a confirmation link, click the link and you will begin to get emails when Google updates your backlinks.

If you want to get an email when Google finds and lists a page on your site, go to http://www.google.com/alerts

Type ‘site:www.yourdomain.com’ (without quotes) in the ‘Search term’ field
Fill in the other fields as above.

If you want to be notified when someone mentions you, then do this:

Go to:
http://www.google.com/alerts

Fill in the form like this:
Type "www.yourdomain.com" using the double quotes in the ‘Search term’ field
Change ‘Type’ to ‘Comprehensive’ <– Only for these ones; for back-links and indexed pages be sure to choose ‘Web’
Change ‘How often’ to ‘as-it-happens’
And write your email address in the ‘Your email’ field

Now set up another alert:
Type "Exact Title of Your Website" (with double quotes) in ‘Search term’ field
Change ‘Type’ to ‘Comprehensive’
Change ‘How often’ to ‘as-it-happens’
And write your email address in the ‘Your email’ field

That should do the trick!

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

ALT and Title Tags

Hi,

I know from this forum how important it is for Title tags to be unique. Does the same hold true for ALT tags for images?

If a category of images all have the same ALT tag will the search engines see that as spam?

Thanks,
Z4K

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Link Backs, Alexa, etc.

Hi,

I’ve seen a lot of references to linkbacks as being required for improving rank and search results. I also see a lot of references to link farms as being a bad idea.

How do you know if a free linking directory service that provides a way to communicate requests between website owners may be considered one of the undesirable methods by the search engines? Or should one just consider any of those methods to be a bad idea and work the requests website to website?

Also, why doesn’t Alexa register link backs? I have installed their toolbar, followed from the sites linking in and still no results with Alexa. I know they do it every couple of months, but by now some of them should be showing. I have some sites linking back with a higher PR than mine so I was sure they would start to register in Alexa. I have a few not-so-relevant links that I probably should notify the owners and break, but until I can see some results I’m not sure I want to remove any of them.

Thanks,
Z4K

P.S. I love this site!!

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Missing Quotes

Just a reminder to myself that a link to a page like this:
<a href=auditmypc.com">

will produce this:
http://www.auditmypc.com/bed-bugs.php%22

In the address field and show up in the logs. I was working on a blog and noticed this error and traced it back to a missing quote after the href= and would not have thought it would produce such an error.

I see these in my logs from time to time and now I know why

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

question about SSI

Hi Jim,

On my site, autotags4u.com, I’m considering using SSI to call up the file for the nav bar on the left of page(s). The reason being, if I want to change that nav bar it would nice to just change one file rather than having to go through the entire site and change every page.

There’s also a menu bar at the top of every page. I’m also considering using SSI to call that up. Again, easier to change on all the pages if I want to make changes to that menu bar.

My question: From an SEO standpoint is that helpful, harmful or does it make no difference? I’d appreciate any info or input that you may have.

Kind Regards,

Steve

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

question about text in hidden text form

Hi Jim,

A friend and I are currently building a site for a client according to his specific and very picky instructions. In other words, he wants a particular look and feel for his site but he doesn’t have any knowledge of SEO or website construction other than what little I’ve tried to explain to him. He’s a nice man and his site is indeed beautiful and displays what he’s selling in a very professional looking manner. The site is:

http://simplelifedevelopment.com/

I have some SEO concerns about the way we’re building this site: site structure, use of hidden text forms etc.,
according to his very specific instructions. I’m not sure if the link structure is good or bad for SEO. Another example of a concern can be seen at this page:

http://simplelifedevelopment.com/photogallery.html

On this page you’ll notice that in the text area underneath the main top picture there is simpy the words Photo Gallery. That’s what he wants. I’ve encouraged him to let us put some descriptive and informative text below that page title, Photo Gallery. Would that not be a good idea in terms of SEO?

Also, You’ll notice that when you click on a thumbnail pic on the right in that gallery section, a larger version of that image appers on the left. Underneath that larger pic is currently the simple text, pic. 1, pic 2, etc etc. Of course we’re going to write more verbage for that area. Here’s the question. That text verbage underneath the lager pic is preset and called up in a hidden text form. Do search engines see that text when they spider a site. If not, do you have suggestions on a good way to do this so that the spiders do, in fact, see that text so that they may glean useful and relevant information for search results.

Again, thank you for your time and valuable, useful information.

Kindly,

Steve

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

There One Day, Gone the Next ?

Hi,

Has anyone experienced a nice jump in search engine results and have it disappear the next day? I check every so often to see where I come out in search results and for one particular phrase I jumped 8 pages in a Google search. I’ve been following the advice and instructions in this terrific forum and was pleasantly surprised to see the new position for that phrase. I thought the work was starting to pay off.

Not really believing the improvement I saw, I decided to check again the next day and my listing disappeared completely. It’s not even where it was hovering before. The site is not banned or anything like that. My hosting company thinks I removed a meta tag or something. I only recently removed the pagerank tag, which I will add back, but that wouldn’t affect this would it?

Any ideas?

Having a tough go at this stuff…

Thanks,
Z4K

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Meta http-equiv=”pragma” content=”no-cache”

Jim,

I use this tag but google writes,

The http-equiv values pragma and expires are attempts at bypassing caches without having to set the HTTP headers correctly. These are probably unnecessary uses; any scenario where there is a legitimate reason to limit caching, the author is going to have enough control over the server to send the appropriate headers. In addition, the meta tags can’t be considered reliable (e.g. proxies and transparent caches aren’t going to honour them).
http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html

So how do you set the HTTP?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

THe Mighty Slash

Jim,

Coffecup.com wrote this about not having a forward slash at the end of the address.

Web servers cannot ignore the missing slash and just send the document anyway. Doing so would break any relative URLs in the document. Normally, servers are configured to send a redirection message when they receive such a request. In response to the redirection message, the browser requests the correct URL, and then the server sends the requested document. Browsers cannot correct the URL.
This error-correction process means that URLs without their final slash will still work. However, this process wastes time and network resources. If you include the final slash when it is appropriate, then browsers won’t need to send a second request to the server.

Since the operating system won’t let you use the slash character in a name, do you go to the server and change the name at the server to include the slash? In other words fire up the FTP and chnage the name of the file there. That could be annoying becuase every time you want to make a change you have to fus with name changes. If you have toursite.com/finland.html on your computer and toursite.com/finland.html/ every time you want to update you have to first rename to exclude the ending forward slash, then upload then rename with the forward slash. What a pain in the neck. Got any ideas?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Where to begin with Validators & Doctype Declarations

Hi,

I just ran the W3C validator and found hundreds of errors.

Where do I begin? I use a hosting company’s shopping cart and wizard software. The wizard allows me to cut and paste HTML code from another package and input "my own" html. It’s all compiled and uploaded to the web on the hosting server.

The validator found hundreds of errors on my home page so I thought I would take a look at smaller chunks. I tried to validate by direct input the code I created for the body of the home page. I put the code into the form and it cannot validate because I don’t have a document type declaration. The code doesn’t have the beginning and ending tags because I’m not supposed to put that in with the wizard.

I looked at the information available on document type declarations and I’m completely lost. Help!

Thanks,
Z4K

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

attaching a priority to certain pages within a sitemap

Hi Jim,

I’ve successfully created and submited a xml sitemap to google using your sitemap generator tool. Thanks for providing this service to people!

Now, I wish to learn about attaching a priority to certain pages on the site. Google webmaster central says that the default priority of each page is 0.5. Let’s take a look at the top of my newly created sitemap, please, which will include the top url of the site. For this post I’m using the domain name mysite.com.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
- <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
- <url>
<loc>http://mysite.com</loc>
<lastmod>2007-06-08T23:12:24-05:00</lastmod>
</url>

The index page, of course, is the most important page on my site. When I used the generator it included the <lastmod> tag on each page of the sitemap. That was the only optional tag that was included on any of the pages listed in the sitemap. Perhaps I missed a function of the sitemap generator tool as I made the sitemap. I want google and all of the other major search engines to know which pages I consider to be most important on my site. For example, I want the above code on my index page and a few other pages in the site to look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
- <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
- <url>
<loc>http://mysite.com</loc>
<lastmod>2007-06-08T23:12:24-05:00</lastmod>
< priority>1.0</priority>
</url>

My question: Do I manually assign that priority tag to the desired pages or can I use your generator tool, using a setting that perhaps I missed, to assign the priority tag to the desired pages.

Thank you for any helpful advice that you may be able to provide.

Kind Regards,

Steve

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

How Many Keywords Is too Many?

Jim,

Some sites say Keywords are unnecessar, other say no more than 100 characters worth, others 200, other 1000 characters worth. What are the consequences of too many characters of keywords from the robot and spider point of view – do they count the number of characters first then if there’s too many they don’t read the keywords at all?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Question about opening a link in new browser window

Hi,

I’m building a website for someone who has asked me to build it so that when a visitor clicks on a thumbnail of a picture of the product that they are selling, that larger image displays in a new browser window.

I am concerned that some people’s computers might mistake that for a popup and block it. Is that a valid concern?

I’m also concerned that it might have a negative effect in terms of SEO. Will the SE robots and spiders follow that link if it opens in a new window? Is that a valid concern.

Thanks for any info that you may be able to provide about this.

Jim, I also wanted you to know that by following your advice for certain SEO techniques I have significantly improved my page results for several search term phrases on my own business website. Thanks!

Kind Regards,

Steve Edwards

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Java and google

Hi

someone told me that if my website is full of javascript, then google spiders cant search my site.

are they full of it or is it true?

anyone heard of this – or can say its nonsense

thanks

wally

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Most Common Search Engine Optimization Mistakes

Understanding exactly what search engines do and what search engine optimization is seems to elude many new website owners when first starting out. The fact is that when you’re not familiar enough with the industry to determine SEO fact from SEO fiction can only mean trouble for your website. Could you be making those same mistakes with your site?
Here’s a consolidated list of things you most definitely do not want to be doing if you want a high ranking in the search engines. Let’s look at the most common search engine optimization mistakes:
Mistake: Overloading of Keywords
Trying to optimize a home page for all possible keywords is not a good thing. If you attempt to squeeze in all the keywords on the home page thinking it’s going to improve your ranking is not true. It will appear that you are ‘spamming’ the search engines and it will make your rankings even worse since those search engines will single you out. ‘Less’ can mean a lot more when it comes to search engine optimization in that respect.
Mistake: Untargeted Keywords and Phrases
Choice of keywords in the META keyword tags are very important and it’s crucial that you use keywords related to your line of work or your business product(s). Targeting such generic words is a waste of time. What you need to do is optimize your site for search terms and phrases that are highly targeted to your precise business. There are numerous software programs or services that can help you to find what people are actually typing into the search engines to find goods and services familiar to yours and concentrate on ranking well for those terms. The more qualified your site visitors are, the more likely you are to convert those visitors into ‘paying’ customers.
Mistake: Non Utilization of the Title Tag
Most search engines index the content of the title tags and consider it to be one of the most important factors in their relevancy algorithm. What you place in your title can make or break your ranking for particular search terms for various engines. When you don’t include your most important search phrases within your title tag, you are overlooking a vital opportunity in your quest for higher search rankings. In other words, give your best information or rather ‘characters’ at the start of your tag, since search engines give more ‘weight’ to content at the very beginning of the tags. If you really want to include your company name in your title, put it at the very end of your tag.
Mistake: Duplication of the Header Area
Here’s another mistake that many ‘newbies’ do when it comes to designing their websites. Seeing the same title on every page within that website which means the Meta tags are identical on every page, only the visible content is different. Each page should be optimized for different keywords whether it’s major or minor and can be an entry point to your site from any search engine. Never repeat the titles or Meta descriptions in your website. Treat each page of your website if it were the most important and optimize it thoroughly. Don’t leave the head area without any optimization means. You’ll regret it and the search engines will not direct traffic to your website.
Mistake: No Body Text, Too Much Splash and Flash
A very common mistake. Many websites think the more flashier they are with limited text will get them the traffic they need. What you may not know is that without some text, or lack thereof, will not get your site optimized since most search engines can’t index images. If you want a web site to rank well in the search engines, you need to give them what they want to see, visible content that is optimized just as well as the invisible content. Most importantly, if you have no content on your main page and only graphics does not say much about your intelligence and looks very unprofessional. The bottom line is simple; a site with no visible content becomes effectively invisible to a search engine and has almost no chance of appearing in the rankings for logical searches.
These are the most common search engine mistakes, of course, in no particular order. If any of this sound familiar to you, don’t worry about it since you’re not alone. Many website owners will find themselves in at least one or more of these situations. The important thing is that when you do recognize an error within your optimization process, get the correct solution, understand why the changes are needed, then you are better equipped with the correct information and have the capability to reverse the damage.

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

From tables to CSS in Frontpage

First of all, many thanks to Jim for all he does for the internet community.
Regarding my websites
http://www.birdlist.org
http://www.nature-worldwide.info
http://www.mammals-worldwide.info
http://www.nationalparks-worldwide.info
I use many many tables.
These websites have about 700 pages each or so and the only way I have been able to manage them is by using frontpage, that has a facility to structure the page relationships through a graphic interface, through which you can drag a webpage under or next to any other page in the website. The websites are structured almost identically with different content, allowing the visitor to jumb from one kind of info to the next for the same country.
Birdlist.org, which has a reasonable age on the internet, does not score better than average among the first 500 birding websites. I was wondering if there is a way to systematically upgrade all my pages to css, without having to redesign the structure of my websites.
Best wishes,
Daan

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

SEO Consulting Work

Jim

Do you do any consulting work with your tools? Specifically, I can tell from using the sitemap generator that I have some problems on my site, but I have no clue what to do about them. I have a site that had tons of traffic and that made tons of money. Starting about 18-24 months ago, the traffic started really dropping off and we slowly lost our google rankings. I sent you a PM with information on my site.

I need some help. Let me know. Thanks.

Jean

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Website Validation does not work on my site?

I tried validating my website using validator.w3.org and it said I had an invalid Character Coding, I changed it using a meta tag to charset=ISO-8859-1. Now it says I have no Valid DOCTYPE.

I don’t even know what that means, I tried looking at their help but it did not explain it very well.

Can anyone explain what I’m missing on this?

MattyMan

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Website Header

Jim,

Do you know where I can find a large selection of headers to choose from and buy a few? No luck on the search engines.

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

importance of identifying key phrases

Hello all,

First of all, this is a great forum. If any of you haven’t read Jim’s (AMPC is his user name ) introduction, you should do so. I have found this forum to indeed be a place where you can get solid answers to your questions. I’m especially grateful for the polite manner in which I’ve been treated on this forum. I have received useful SEO tips that are already paying off in terms of more first page rankings for certain key phrases.

Now, for my topic of the day: There are free tools on the net that enable a person to identify the keywords and phrases that folks are typing into a search engine in order to find whatever it is that you may be selling or offering. For my website and web based business I’ve found appx. 75-100 keyphrases that people use to find what I sell.

Of course, some phrases are more important than others. Usually, the most important phrases are also going to be the most competetive and harder to rank on the first page. My goal is to achieve first page rankings with the most important phrases.

Having said that, I’ve found that it’s also important NOT to ignore less important phrases. I divide my search term phrases into 3 levels……I refer to them as first, second and third tier search term phrases.

If you have a website and you’ve indentified 50 search phrases that people use to find your product or service, build pages that will target all of those phrases. You may not be able to easily achieve a first page ranking with the top 10 phrases. However, if you can get on the first page with 30 or so of the OTHER phrases, then you can still make sales!

In conclusion, of course, we should target the most important keyphrases for our site and strive for first page results. At the same time, I suggest that you not ignore other phrases that will send traffic to your site, which in turn generates sales which in turn buys the beans and ‘taters that keeps us going until we DO get on the first page with the most important phrases!

Kind Regards to all,

Steve

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

pros/cons of using image and text as link

Here’s a new question. On a website that’s graphic intensive, because people need to see pics of what you’re selling, does it hurt, help, or make no difference if you link text AND a graphic together in order to link to another page. In other words, if you’re selling widgets in different shapes and colors and you have them listed on the index page. One link says……See our blue widgets (and a thumbnail graphic of one blue widget either above or below the descriptive text). Should we stuff in an alt text tag in that graphic……should we link the graphic and text together…..or seperately……or only use the text for the link?

Does any of the above matter?

Thanks,

Steve

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Question about robots meta tag.

In the head of my home page I have the following tag:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,follow">

Does that mean the robots and spiders are only going to follow links that originate from the index page? For example:

I have a folder on my site in the public html folder with that rest of my site that is called "previews". There are no links to any of the pages in that folder from the index or any other page on my site that is for public consumption. It simply has pages where I put previews prepared for customers. I make and sell a custom item so some people want a preview of what their order will actually look like.

Do I need to add a robots.txt file to keep the engines from going through other folders that aren’t linked from the index and subsequent pages on further levels down in the site? Any sound advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Steve

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Webtool v1.1 URL Check question…

Hi,

This is my first post on any forum so not sure if I have posted this in the correct place.

Just tried out the new WebTool – powerful stuff. Actually, I got a scare when I tried a URL Check on my site and got the following :

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="http://www.buyplumbing.co.uk/Merchant2/merchant.mvc">here</a>.</p>
<hr />
<address>Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat) Server at BuyPlumbing.co.uk Port 80</address>
</body></html>

Google hasn’t shown much interest in my site so far – could this be connected to the above?

Cheers,
dket1234.

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

Code Storage

Jim,

How can I put the html code I have for the two different search boxes I
have (on /clean.html top left, bottom center) in one or two separate
files and refer to the files where ever I want the search boxes to
appear – somewhat like CSS?

Thanks,

Roger

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques

how do the search engines reads tables?

When the search engine spiders and robots crawl a website that has a table broken up into columns, is there a way to inform the bots to read the table on the right first? I don’t understand how that works.

What is the default way that the bots crawl a page with tables? Any info on this topic would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Steve

Filed Under: Optimization Techniques