Webmaster Apex
A Home for Webmasters

Google’s new browser, Chrome, potentially open up new possibilities for webmasters. Chrome takes a step into creating a more user friendly browser but is shaping up to slowly move away from the traditional role of browsers.

Features

Chrome has a developer tool built into the application which is really nice. Chrome also loads very fast and takes very little memory space. It’s a lightweight clean application that satisfies what you need. I also like the feature that saves your own personal little homepage, although they could perhaps allow integratation it with iGoogle. However, for the multitudes of non-Google users, the current homepage is sufficient. The integrated search bar is really nice although it makes checking unused domains more difficult or broken urls. The fact that Chrome also loads each component of a website separately (Javascript, html, etc) is another great feature that helps people load the page regardless of those ill-designed websites.

In addition, Google has made Chrome open source and as with other open Google systems like Android, there will probably be a lot of developers and Chrome may become a major browser contender.

Stepping in a new direction

For better or worse, Chrome seems to serve as another link from desktop to the internet. With Google Desktop and the integration of Chrome, it seems that the internet is slowly becoming ever more meshed into the computer’s operating system. The emphasis Google puts on web applications that substitute for more traditional versions of software is shown through Chrome’s feature of easy integration of web apps. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if Chrome helped initate further integration of web services and applications into people’s daily lives. I feel that currently, unless someone specifically has to use the internet for a service, conventional methods are still prefered: e.g. conferencing.

Of course, at this time, I have yet to finish learning the ins and outs of Chrome and I may post an update.

Lots of people wonder why there are such major differences in reporting from different web statistic software. The main reason is that there are two main types of data collection methods for web stats: page tagging and log files. Log files are used by programs such as “awstats” while page tagging is used by programs like “Google Analytics”.

Page Tagging (Google Analytics)

Page tagging uses javascript or other methods to take voluntarily provided information from the visitor’s browser and sends that information to a third-party server.

The javascript is reloaded everytime a page is rendered even if it is loaded from the cache which provides better tracking of user behavior and gives more detailed statistics that can be used by business owners such as statistics on conversion rates or events that don’t involve server requests (An action not involving server requests would not be in the log files for programs such as Awstats).

Page tagging programs generally display fewer visitors/users because users can block information sharing and some browsers block sharing too. Javascript may also be disabled by visitors. A small percentage of visitors may leave the website before the javascript loads, which would also lead to an unreported visitor.

Log Files (Awstats)

Webservers keep logs of all requests made of them. Programs that use log files to provide website statistics provide data based on these logs. Everytime a request is made of the server, it will log the request. Logs are great for finding information about failed requests which won’t show up in page tagging. This helps with broken links and finding common misspellings.

The biggest problem with server logs is that their data may be misleading. Spam bots and certain bots can succeed in making the server think that they are actual users. This creates the illusion of a lot more visitors than there actually are.

Conclusion

Complementary usage of both types of web statistis programs is probably best. Just be aware of why there are differences in reported data. As both Google Analytics and Awstats are free, all webmasters should spend the time to setup both statistics programs. Generally, the true number of visitors you have is slightly above the number reported by Google Analytics.

There are several commonly overused SEO techniques that doesn’t provide much benefit to your website and sometimes even  has the negative effect of reversing SEO.

1. Keyword Density in Content (Keyword Stuffing)

It’s important to make sure that you have keywords in your content but beware of overdoing it. When you have too many keywords stuffed into a small area, it becomes keyword stuffing. Not only is purposeful overstuffing of your content degrading for your writing quality, it also recieves many negative SEO effects as bots generally think that someone is trying to get around the system.

Generally, as long as your writing/content sounds fluid and sounds like something written for people, it should be fine. If optimal keyword density and placement really is very important for you, you may wish to hire a SEO firm.

2. Keyword Stuffed Titles

Titles in keywords are good, but many people overdo it. This form of keyword stuffing is creating long tiles that use subdivision for sections such as:

• Webmaster Apex > WebHosting Reviews > Bluehost > Promotion > 50$ Off > Best Web Hosting

This is totally unnecessary and you may be punished for it. From practice, most people find that the first ten or so letters are the most important for an SEO-friendly page title.

3. Thinking More is Better

More content (a.k.a. more topics and articles) is good but thinking really long articles or abysmally long blocks of text will create more page relevancy is totally wrong.

Actually, the first two hundred characters of code on a page generally seem to hold the most weight. Of course, this is an approximation, but the key aspects of your content that you wish to convey will probably be best put in the front.

Note* With the two hundred character point of reference in mind, try to keep your header short and concise so the main body of your content stands out in search engines.

4. Submissions (Directories and Search Engines)

Once upon a time, all you had to do well in search engine placement was to have lots of keywords and meta tags, and then submit your website to a ton of directories and search engines. Fortunately or unfortunately, this no longer works.

Submissions are often overused as there is a very limited number of good submissions such as DMOZ or BOTW. Submitting too much shouldn’t hurt you but your time is probably better spent elsewhere.

Admittedly, being indexed by major search engines is important, but major search engines will generally pick up your website within a month so your time is better spent creating content. Trust me, getting indexed earlier is pointless as you’re highly unlikely to get much organic traffic when you start out.

Directories are a different matter. Some directories are truly beneficial to you. These are generally the manually edited directories that may either be paid or free. You shouldn’t expect traffic from directories, but a link from a good directory may provide huge SEO benefits.

Although I mentioned before that commenting on the majority of blogs is near futile as you have better things you could be spending your time on, there are certain blogs that don’t have a nofollow coding programmed into them. Many of these are not using the latest mainstream blogging platforms so they’re harder to find.

Why is blog commenting of dofollow blogs worth the effort? Dofollow blogs give links to your site which give PR and are actually a valid link. You can do a quick linkbuilding campaign by commenting on such blogs. However, remember that you should always post quality comments and avoid posting spam. Other than genuinely showing interest in the blog posts you like, your post could also be regarded as spam and deleted if you create a comment that is obviously used only as a backlink. Remember that you shouldn’t expect too much traffic from blog comments.

Here’s a list of dofollow blog directories from myseoblog.net:

1. Sitepoint Forums - Dofollow blog lists arranged by PR
2. Bloggers Directory - List of Dofollow Blogs
3. Bumpzee - The No Nofollow, I Follow , DoFollow Blog List. Biggest list of dofollow blogs so far.
4. Digerati Marketing - Lists of dofollow blogs in pdf format.
5. D-List Doffolow Blogs - There are well over 200 sites on the D-List directory of dofollow blogs.
6. Doffolow Blogs Directory - Simple directory of dofollow blogs arranged by categories.
7. India SEO - 140+ DoFollow Blogs (SEO Tips)
8. Jim Carter - List of DoFollow Blogs
9. Minterest - List Of Over 250+ DoFollow Blogs
10. Nickoo Shore - Do Follow List contains now more than 350 links to blogs which have the ‘no follow’ link disabled from the comments
11. Terrazoa - 45 dofollow blogs arranged by category
12. The “Do Follow” Blogs Directory - Small lists of dofollow blogs
13. Tip for the Web - Get Backlinks From Huge List Of DoFollow Blogs
14. Tucson SEO Solutions - A comprehensive dofollow blog list of around 300 dofollow blogs
15. Webhosting Blog - DoFollow Blogs List With High PR
16. Whydowork.com - DOFOLLOW Blogs With Good Google Page Rank

I’m hesitant to say “social media” as the phrase is now associated with sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Facebook, and other major social websites. However, social media on the internet used to simply consist of forums and similar entities.

All webmasters who are passionate and actively participating in their niche should be able to find some sort of forum, wiki, or related niche site where they can actively participate. In addition to enjoying their participation, webmasters can also receive a substantial amount of traffic from these sites.

The Reasoning

Why participate in such sites when you could simply comment on blogs or submit to Digg? Here a the main reasons:

• All of the readers on a niche wiki or forum are pre-qualified visitors. The simple fact that they are reading forum topics or wiki pages about a specific niche means that they are truly interested in the subject. On Digg or StumbleUpon, all of the visitors are completely untargeted which results in a high bounce rate (rate at which people quickly leave the site upon arriving)
• All of the members of the wiki or forum are on the page to read the information. If what you posted is interesting, then perhaps the reader will want to read other things you have posted. Unlike blog commenting, where the vast majority of blog readers don’t read all the comments, forums are there for the sole purpose of an exchange of ideas.
• Like article marketing, forums allow you to create credibility and establish yourself as a resident expert of sorts.

The How…

AVOID putting links to your site in your posts. This is generally frowned upon and unless your link has complete relevancy to the subject, you may wish to avoid posting links to your site. Self promoting comments are often considered as spam.

You should simply create a signature and add your website in the signature with prominent styling. Of course, be reasonable. Don’t create a signature with an enormous font. Simply engage in discussion and be an active member.

In wikis, frequent contribution, discussion and a few interspersed links to your site may be all you need to do. Several years back, I had one link on a niche wiki site that generated the entire websites traffic. Over time, the traffic obviously came from other sources but I never had to market the website when it was new. (Keep in mind that the website had good content too. Good content is still better than links.)

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has given you some more ideas on how you could market your website and get traffic. There are a lot of ways out there to promote yourself online, you just have to find it.

From Tables

Tables were THE hottest thing in web design when graphical web design first started being implemented. By using tables, people could create different cells for different aspects. Manipulation of the <td> or <tr> padding, placements, and width could create many different arrangements of images and text.

A simple website using tables would often look like the following:

<table>

<tr>
<td>Banner</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td>Content</td>
<td>Navigation</td>
<tr>

<tr><td>Footer</td></tr>

</table>

Now the beautiful thing is that you could place tables within tables and create very intricate and ornate designs and achieve great navigation bars. Now, you may be wondering why people use CSS now and tables have been phased out

Two main reasons: CSS is much neater and organized. Tables are very messy and hard to work with and it becomes very confusing after you add tables within tables as you start to have trouble remembering which cell you are in. However the biggest issue with tables is that the pages have to load the tables one by one which creates a huge load time for sites with many tables within tables.

Tables, in the end, became more suited for their original purpose: to plot data.

…to CSS

Eventually CSS came out and provided a much neater alternative to tables. CSS allowed you to put the different sections of your website into a <div> container. Then you label the div and apply different settings for each div. Not only did this make it both cleaner to edit and faster to load, by allowing the creation of a separate standalone stylesheet, it made websites easily readable for text browsers and older browsers without support for various html or other styling tags.

Because of the cleanliness and faster rendering of CSS layouts, creating CSS stylesheets has now become the dominant styling method for webmasters.

And Beyond!

Even now there are certain effects webmasters can’t achieve and they end up having to create some brute force hack (as in code to get around certain limitations) using javascript or some other language. Maybe a future version of CSS will address this issue. Or perhaps there will be a new styling language to take over CSS. All await…

Note that this article assumes that your website has not been optimized yet. If you have already been actively optimizing your website, you’ve probably done these things already.

1. First, you should think about what keywords you want to optimize your site for. With no clear goal, you won’t be able to optimize your site. Be realistic too. If you are optimizing you site for a major keyword like health care, then it may be a long long time before your reach the top 10 for health care.

2. Next, check the content written on the page and make sure to use the keywords you are trying to optimize for. Don’t overdo it, as you will get penalized. Simply use the keywords where they are appropriate.

3. Third, check the titles of your pages and make sure it is rich in keywords that pertain to the page. For example, if the page in question is about how to grow magnolias, then label the page “Growing Magnolias”. Easy. The title is located in between the <title> tags.

4. Check all of your images and add alt tags in them to provide information about the images. An image with a picture of a printer would be labeled “printer”. Alt tags are commonly used in this format:

<img alt=”printer” src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/printer.jpg”>

5. Check your meta tags and ensure that they contain relevant information. Although meta tags have less importance nowadays, they are still used by many search engines and all search engines still read meta data.

6. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap to Google. To ensure that new pages will always be indexed by Google, you may wish to submit your updated sitemap everytime you create a new page. Google Webmaster Tools also has a variety of site analysis features that provide good statistics and input on how you can improve your website.

7. Make sure all of your pages are navigable by spiders and people with older browsers. This requires you to make sure that all sites have a link to them via html even if you insist on mantaining javascript menus. Javascript menus or Flash links can’t be accessed by all spiders. Some seem to be able to read Javascript link, but javascript, ajax, and other languages don’t have full readability by spiders.

8. Build links to your site. One-way links are better, but reciprocal links have their place as well. Remember the adage “quality over quantity”. This applies to SEO too. A link from an important site is far more valuable than a lot of links from sites with no traffic.

Initially, you can build links by submitting your website to different directories. Niche specific directories should not be overlooked. You can also publish articles on certain sites like Ezinearticles and if you have a great article, people will put it on their own website. If your site isn’t even listed in the search engines yet, you might want to submit your site to them.

Building links is a long term activity and the best way to build links in the end is to simply provide a helpful and useful website. If your site genuinely provides value to others, people will eventually link to you.

9. Ensure that your website is clean and attractive to users. Remember that although search engines can’t tell the difference between beautiful sites and ugly sites, they do pay attention to the popularity of your site. PEOPLE definitely know if a site is pretty or not and a visually attractive site tends to draw more visitors which draws the attention of search engines.

Note that attractive does not mean littered with graphics. Clean and easy on the eyes would be a good goal for visual design.

10. Keep adding more content! The more that is on your site, the more pages that are indexed and more reasons are created for people to go to your website. In addition, each page can rank high for their specific longtail keyword phrase and slowly build the importance of your website.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the optimization of your site to achieve high search engine results. Originally, SEO only consisted of using lots of keywords in your textual content and meta tags, but it has become a lot more complicated over the years.

Content Optimization

The First step to optimizing your website for search engines involves your own website. In general, the more textual content you have on your site, the better. You also need to change all of your meta tags and page titles to reflect your page’s content. Make sure your articles contain the keywords you are trying to rank for but don’t use an unnatural amount of keywords.

Make sure to use “alt” tags for images and other media. URLs should also include keywords and each specific page should have its title included in the URL unless the title is too long. If the title is too long, then just keep the important keywords in a legible condensed title.

Remove all frames from your site of both sorts: iframes and frames. Frames cannot be read by search engines and they are no longer used in commercial web design. They can be used for personal sites such as photo albums, but personal sites generally don’t need to be optimized for search engines anyways.

Link Building

Getting links is another important aspect in optimizing your site for search engines. Although this could be considered marketing, link-building is often associated with SEO.

Generally, you want links from important sources on the web. Sites with a high Google PageRank tend to equate with higher search results in Google which equates to quality over quantity. There are many different methods employed by people to get links such as link exchange, linkbait, article marketing, etc. Alot of them overlap but they all sum up to having awesome content.

Note that other search engines don’t use link popularity as a measure for search engine ranking but Google has a huge search engine market share.

Note* These are the technical basics of SEO; however, having awesome content that is unique to your site is still key. This is just optimization. SEO is more complex than this simple introduction, but the basics of SEO can be easily covered and implemented by anyone with many benefits to their websites.

The JPEG format was created to be used with photos. The GIF and PNG are competing formats that support lossless data compression.

JPEG

The JPEG format is generally used in websites to display photos or realistic art that have a smooth transition between colors. Text, logos or modern art that has sharp color contrast create visible artifacts that don’t look visually appealing. JPEGs generally save photos at the highest quality in relation to file size.

Also, the JPEG format loses some data everytime you save the image because it uses a lossy compression so it will lose some visual quality. The solution is to edit the file with a lossless compression system and only save the final image as a JPEG.

Note* Don’t resize JPEG’s either as this will create noticeable compression artifacts.

GIF

GIF’s is the other original major player in the web image format realm. GIFs are best suited for images that don’t require many colors as GIFs only support a limited 256 color palette. Logos, Banners and sprites are common uses of GIFs as they generally use a few solid colors.

GIFs have a lossless data compression system so it is useful for resizing images. It is generally a bad choice to use GIFs for photos as it requires the use of dithering (a method that creates colors not available in the 256 GIF colors by overlapping different colored pixels.) This makes for a gigantic file size when dealing with images that have lots of variants in color.

The other features that make GIFS popular are its transparency and animation features. GIFs are the only well supported format for animation and is still the most commonly used image format for transparent images.

PNG

The PNG format is a relatively new format that is now completely supported by almost all major browsers. PNGs directly compete with GIFs and is generally a better image format that uses less space and has alpha transparency channels that allow partial transparency in addition to the GIF’s full transparency. PNGs also are not limited to 256 colors. The only major advantage GIFs have over PNGs is animation capability.

Many designers shy away from the PNG format because others tell them that it is not supported by many older browsers including IE6 and below. This is only true for the alpha transparency feature. All the features offered by GIFs, including full transparency, are supported for the PNG on older browsers as well as newer ones. In addition, most older non-IE browsers have alpha transparency rendering capabilities and the latest Internet Explorer offers full support too.

Note* Honestly, I believe PNGs will replace GIFs as its features, compression efficiency, and color palette are all superior to the GIFs.