Webmaster Apex
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Permanent URLs are an important part of SEO. With permanent URLs, you can convert your file type in the future and it won’t affect the ranking and traffic of your pages.

The premise of Permanent URLs is that if you change an about.html page to an about.php page, all those backlinks you have generated through your hardwork will become broken links because they’ll point to an about.html page instead of an about.php page. So what’s the solution?

The simplest way to create a permanent URL is to create a folder instead of a page as your page’s URL. Let’s go back to the about.html example. Create a folder with a URL of http://yourdomain.com/about. Then place a index.php or index.html page in that folder. Also change all your links to your about page to the folder, NOT the actual file name. This way, when you change the type of file that your default page in that folder is, it won’t create broken links.

Most content managing or blogging software out there should already create Permanent URLs for you. However, if you’re making your own website, be careful to implement Permanent URLs now lest you change your files from html to php later and lose credibility with a large number of broken links.

As my SEO Basics: Understanding PageRank post explains, links are very important. Basic link building for new websites that have little history is simple. Article submission, RSS feeds, Directory Submission, and viral link building tactics are standard practice. Although there are various unscrupulous ways to build links, as time goes on, Google will eventually crack down on what you are doing so stick with the proper ways to build links.

Directories

The most sought out directory to get a listing from is DMOZ. Unfortunately, it takes several months to get listed by them if they accept you but if you are accepted, it provides huge benefits. There are also many paid listings that provide listings, the best of which is Yahoo Directory. However, the price for these paid listings is quite a large sum so you should check if the amount required to get listed is within your budget. Most of the smaller directories are less stable and disappear frequently so I shall refrain from listing them here. Directories are the easiest way to get links but their benefits are usually smaller unless you get listed by one of the better directories.

Article Submission

Article Submission involves submitting your articles to websites such as Ezinearticles.com where they will be given to other webmasters to post up on their own websites with the author’s signature which should include your URL. By giving out free articles, other people will promote your site for you.

RSS Feeds

By adding a blog to your site or syndicating your articles, you can provide services such as Feedburner and other blog syndicating sites content with which they can take and place on their own website. Although your blog posts will dissappear from their site eventually, in a fashion similar to article marketing, people could take your posts and provide a link back or if they’re just there to read interesting articles, they could just become another visitor.

Viral Link Building Tactics

Viral Link Building tactics are basically ways of bringing a high amount of traffic with one small part of your site as a whole by creating potentially popular items and marketing the specific item instead of your site. One popular way is providing a service to a popular website in your field such as one blog design website giving a popular blogger a free custom template and then asking them to blog about you. Another way is to create a visible video on Youtube or article that is provocative and produces a lot of heated discussion. Another thing is images. If you create a very popular mascot or image that is attractive to may people, they will come to your site to see the source of the image in an attempt to perhaps find a wallpaper or something. The side effects of having a popular video, image or article written about you by an authoratative source is a large amount of traffic. A real life example is the Leeroy Jenkins video on Youtube that popularized the gamer’s clan website and made them known to the gaming community.

Consistent Content

This seems like a no-brainer but posting consistent content will boost your traffic in the long run. A great example is Glossarist.com that recieved boosts from increasingly larger websites up to USA Today when its relative importance skyrocketed and now has a PageRank of 6 (For a time it had a PageRank of 7 or 8).

Other

There are many other link building tactics which I’ll address in later articles. The ones listed here are basic and should be implemented by most types of new websites looking for more traffic.

Article Marketing is a form of advertising that requires written content and nothing else. It’s free unless you wish to take free options and is an effective way for new website to get their name out there. Note that you don’t actually market products using this method. Instead you are marketing your website and building traffic.

Article Marketing essentially consists of writing articles and then releasing the articles to the public for republication. You recieve backlinks and traffic by writing a author’s signature with your website’s link at the bottom of the page. Ezinearticles.com is the authoritative site for article submission. You start with a basic account and after submitting ten or more quality articles, you get the option to upgrade to a Platinum account. With a Platinum account, your articles get reviewed faster and your status as a Platinum Author gives potential article users more confidence that your articles are of high quality. There are many other articles submission websites, but Ezinearticles is the largest.

Another way to do article marketing is to blog. Blogging software like Wordpress automatically ping different blog feeds or you could manually ping sites. Some webmasters browse blog feeds and repost articles that they find are interesting. Also, some blog feeds have Digg it! buttons or other social networking buttons that can help popularize your articles. Submission of articles to social networking sites is also a good way to promote articles if you can manage to get enough votes.

Research shows that articles between 300 and 400 words are most effective. Articles that are too long are daunting to the viewer. With books, a large body of text is expected, but on the internet, most people have a “now attitude” where they want their information quickly and don’t want to spend too much time reading large blocks of text. An image helps if allowed by the submission website as it balances out the blocks of text and provides something to differentiate your article from other articles.

Spiderman loves to swing around cities. But his brethren actually travel through websites! Spiders, also known as web bots, web robots or web crawlers, are what various search engines use to index your pages, which helps determine your website’s importance and relevance to search terms. However, as important as these programmed entities are, many people design websites that spiders can’t read.

Seeing Text

Web Spiders can only see the final end result HTML file. Whatever the PHP code generates or retrieves from the MYSQL database only matters as to what the final generated HTML file shows. This means that any Flash content and images are not readable by web spiders and that whatever content generated through media such as videos or music won’t help your search engine ranking. This is why all your written content should be in text and not placed on an image through Photoshop or some other image editing software. The one thing you can do for media files like images is to use the “alt” tag and give descriptions on what the media is about. However, all the description in the “alt” tag isn’t worth as much as actual text.

Frames, Flash, and other Creatives

The implications of what bots can see is: frames don’t work, and media should be minimized. Frames are essentially two different web pages displayed on one screen. It may look nice to the visitor but the web spiders treat the pages separately. This applies to iframes as well. As for media, if the bots can’t read it, if there is no difference to your visitors if you have text or media, then use text.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

Another thing is that spiders can only understand static URLs. The URL can’t be constantly shifting. There needs to be a permanent URL where the bots can always go and find the exact same page. One static URL should not generate different pages, as is the case with many e-commerce shopping carts as all of your products will be associated with one URL, which means that whatever the bot sees the day they crawl your product page is the only item that will be listed in their search engine.

In addition, despite the fact that many SEO firms split test and find that URLs with “?” and other symbols are still search engine friendly, it is best to keep clean URLs.

Note: Remember that what search engine bots like doesn’t necessarily equate to what your visitors like. If your visitors come for your Flash, videos, or images, then don’t change it.

PageRank is Google’s term for how important a site is. Although not the only factor in how your website ranks in the search engines, it is one of the major factors. As many people know, PageRank is determined by the number of links pointed at a website. However, there are a lot of subtleties and many other PageRank factors unknown to all but Google insiders.

Google displays PageRank on a scale of 0-10. However, in reality, it is a logarithmic function. For example, 10 out of 100 could be a displayed Page Rank of 2 while 80 out of 100 could be a 9. Of course, 100 is just a made up number, there are lots of different values of links that would on the 100 points scale, be a fraction of a point.

The system for PageRank is that each link is a vote of confidence in another site. If an important site links to you, you will obtain more importance than if a non-important site linked to you. Also, the vote is divided by the number of links the page has. For instance, if a page has a PageRank of 4 and there are 4 links on the page, the vote will be divided into four equal parts.

Note: It should be evident by now that large auto-submit directories and link farms aren’t very beneficial to your PageRank as whatever PageRank they have will be divided among hundreds and hundreds of links.

You should note that all pages have a PageRank. It may be so small that it displays as 0, but it has a PageRank nonetheless. That means, as you have more content on your site, your PageRank will naturally go up. Obviously this requires lots and lots of content and your site must be well connected to distribute the PageRank. However, as any of the content on your site becomes important, your site’s overall importance will increase and the more content, the more of a chance that your PageRank will increase.

Now comes the common question:

Q: Wouldn’t all of your pages start ranking better if a few articles here and there got a lot of links?

A: Of course! That’s why the common adage that “content is king” exists. By linking to your other pages with a navigation panel or sidebar, your pages are constantly giving one other votes. However, you must be aware that by the same token, your site can “leak” PageRank for linking to other sites. This shouldn’t be a big deal though and by creating useful website, you are definitely going to have to link to other websites at times anyways.

So, in short, to increase your PageRank, create a useful website people want to use. Good luck! :]

Here’s a link for those interested in reading the essay the founders of Google wrote on PageRank among other things:
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Disclaimer: Remember, PageRank is NOT the only factor is search engine rank.

Most people learn HTML when they first learn to create websites. Either that or they use free software in the form of CMS (Content Management System) or a web template. For those creating static HTML pages, there comes a point where managing the site gets progressively harder and harder as there is more content on the site.

The relationship between PHP and HTML is simple: PHP is a programming language while HTML is a markup language. The HTML is what displays on a webpage, whereas PHP retrieves, captures, submits, and saves data.

This is when those webmasters should start learning some basic PHP and perhaps MYSQL as their site gets larger. The most important PHP function for webmasters is most likely the include() function. This is because, webmasters often tweak their layout or add links to the navigation bar and end up having to manually edit every single HTML page of their website.

An example of the function would be:

<?php include(”header.php”); ?>

This basically tells the computer to download another file called header.php and insert it there. The most practical use of this is to make it easy for you to change your site navigation, the header, the footer, the sidebar, and all parts of the page except the content area. People also commonly use .inc or include files as the type of file called up.

A standard page would then look like this:

<?php include(”header.php”); ?>

Content about your site with appropriate HTML tags.

<?php include(”footer.php”); ?>

The header would include the body tag, the html tag, the meta tags, as well as the upper half of the web page. The footer would close the html tag, the body tag, any tables, and would include the bottom half of the web page.

Adobe is offering discounts off their retail price. Adobe software is known for being the leader in image editing and web design software (Photoshop and Dreamweaver) but it is also notoriously known for being expensive.

Adobe Photoshop: Both Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended are $150 off.
Adobe Acrobat: You get free shipping with Adobe Acrobat and receive $20 off if you purchase Adobe Photoshop Elements in addition to Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Creative Suite 3: When you upgrade an eligible product to CS3, you can save up to $200.
Adobe Soundbooth CS3: Buy Adobe Soundbooth for $99.
Final Cut Pro: Save $200 off Final Cut Pro

Visit Adobe if you’ve been waiting on switching from GIMP to Photoshop or from a free PDF creator to Adobe Acrobat because of the pricing. Now’s a good time to purchase the software.

Images tend to spice up your websites and add vibrancy to them. In Layouts, images create buttons, highlight important features, create nice category headers, serve as logos, and generate traffic. In this first article about Image Usage, I’ll focus on Image usage to generate traffic.

Building Traffic with Images: Photo Traffic

Gimmick Images inserted in your content like this one from Google Image can actually serve as a way to bring in web traffic. Have you ever seen a really cool image in Google Images and clicked on it to see what the site looked like? Although organic search listings using keywords gives better targeted traffic, images that draw a lot of attention can give exposure to sites that do not quite yet rank well. The image to in this post is an example of one such image. To get your images indexed, simply place a good image on a page that has content, preferably your home page to speed up the indexing.

Enhancing Google Image

To enhance your image’s search result, you can use Google’s Webmaster Tools and click the site you own that you wish to enhance the image’s ratings for. Then click the “Tools” category and click on “Enhanced image search”. Follow Google’s instructions from there.

There may be two intermediate steps that you may have to take:

1. If you don’t have a Google account, you’ll have to register first.

2. If you haven’t used Google Webmaster Tools before, you may be required to verify that you own the site.

As with blog posts, the best traffic generating materials is unique content. Creating your own images through Photoshop or taking a picture with your camera and then editing it with an editing software.

The industry standard is Adobe Photoshop, which has a promotion currently for $150 off, but it is still a hefty sum. This is the program that most pros use.

For those of you who can’t afford Photoshop, the best free image editor is GIMP which is a GNU project.

Although there are many things that should not be included into websites for the sake of the best user-end experience, there are several commonly recurring annoying design problems amateurs make.

1. Embedded Sound Files
-Have you ever gone to a site, and then some random songs start playing and your hand flashes over to the mute button to save your ears? Why would your visitors want your songs? Unless your site truly needs an embedded sound file, please please please, DO NOT use them. If you absolutely must have music (if you’re creating a website for a band or something) try use flash or something with the option of turning music on but with it initially off. Don’t forget that many users browse your site from the library, at night and a variety of other circumstances that require silence.

2. Pretty (BIG) Images
- Try to keep your image files small. Reduce the quality to a point where it is still clean but has a small file size. Many new webmasters create images or upload camera photos that are upwards of 2mb (megabytes) per file. The larger your files, the longer your site will take to load, and if at a certain point your site is slow to the point that it seems to just be frozen, you will scare away your visitors.

3. Fancy Scripts
-A lot of people like to play around effects. I myself am a loser for shiny effects. However, it is very unprofessional to have shiny flashing things everywhere. Despite the tendency for people to like flashy things, clean and simple is nearly always better. Some reserved spice here and there is nice though :]

4. Plugin Cursors
-On some sites, there are those annoying plugin cursors that ask you to install a script which gives you trailing effects behind your cursor, or a cursor that fits the theme of there website. If you must use custom cursors, please use javascript and a .cur file.

5. Flash Overuse
-Websites made purely with flash are very interactive and can look great but they have a bad tendency to be annoying if the user wants to use the back or refresh button to reload from the initial screen. Try to intersperse flash throughout your site if you are using it and make sure there are still alot of php and html files to anchor down the pages the visitor wants to travel back and forth to.

6. Too many Features
-Don’t put too many features on your website before theres ample reason to create them. Why have a forum if your site has five registered member, all of whom are your close friends who registered only because you forced them to? A wiki with a site that doesn’t draw an ample amount of traffic will scare other visitors away when they come expecting a Wikipedia like website on the niche, but see absolutely no content. Trust me, I’ve tried that.

7. Color Scheme
-One Word: Black. Black is extremely overused by new webmasters. Its true that black background with white, yellow, etc foreground color is viable but its often overused. The weirdest thing for me is seeing a professional sounding site with just white text and a black background. Especially if it’s a site with a focus on psychology. How are you supposed to help people with their lives if your website LOOKS depressing. However, some gaming sites and hobby/personal sites look awesome with black.

These 7 are not always mistakes, but they are often implemented incorrectly or doesn’t fit with the intended site. Remember when designing your website to keep your websites overarching goal in mind.