Mar
15
Joomla RSS Feeds SEO

samir07:32 pm

Many SEO experts believe that incorporating targeted and relevant RSS content feeds from high ranking web sites within your web site as part of an overall SEO strategy can enhance your search engine ranking across the Search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN. It’s a known fact that if you keep your web site updated with fresh new content then Google will reward you but creating new content on a daily basis can be a challenging task and this is where RSS Feeds can help.
The aim of this article is to provide you with an overview to RSS feeds for Joomla and the reasons why you should use them for your Joomla web site. Again with all articles I don’t claim to be an expert in RSS feeds and the subject is open to debate but Joomla is all about sharing knowledge and at Joomlaseo that is what we like to do. For the SEO experts this might be a little boring but if you are new to SEO or Joomla then the following might be useful to you.
The first port of call is to give you a definition of an RSS Feed as taken from the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_Feed
RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by news websites and weblogs. They are used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.

Joomla RSS support
The next stage will look at Joomla and the inbuilt support it offers for RSS feeds and syndication of content.
Joomla currently offers the following RSS functionality

A number of 3rd party RSS feed modules and components are available for Joomla including DS-Syndicate and RSS 2 Joomla auto import which are included in the Joomlaseo repository.

So what’s so great about RSS feeds ?
When a user visits your web site they expect to see new and relevant content and the same can be applied to the search engine bots who visit your site on a daily basis. The fact is search engines expect to see new and fresh content and your search engine ranking can be effected based on how upto date your content is.
This is where RSS feeds play a key role. If you include 2 or 3 well respected RSS feeds from high ranking sites which includes content relevant to your site then the SERP’s will reward you. The key is not to fill your site with hundreds of RSS feeds and hope to get a number one position in Google because this will not happen. RSS feeds are designed to compliment and enhance your existing Joomla site content.
Do your research and find web sites who offer quality RSS feeds which has some direct relevance to your web site subject matter. Once you have found the RSS feeds add them to specific sections, categories of your site. So for example you have a topic which covers web hosting for joomla then you could include a feed from a respected hosting forum or site. If possible try and add the feeds to categories or topics which are relevent to feeds coming into your site.

Syndicate your content
We have talked about including content specific RSS feeds within your web site but another approach is to syndicate your content across other web sites. This can be achieved in a number of different ways.

Activate your Syndicate module.
You can do this from the Joomla administrator console which will enable users to click on the relevant RSS feed button and include your content on there web site. The benefit of doing the above is that the robots will index the site where your xml feed appears and following the links to your site therefore improving your search engine position based on link backs and relevance.

Submit your RSS feeds
The next approach is to submit your site to a growing number of XML feed sites who accept and publish XML feeds which are then distributed across hundreds of web sites on the net. If your XML feed gets accepted then you may attract lots of new traffic and your position across the search engines will increase.

Where can I publish my RSS feeds ?
We have included a number of web sites who currently accept RSS feeds but if you search Google you can find hundreds of web sites accepting RSS feeds.
http://www.syndic8.com/
http://www.completerss.com/AddFeed.aspx
http://w.moreover.com/cgi-local/site/sourcesubmission.pl
http://pingomatic.com/?oldpinger
http://www.rssfeeds.com/suggest_wizzard.php
http://www.stepnewz.com/sn/suggest_feeds.asp
http://www.feed-directory.com/addfeed

Where can I get RSS feeds from ?
Most of the big content web sites including Yahoo, BBC, computerworld, cnet and Joomla all syndicate XML feeds. The important point is to search for a site which has a high ranking and also has relevant content which can enhance or compliment your site content.

sources http://www.joomlaseo.net

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Mar
13
20 pro tips for web development

samir06:48 am

The difference between a good web designer and a great one is the ability to know how to take short cuts and save time without compromising the quality of work. Pixelsurgeon’s Jason Arber has put together 20 top tips and tricks you should be using to give your work that all-important professional edge

1. Planning

When you’re itching to get started, it’s easy to overlook the most obvious step: planning. Whether it’s drawing wireframes and site diagrams in OmniGraffle or Visio, or even on a scrap of paper, you’ll save time by having an overview of your design at the site and page level before you start building. Obvious errors can be detected and solved before it’s too late to go back and it makes explaining your ideas to clients and colleagues a lot simpler than waving your hands in the air.

2. Do it by hand

Although there are some excellent tools around for building web sites, such as Adobe GoLive and Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver, professional code monkeys prefer to code by hand. Are they crazy masochists? Quite possibly.

There’s only one way to learn HTML, and that’s to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with some actual code. But fear not: HTML has one of the easiest learning curves you’ll ever come across and you can create a basic web page with only a couple of lines. Writing code by hand also ensures that you write the leanest code possible, which is the ultimate aim of all HTML geeks.

Don’t throw out that copy of GoLive or Dreamweaver just yet. Both applications have excellent code writing environments, and have useful features, such as collapsable blocks of code and split views so you can code and see the results at the same time. If you want to try the code-only route, then any text editor that can save in the basic .txt format should do, but Mac users might want to check out Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit, and Windows users should give the freeware AceHTML editor from Visicome Media a whirl.

3. Stylesheets: importing vs linking

There are two ways to attach an external stylesheet to your HTML page, and not all browsers understand both methods. This can be used to your advantage to feed one stylesheet to modern browsers and another to Netscape 4.x, which would otherwise choke on more complex CSS.

Cascading stylesheets are designed to flow over each other. The secret is to create a simple stylesheet that works in Netscape 4, with more complex CSS relegated to an additional stylesheet that’s attached using @import, which Netscape 4.x will ignore:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”simple. css” type=”text/css” media=”screen”>
<style type=”text/css” media=”screen”> @import url(simple.css); </style>

4. Smarter gradient backgrounds

CSS gives you a lot of control and flexibility over the tiling of background images. And the great thing is that tiled images are not limited to the Body background but can also be applied to any DIV, block level or inline element.

Images that tile conventionally or just along the x or y axis can be set to scroll with the page or remain fixed while the rest of the page scrolls over it. Backgrounds can also be offset. This means that it’s easy to create a vertically graduated background that never repeats no matter how long the page is, using graphics that are only a few kilobytes in size.

Using the following code, the background.png file need only be as tall as the gradient and one pixel wide. This example assumes that the gradient fades into white, but the backgroundcolor attribute could be any value.

body { background-color: white; background-image: url(background.png); background-repeat: repeat-x; }

5. Commenting

When you come back to a site that you designed months ago, there’s nothing worse than trying to figure out what you did and attempting to untangle a spaghetti of code. Do yourself (and anyone else who wants to check out your code) a favour by putting comments in your HTML. Comments might add anything from a few bytes to a kilobyte or two to your page, but the time savings are invaluable.

Commenting also encourages you to keep your code tidy by breaking it into logical chunks. Some coders even use comments to create a table of contents for the page, which is only visible in code view.

Be aware that HTML and CSS use two different kinds of commenting, so you may want to learn the difference.

<!– HTML commenting looks like this and is enclosed within angle brackets and two dashes. The opening tag includes an exclamation mark. –> /* CSS comments are enclosed by a forward slash and an asterisk. */

6. Use simple PHP to build sites

There’s no need to become a PHP expert to start using it in your site. If your server supports PHP, you can quickly and easily use server side includes to build a library of commonly used elements, inserting them into your web page with a simple link. This is great for elements like menus, which can exist as a single instance, and means that if you add a new menu item or change the design, you just need to change the include file, which will then update the whole site.

Includes are simply snippets of HTML code such as a table or unordered list. The page calling the includes should end .php and the includes are inserted using the following simple code:

<?php include(“filename.html”); ?>

7. Set fonts using ems

Designers love specifying type sizes in pixels because it corresponds easily and naturally with what they do in Photoshop. But as a type size specification for the web, pixels have one major disadvantage: they can’t be resized in Internet Explorer. As monitor resolutions increase, it’s not only the visually impaired who may want to increase the font size in your design, so what’s the solution?

The answer is to specify type in ems. If you’re unfamiliar with the unit, an em is roughly the width of a lowercase em in a font, and using a browser’s default internal stylesheet, an em is roughly equivalent to 16 pixels. Set the font size attribute in the body tag to 62.5 per cent like this:

body { font-size: 62.5% }

This makes one em roughly ten pixels (16 x 62.5% = 10). Now you can equate pixel sizes to ems. For example, type that is set in 12 pixels could be expressed as 1.2em; 9 pixels becomes 0.9em and so on. What’s more, both the designer and user are happy.

8. IE Box Model Hack

Sooner or later you’ll come across an important bug in Internet Explorer that incorrectly calculates the width and height of block level items by including padding values within the box’s dimensions, rather than adding it outside the box. This can wreck layouts. The solution is known as the Box Model Hack, which uses another bug in IE to force it to use tags that other browsers ignore. If you have a div validly specified like this:

div {_ width: 100px;_ padding: 5px;_ border: 5px solid #fff;_ }

You’ll end up with a box that’s 120 pixels wide in most browsers, but only 100 pixels wide in IE. The easiest solutions is the box-within-a-box method, which places one div inside another:

div {_ width: 100px;_ }
div .hack {_ padding: 5px;_ border: 5px solid #fff;_ }

This is applied in the following way:
<div>
<div class=”hack”>
Your content goes here
</div>
</div>

9. Space saver

Nobody likes building forms in HTML, especially as browsers insist on adding padding around them for no reason. Simply add the following CSS to your stylesheet:

<form style=”margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0;”>

10. Test, test and test again

While Internet Explorer still dominates the browser market by a huge percentage, its lead is being gradually eroded by other browsers such as Firefox and Opera. There are also plenty of people out there still using archaic browsers like pre-Mozilla versions of Netscape.

It’s virtually impossible to design great-looking web sites that work in all browser versions, so it’s best to decide which browsers you’ll support. Mozilla-based browsers, WebKit-based browsers (such as Apple’s Safari), KHTML-based browsers (such as Konqueror), Opera and Internet Explorer versions four and higher are generally considered a safe benchmark. However, you should still be a good net citizen by ensuring that your code degrades gracefully, so that even unsupported browsers can experience your site – even in a limited form (see tip 14).

11. Format fundamentals

In the old days it used to be simple. If the image contained flat colours like a logo, use a GIF. If it was photographic, use a JPEG. There’s also an overlooked third format, PNG (pronounced ‘ping’) that comes in two flavours: an 8-bit version containing 256 colours, like GIFs, and a 24-bit version with alpha channel support allowing for variable transparency.

The bad news is that Internet Explorer doesn’t support PNG’s alpha channels without resorting to a complex hack. However, 8-bit PNGs generally compress much smaller than the equivalent GIF version. Unless you need animation, which PNGs can’t do, PNGs can replace GIFs in most situations, resulting in an overall file size saving.

JPEGs usually create smaller files than 24-bit PNGs, so unless you’re taking advantage of PNG’s alpha channel transparency using the hack (www.alistapart.com/stories/pngopacity/), then JPEGs are still the best format for continuous tone images.

12. The ‘title’ and ‘alt’ attributes

Ensure that all your images make use of the alt and title tags so that screen readers for the visually impaired can correctly parse your page:

<img src=”logo.gif” alt=”logo” title=”logo/” />

13. The correct format for pseudo classes

For text rollover effects, it’s important that the pseudo classes are in the right order, or they won’t work correctly in all browsers. The correct order is:

a:link { color: blue; }
a:visited { color: purple; }
a:hover { color: purple; }
a:active { color: red; }

14. Use semantic mark-up

The idea behind semantic mark-up is to separate the content of your web site from its appearance so that it degrades gracefully. Ideally, if you were to remove the stylesheets, your web site should still work. It might not look pretty, but it means that users with older browsers, will still be able to get meaningful content from your site.

The positioning, styling and a certain amount of interactivity can then be added with stylesheets and CSS-P.

15. Favicons

Favicons are the little 16×16 pixel icons that appear in your favourites lists and the title bars of web sites. They’re quick and easy to add: save a graphic in .ico format (Mac users may want to consider using Graphic Converter as Photoshop doesn’t support this format) and put it in your site’s root folder. It’s as simple as that.

16. Change capitalisation using CSS

If you need something written in capitals, such as a headline, rather than rewriting the copy, let CSS do the donkey work. The following code will transform all text with an h1 attribute into all capitals, regardless of format.

h1 { text-transform: uppercase; }

17. Wrapping text around images

For a quick and dirty way of wrapping text around images, use the image’s align attribute to push it to the left or right. Rather than jump below the image, text should now flow along the edge.

<img src=”image.jpg” align=”left”>

18. Universal character sets

Character sets are an important part of a web page’s definition, but they’re probably the least understood component. Character sets, which are defined in a web page’s invisible head section, tell the browser what method is being used to encode the characters. A charset ISO Latin 1 (also known as ISO 8859-1) will render the code it finds using a basic Western alphabet, but a charset of Shift JIS will attempt to render any characters it finds as Japanese.

With so many competing character sets, problems can occur, especially when using the MS Windows character set (which contains certain characters that may be replaced by a blank space on other operating systems) or when several languages need to appear on a single page.

The answer is to use a single universal character set that’s able to cover most eventualities. Luckily one exists: UTF-8, which is based on Unicode. Unicode is an industry standard that’s designed to enable text and symbols from all languages to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. UTF- 8 is rapidly becoming the charset definition of choice, and should be included in your web page’s head like this:

<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/ html;charset=utf-8” />

19. Print styles

When people print web pages, often they’re not interested in your flashy graphics: they just want a simplified version of the page. Using CSS it’s possible to create a separate stylesheet that only affects printed versions of your site, rather than having to create a new HTML page or adapt an existing one. You add a print stylesheet in exactly the same way that you would add a regular stylesheet to your page:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type”text/css” href=”print.css” media=”print”>

or

<style type=”text/css” media=”print”> @import url(print.css); </style>

This ensures that the CSS will only apply to printed output and not affect how the page looks on screen. With your new printed stylesheet you can ensure you have solid black text on a white background and remove extraneous features to maximise readability.

20. Learn from others

Finally, a quick and simple tip: learn from great sites built by others. Any site’s HTML is easily accessible by viewing a page’s source code. See how others have done things and apply their methods to your own work.

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Mar
09
Forget about Page Rank.

samir08:06 pm

In case you don’t know what Page Rank (PR) is, it is a score that Google gives a web page out of 10. To find out what sort of page rank you have you will have to download the Google toolbar from toolbar.google.com.

Google’s Australian site, google.com.au has a PR of 8/10 whereas google.com itself has a 10/10. Many people think that PR is the main determining factor to getting a web page ranked high in Google. What a load of codswhallop! (I don’t know what that is I just like saying it). Google looks at the information on the page before it looks at anything else, so if you want to get ranked high in Google focus on creating good content before worrying about Page Rank.

An SEO Tie Breaker

Page Rank is really more about being a tie breaker. It’s like that bit of extra training that gets the athlete over the line. When Google sees two pages that are equal in relevancy to a search, the final thing that is considered is Page Rank. The higher the PR then the higher the ranking, providing all other factors are equal.

In my SEO Melbourne based business I have regularly ranked many pages that have a 0PR higher than those with 4/10, 5/10 and even 8/10. The key is to focus on your keywords in places like your page title, article headings and especially text links.

Anchor Text

Open another browser window and type in the word ‘Failure’ into Google, then come back here…. Go on… I’ll wait. Funny huh? George W. Bush biography is no.1. Now funnily enough the word “Failure” does not appear anywhere in Dubyah’s bio. The reason he is ranked no.1 is that lots of bloggers linked the word ‘failure’ back to his website. If you look closely you will see some politicians from the left there as well.

Search engines like to see keywords in your anchor text or links. Google thinks that the most important website in the world for the words “click here” is Adobe Acrobat. I guess they are kind of right too, when you consider that there a gazillion web pages linking the words “click here” to download Adobe Acrobat. Once again the words “click here” do not appear on the Adobe page.

These two examples have promoted the idea that the more links you get back to your site the higher you will rank. Once again this is only true if you have done the work on your own web page first.
For instance if I wanted to rank high for “Online Marketing Melbourne” ( I live in Melbourne Australia) then I had better build a page where that phrase is present in the page title and maybe in an article heading and certainly in the body of the article as well as in a link somewhere. I should do this before I go around trying to get thousands of backlinks with online marketing Melbourne in them. That is what I call the lazyboy approach to SEO. Focus on your web pages first before you try and get back links.

Where PR counts.

Let’s just say for instance, that you are in an incredibly competitive space for ranking. Maybe you are trying to rank for a phrase like “Appear on the first page of Google” I have ranked no.1 for that for quite some time. However recently someone knocked me into no.2 spot. I don’t mind really, as the guy that did it, attended one of my SEO workshops . The pages were equal for SEO but his had a higher page rank, so it ranks no.1

So instead of trying to increase your Page Rank you should be increasing quality links back to your site. By quality I mean getting links from similar pages. This does a few things. Firstly it will generate targeted traffic back to your site. Secondly it will provide a path for the search engine bots to find you and thirdly it will increase your Page Rank but this should not be the primary reason to build links.

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Mar
07
Using Chat Rooms To Gain Massive Website Traffic

samir09:54 pm

Spamming chat rooms or instant messaging systems with undifferentiated marketing messages is certainly not a very good idea.But if they are used the right way, these channels can be great to communicate with the market - especially to establish a dialogue with customers.

Have you ever been to a chat room and posted a message. If you have then you may learn some free web-advertising secrets on how to market your products and service in chat rooms.

Chat rooms are usually broken into categories. You will need to find the right chat room where your targeted audience would gather. If there isn’t one, them you may need to create one.

It will be of no use to create one that is obviously for the sole purpose of selling your product or service. Rather, it needs to attract people who would be interested in your product or service.

For example: If you sell garden products, your chat room should be on the subject of gardening and not the brand name of the products you sell.

Another way to use a chat room to promote your business is to include a chat room on your web site. Host a free online seminar in your own chat room about a subject of your expertise.

Use your chat room to meet with your current customers and answer any questions or address and problems they may have. Regularly schedule free events in your chat room and be certain that your customers are made aware of when they will occur.

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Mar
07
Human And Search Engine Friendly Web Design

samir09:54 pm

Search engines like to index as much website as possible. Unfortunately, many impatient webmaster sways to the dark search engine optimization. This article aims to aid webmasters to create an original, unique, and user-friendly website. Human must first like your website. After you satisfy humans, you may tweak the website to meet search engine spiders. The Search Engine Spiders are a piece of code that crawl the web to index website.Meta Tags includes the page title, keywords, and description. The Page Title of Meta Tags tells the main topic, subject, or reason for the website. For example, Affordable Web Hosting Service shows that the hosting plans are easy on the pocket. The visitors can easily tell that the website sells hosting plans, and domains. The Keywords of Meta Tags are search terms. It is the words or text that visitor enters to Search Engine to find the website. For example, the web hosting design company keyword finds companies who creates website. Lastly, the Description of Meta Tags describes what the web page or site does. With the Meta Tags information, the spiders check the relevance of the copy or content of the website.

A well-formed HTML website keeps the search engine spiders happy. The spiders repay you by indexing your website. Keep your website concise, and reasonable in length. Lengthy content bores any visitors who come to your website, and dilutes the keywords which tell the importance of your website. With proper keyword count, the website increase in importance. Not toe mention, the content must relates to your keyword.

Content Management Software provides an easy way to build or create website. And, there are many of this kind of software. There are web-based and window-based. You may have to pay attention on the HTML that Content Management Software develops. If the HTML is well-formed, we recommend to continuing of its use.

The visitors of your website must find what he is looking in one to three links. So, keep the website as flat as possible. Besides, the search engine spiders stop crawling in certain level or deep. This is a protection against endless loops. Dynamic websites violates the most especially dynamic website with many parameters. However, spiders go thru dynamic website as much as static website. With many and complicate parameters, the spiders stops. Then, it looks for another website or page. Also, the keywords on the link lead the visitor to the information that they are searching for.

The Site Map Page which contains the links of the website gives spider clues how to go thru the website. Google allows you to submit Site Map in xml format, while Yahoo allows you to submit a text file with all the links. Google Site Map are far superior. Webmaster can login to see Google spider statistics. The statistics shows top queries, link popularity, error page, and more. Be sure to include any new page and renamed page to the Site Map. For any renamed page, you may consider 301 redirects. The 301 Redirects safely direct visitor an old page to the new page. Another, the 301 Redirect is the only accepted redirect by spiders.

Good-looking website with extensive JavaScript, Cookies, Session id, Frames, and Flash gives spider a hard-time. There is hope though. There is work-around them. Be aware of the work-around.

Bread Crumbs dramatically adds to the usefulness and functionality to the website. Bread Crumbs are a series of links that leads to the current page. The visitors navigate the website with ease, because the visitor can go back and forth with ease.

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