Archive for August, 2008

8 Webmaster Tips for Good Search Engine Ranking

Posted by admin in google webmaster tools, search engine optimization, seo, tips, webmaster on August 28th, 2008

1. Build incoming links. No kidding. Build incoming links. It’s hard to do, and can be extremely time consuming and tedious, but keep at it. If you wonder why your site still has a PageRank of 2 and isn’t showing up in your competitive searches, it’s because you have not built enough incoming links.

2. Redirect yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com (or visa versa). If you don’t, search engines will see both URLs as separate websites and you could get duplicate content penalties. Type site:yourdomain.com in the Google search box. Then type site:www.yourdomain.com in the Google search box. If you have a different number of links, or different links indexed, Google thinks you have two different websites with the same content.

3. Don’t point links to your index page. Point them all to your domain. That includes your internal navigation.

4. Use Google Webmaster Tools to flag any errors in site structure, tags, redirects or indexing. The most useful tools, in my opinion are the robots.txt analysis tool and the URL Removal Tool. Also of note are the sitemap submission tool and diagnostics that tell you if you have 404 errors, or if there are problems with URLs in your sitemap.

5. Leave your company name out of your page title and h1 tags. Chances are that searches for your company name are insignificant in your overall search engine ranking strategy, and you are diluting your keyword relevance.

6. Make sure that all of your page titles are different, and are targeted to the content of the page. Having 20 pages titled “custom widgets” doesn’t make the search engines think that your website is the place to learn about custom widgets. It makes them think that users will have a hard time finding information on your site.

7. Use search engine functions to monitor the pages of your website that are indexed. Spiders don’t always obey robots.txt, so you can end up with a lot of garbage in the index if you don’t keep on top of it. This is especially important if you have a dynamic website.

8. Add new content on a regular basis. Search engines think big websites are important websites, and keeping it fresh keeps them coming back.

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Adding Google Analytics to an ELGG installation

Posted by admin in elgg, google analytics on August 28th, 2008

This is more of a rant than a tutorial, so forgive me if you are searching a solution and this doesn’t help you.

As far as open source web applications go, Elgg is pretty difficult to work with. It’s buggy, there are a lot of compatibility problems, and support from the development team and the community is less than stellar. The application is, however, very powerful, and has many functions that make it the best choice, in my opinion, for an open source social networking web application.

After some difficulty, I got my installation at http://www.fanclubhelper.com up and running. Being afraid to touch it again, for fear I’d open up a can of worms, I didn’t make any modifications for over a year. In that time, however, the site started ranking well in some searches I’m interested in, and it was now time to install Google Analytics, to see how the traffic was doing.

In most open source software applications I’ve used, in order to make changes, such as adding Google Analytics tracking code, you edit the template file. So I went to /mod/template/templates/MyTemplate/pageshell and pasted the Google Analytics code before the closing body tag. In checking the live site, however, the code was not installed.

Since the closing body tag needs to be coming from somewhere, I took a shot in the dark and added the Google Analytics code to the pageshell file of the default template. That worked, but I have no idea why. It also had the side-effect of putting some text over my logo where it wasn’t before. I can only guess that one of the pageshell templates I put was different on the server than my local copy, and I forgot about it during the year of inactivity. Another ELGG mystery that I’d rather not get into. It’s working well enough, so no touchy!!

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Paypal Sandbox - So Slow it’s Unusable

Posted by admin in paypal, web development, web programming, website design on August 6th, 2008

Paypal offers developers an environment called the “sandbox” to test out their applications. “Sandbox”is a generic term for “test environment.” I last used Paypal Sandbox a year or more ago in testing a Paypal integration with Oscommerce, and didn’t notice anything unusual.

Today, however, just now, when throwing a quick test together to detail out a quote, I was unable to use the environment. Page loading is over 10 minutes and counting. To check whether or not it was just me, or just a momentary problem, I did a search and found quite a lot of angry complaints. The complaints spanned a year’s time and seemed mixed at first. The last complaint, just a couple of weeks ago was just resigned. He would not be using paypal in his applications again.

A major theme of the complaints was that Paypal wasn’t interested in improving the situation. They didn’t really care. That was something I had heard before, not from the developer community, but from eBay sellers. They complained of problems, which Paypal customer service was very uninterested in resolving.

If Paypal were just another online store it would be one thing. The problem is that Paypal is basically a bank that has a LOT of peoples financial information online. Are they competent? Do they just not care about the little guy? It seems to me that Paypal should be all about the little guy, because I don’t see many Paypal buttons on Fortune 500 websites.

The bottom line is, if a developer can’t use Paypal’s Sandbox, why not try Google Checkout?

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