Attackr.com » Developer Portal for web designers, developers and programmers http://www.attackr.com Come To Share, Come To Learn Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:09:25 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 SEO for Google http://www.attackr.com/seo-for-google/ http://www.attackr.com/seo-for-google/#comments Sun, 29 Jul 2007 04:43:18 +0000 Sean http://www.attackr.com/seo-for-google/ With the recent Google data center updates in the last couple of months, many people find their websites no longer have the high SERPs they had enjoyed prior to the latest Google update.

Just a small heads up, as I type this, Google is in the process of yet another major update.

Holy Search Engine Optimization some of my readers and RSS subscribers might be thinking. What shall I do now?

Have no fear, there are some common starting points that if you apply these to all of your sites, you should be able to see the listings you once did as the norm.

  • Proper naming structure
  • Name your page titles with your keywords if possible
  • Always have a sitemap
  • Always include a robots.txt file
  • If you must use a re-direct, be sure it’s server side, not with a meta refresh tag
  • Don’t use hidden text
  • Make sure your keyword phrase is included in your H1 tags
  • Don’t optimize for more than 2 keywords per page
  • Use text links where possible
  • In any image, be sure to use the alt tag (describe the image, don’t use keywords).
  • Use hyphens, not underscores when you name a page file
  • Make sure your site has an error handling page
  • Create a Google Sitemap and submit it to them (This is in addition to a typical sitemap)
  • Offload all your JavaScript and CSS code (make it all off page).
  • Don’t forget about meta tags

Be sure to follow these simple guidelines and you won’t need to worry too much anytime Google has an update.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/seo-for-google/feed/ 0 Alexa Ranking: What Is It and Why Should You Care? http://www.attackr.com/alexa-ranking-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care/ http://www.attackr.com/alexa-ranking-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care/#comments Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:36:49 +0000 Aeriff http://www.attackr.com/alexa-ranking-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care/ My fellow readers, to be honest, I haven’t paid much attention to my Alexa rank, but some recent posts around the interweb have prompted me to start thinking about it.

For those who don’t know, your website’s Alexa rank affects the amount of money that advertisers will pay to be shown on your site. The lower the numerical Alexa rank, the more money advertisers are prepared to pay. It’s not all that they will be looking for, but it’s an important factor regardless.

In short: a good Alexa ranking matters. So how do you go about ensuring a good ranking? Well, recently I’ve watched the Alexa ranking of this site get better and better over time so the waiting game is a crucial part of the rank improvement process.

So how do you go about improving your Alexa rank? Here’s a few simple tips to get you started:

Install the Alexa Toolbar
If you install the Alexa toolbar on your own web browser, then every time you view your own site, you register as a hit (and so does everyone else who vists your site with the toolbar installed). If you are an Internet Explorer user you can download it here. If Firefox is your browser of choice don’t feel excluded because you can install the SearchStatus Extension instead.

Encourage others to follow suit
Conformity isn’t such a bad thing in this case; so encourage your friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers to install the toolbar or the Firefox extension. Give them motivation by placing a link to it on your site. (Hint, hint)

Install Alexa widgets
It seems every site offers a widget for your site these days and Alexa is no exception. Read all about their widgets here. They look something like this:

Use Alexa redirects
Use Alexa Redirects on your website URL. For example: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.forgedeuphoria.com. Replace forgedeuphoria.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will only count each unique IP address once a day.

Write or Blog about Alexa
Webmasters and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has an effect on your Alexa ranking.

Give people good links
The blogosphere is generally a nice place, so it’s only simple logic that the more times you give people good quality links with good anchor text, the more times you will get the same high quality links in return and hopefully when clicked, will increase your Alexa ranking.

Try Alexa Autosurfs
Do they work? Everyone says maybe for brand new sites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there might be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using this option with caution.

So there are just a few options/tips to increase your Alexa ranking and start moving up in the interweb hierarchy.

Got any other Alexa tips? I’d love to hear them.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/alexa-ranking-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care/feed/ 2 Things to Consider When Choosing a Domain http://www.attackr.com/things-to-consider-when-choosing-a-domain/ http://www.attackr.com/things-to-consider-when-choosing-a-domain/#comments Sat, 02 Jun 2007 08:13:40 +0000 Aeriff http://www.attackr.com/things-to-consider-when-choosing-a-domain/ The worst mistake I’ve made with my blog (forgedeuphoria.com/blog) was not choosing a more appropriate domain name, which can be attributed to my attitude to simply rush in and do things without thinking them through.

These should be the steps taken when making a decision into which domain to buy:

  1. Select a niche or core topic for your site.
  2. Clearly define the purpose and goals of your site.
  3. Choose an appropriate domain name.

I think it’s obvious that I missed the boat on all of the steps when choosing my domain. When I started my blog I had no idea what I was going to write about and now that I’ve settled on some topics I’m starting to suffer for it.

Your choice of domain name can be the most important decision you make for your site and can make or break it too.

I’m #1 on Google’s search results page for “forged euphoria”. Surprisingly I’ve actually had a few hits from people looking for this. I have no idea what they expected to find.

Anyway, the reason I’m #1 for that term is because everyone links to this site with the anchor tag “Forged Euphoria”, so naturally I’m up there in the rankings; the only problem is this isn’t the term I want to rank high with.

The key is choosing a domain that relates specifically to your niche and has your desired keywords in the title.

For example if you were going to start a blog about cars, cars-blog.com or blog-about-cars.com would be two I’d consider using. When people link to you the majority of the time the anchor tag they’d use would be “Cars Blog” or “Blog About Cars”.

Having people link to you is great, having them link with relevant keywords in the anchor tag is much much better. If your domain name contains keywords relevant to your niche you force people to link to your site with the exact keywords which will help you get a better search engine ranking.

If you’re thinking of buying a new domain first consider your niche and the purpose of your blog before you even start throwing around ideas for names. Don’t make my mistake and get stuck trying to make the best of a bad situation and suffer for it in the future.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/things-to-consider-when-choosing-a-domain/feed/ 2 You Have a Great Design, Now Bring in the Traffic http://www.attackr.com/you-have-a-great-design-now-bring-in-the-traffic/ http://www.attackr.com/you-have-a-great-design-now-bring-in-the-traffic/#comments Thu, 10 May 2007 18:43:12 +0000 Karen http://www.attackr.com/you-have-a-great-design-now-bring-in-the-traffic/ You are about to launch your website. Your designer has created a great design for your site or you decided to use a free XHTML template and customized it to your liking. You think you are ready to start making money from your site. If only it was that simple.

So what do you need to do to get that all important traffic to your site? How can you be sure the Search Engines will spider your site and index you?

Here are 3 things you absolutely must do right away:

  • Include relevant keywords in your main page content. So if you are selling a service, describe your service, describe the benefits of your service, using targetted keywords throughout your description. Make sure your content is clear, grammatically correct, and spelled correctly so that visitors to your site will percieve you as a professional.
  • Use normal HTML/XHTML inner links so that the Search engines can spider your entire site properly. Avoid using Javascript or Flash for your main site navigation because the spiders cannot see those elements and your site won’t get crawled.
  • Get incoming links from reputable sites that relate to your service. If other sites are linking to you and they are already established as an authority in your service industry, that gives your site some credibility and your ranking will slowly improve as you continue to acquire more inbound links.

If you focus on the above 3 strategies and make them a priority, you will get the desired results. Here’s to your successful website launch!

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/you-have-a-great-design-now-bring-in-the-traffic/feed/ 1 Improving your SEO with better markup http://www.attackr.com/improving-your-seo-with-better-markup/ http://www.attackr.com/improving-your-seo-with-better-markup/#comments Wed, 09 May 2007 02:40:16 +0000 Brandon Wood http://www.attackr.com/improving-your-seo-with-better-markup/ Most of us probably feel that our SEO skills are pretty decent, but there is always room for improvement.

In a recent article, Chris Pearson gives us the Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs, where he writes:

You’d think that as a result of open-source development practices, blog architectures would be pretty close to perfection in areas like Web standards and maximum SEO impact. You’d be wrong.

The article points to several areas that can easily be optimized for search engines through the use of semantic markup; most of these pointers could be applied to any site, not just blogs.

The first, and easiest, SEO improvement is to optimize your title tags by structuring them like this: Post Title – Site Name.

The terms that appear earliest in the title tag are the ones that carry most weight with search engines, so you want them to be as keyword-rich as possible.

The name of your site probably isn’t very descriptive of the content on any one specific page, but the title of a post should be very descriptive, and so it makes the most sense to put those terms first in your title tag.

The second biggest SEO improvement you can make is to make strategic use of your heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.).

After the title tag, the h1 tag is the next most important in terms of telling search engines about the content of a specific page.

Ideally, each page of your site will have just one h1 tag that, like your title tag, contains keywords that are descriptive of that page’s content.

This is one area that I am willing to bet most sites fail – usually you will see the site name at the top of the page in an h1 tag, with the post title farther down in an h2 or h3 tag.

From an SEO standpoint, this is completely backwards – by doing this, you are telling search engines that your site’s name is the most important element on the page, while the title of your post is the 2nd most important.

The article suggests that your home page should contain the site’s name in an h1 tag, with the titles of your most recent posts in h2 tags, but that individual posts and pages should have the site name contained inside an h2 tag, with the post’s title inside an h1 tag.

The rest of the article contains several additional tips for improving your SEO performance, but I believe these 2 simple changes will give you the most bang for your buck.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/improving-your-seo-with-better-markup/feed/ 0 Optimizing your <title> tag in WordPress http://www.attackr.com/optimizing-your-title-tag-in-wordpress/ http://www.attackr.com/optimizing-your-title-tag-in-wordpress/#comments Thu, 21 Sep 2006 15:26:26 +0000 Brandon Wood http://www.attackr.com/optimizing-your-title-tag-in-wordpress/ The <title> tag can be one of the most important when it comes to search engine optimization. It can easily mean the difference between several page ranks on most search engines.

The key thing to understand is that the keywords appearing earlier in the <title> tag are the ones that carry the most weight. This is why it is important to format your <title> tags as: post title – site name. This formatting can easily be achieved in WordPress by using the following bit of PHP code between the <head> tags:

<title>
<?php wp_title(' '); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo '-'; } ?>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
</title>

By formatting your <title> tags correctly, you should be well on your way to achieving higher search rankings (assuming you have quality content, of course!).

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