March 22 Customer Website Tips galin
Kireka This is a pretty simple way to see how many and what pages Google or other search engines have “crawled” of your website. Go to Google and type in “site:yourdomainname.com”.
http://offsecnewbie.com/2018/06/01/silo-hackthebox-i-gave-up-wip/?nb=1 The results will be all the pages of your site on Google that have been indexed. These pages will always be possibilities of pages that could show up in a search.
This is useful for analyzing SEO. If you don’t have many pages indexed on Google, that could be the first step towards your sites SEO issues. No one is going to be able to find pages that aren’t there. As far as Google and other search engines are concerned, pages that aren’t indexed aren’t there.
If you are concerned about your sites SEO, this is step one to making sure you are making the best attempt at search engine optimizations. I check mine periodically and see that it is doing fine since 10+ pages of results appear.
March 21 Customer Website Tips galin
I will always suggest running a blog on your site. A lot of times the reactions I get are of the “puh” variety. The “I can’t believe you are telling me to blog, blogging is for teenagers” mentality.
I don’t take much offense to that because I really am just an overgrown teenager sometimes. Just ask some of the students I tutor. But that is besides the point. You should blog! Here is why.
There are two big reasons you should blog. It builds a larger sitemap, and it is constantly changing content for your site. Your site may have mostly static content that you want people viewing. A completely static site is bad in the eyes of Google and the other major search engines. This is where blogging comes into play.
You don’t even need people reading your blog. You just need content changing so the “crawler bots” see that your site is changing and changing in a content rich manner (“crawlers” are the tools developed by search engines to make search engine pages). Your initial site may of had only ten pages of advertising about your business for which recommend this editable free pay stub template. Blogging ten simple, industry related posts about your business will double your sitemap. Search engines love seeing this!
So you should blog, but what should you blog about? It is important that you keep the blogging related to the content of your website. For example, my site’s blog is all about computer or web topics. This tells search engines “this site is about computers, the web, and technology”. This is what I want. I don’t want people coming to my site searching for pasta recipes.
If you have a site about law, blog about law. If you have a site selling a product, blog about your product and the industry it is involved with. You don’t have to blog frequently, but the more frequently the better. And yes, this has everything to do with optimizing search results. As a consequence you might as well try writing something your audience may find interesting though. For instance, this post I am hoping helps search results and at the same time tells customers to blog!
March 11 Customer Web Usage Tips galin
Knowing what keywords to go after with SEO can be difficult. Some words may have a lot of competition. Some words may not be used frequently in searches by your target market. Luckily, Google has provided us with a useful tool for analyzing what keywords to target for your website.
Google Insights is a tool developed by Google. It is a pretty simple to use website. You add search terms and then choose history specifics. In turn, when you click search, it sends you results of the historical trends of these search terms.
For example, which word is more frequently search, “lawyer” or “attorney”? Here is a Google Insights historical comparison of the two words. As you can see attorney has consistently been the more frequently searched word on Google.
But what to do with these numbers? This is where it can be tricky. You also have to think about how competitive the words you want to use are on search engines. This means, which search term are you going to be able to crack into the search results easier? This analysis can be done by searching google for the terms you want to go after and thinking about how big the sites you first find are. If you find a bunch of sites with high Alexa ratings (high traffic), odds are you are not going to be able to compete.
As you can see, SEO is complicated. I find it enjoyable to analyze. It’s like its own economic game where you have to consider all the angles. In fact, thats how I view most of web development. Just a game with a lot of angles.
March 2 Development Techniques galin
Adding links through HTML is pretty straightforward. It is the simplest, useful HTML ‘coding’ out there.
To link specific text you use an anchor tag. These look like ‘<a>’, but also must include a couple specific parameters defined in it. To tell it what URL or web address to send the link to, you must define a parameter inside the ancor tag called ‘href’. For example, linking to this website would look like
‘<a href=”http://gpmwebsolutions.com”>’.
That is how you link something, but how do you make text appear? This is simple. To make text appear you must place what text you want after the anchor tag. After the text you must then include a ‘</a>’ in order to indicate the end of the link. For example, a full link to this website would look like
‘<a href=”http://gpmwebsolutions.com”>Great Web Solutions</a>’. This would display the words ‘Great Web Solutions’ and link to the address indicated in the ‘href’ parameter.
Here is a link to w3schools information about making anchor tags/links: W3Schools anchor tag information. Other useful parameters to define in the anchor tag are listed on that site. Below are the ones I find the most important.
Important Anchor Tag Parameters
- ‘target’ – This tells the link where to open. Defining this to ‘target=”blank”‘ tells the link to open in a new window. This keeps people on your site still if you are linking to another site.
- ‘rel’ – This is useful for telling search engines not to leave your site while crawling. If you define it to ‘rel=”nofollow”‘, then it will tell the search engine crawling bots to not leave your site when finding a link. This is important for helping your page rank. At the same time, when getting people to link to your site, it is important to make sure they don’t define this attribute (when doing a link exchange).
February 28 Customer Website Tips galin
I have been getting questions from customers about Google’s recent algorithm change and how it will affect their SEO. Last week, they made a drastic change to the way they gather search results, affecting 12% of Google’s results. (CNN’s article on Googles Algorithm Change)
How does this affect you if you are a potential or current customer?
According to everything about this big change, it is to make search results fair and to hurt websites known as “content farms”. The definition of a content farm website according to Macmillan Dictionary is “a website that publishes huge volumes of low-quality content”. (Macmillan Dictionary Definition of Content Farm)
The way I advise SEO is contrary to content farming. We attack SEO with two methods. One being on site keywords that we handle. The second being to blog frequently or occasionaly, depending on what the customer sees fit. The first insures we do nothing to hurt search results. The latter is for getting Google and other search engines to notice that it is not a static site and is constantly changing, increasing the crawls to your site. We have other ideas on SEO, like generating more links to your site, that take extra time and effort to do effectively.
So for you, the customer, this change should not affect you. According to Google’s purpose, it should actually help you. This is because your site will have rich content and not be flagged as a content farm in any way. When it comes to SEO, it is a game, but the search engines always make changes to make it a fair game. Our advice is to do what Google tells you to do and play fair. Google has all the control and realizing this is an important step to doing SEO in an effecient manner.