Basic Features

1. Before entering the website you are asked to select the city where you plan to buy the product from.
2. Only one product / service is offered per day. The product varies from each location / city. The time duration will be shown.
3. Only limited number of products will be available for the sale. The site will constantly update the sold out and remaining available lists and details.
4. The deal will be canceled if the target sales are not met for the day. For example, if there are 500 iPads for sale and only 200 interested buyers, then the deal will be canceled since the target was not achieved. Customers account will be charged only when the deal is committed.
5. Sign Up is easy and free. Want to try some? Here it is – Woot, Dealfind, Dealaday etc.

The buyer benefits by getting a product / service for a discounted price which no other seller is offering at the moment.

So how does the seller make money from this style of Internet Marketing? The answer is– Bulk Purchase. He makes a deal with the producer / wholesale distributor for the products which he lists on his website. And if the target is met then the deal is done or else it is pulled off.

If you want to know more or utilize the business opportunity of One-Deal-A-Day Website rush to this page now !

What he didn’t know was the remaining part of his responsibility. The major one – maintaining his ranking.

Once you have optimized your website for search engines there are still many responsibilities that you should consider outside of regular SEO tasks.  Here is a short list:

Things to be done after your website is optimized

If you are like me, you already know many of the tricks to get your website optimized. There are other tasks that have to be done periodically. This way you can ensure that your website is search engine and user friendly which in turn brings more business.

1. Google Analytics

Get your Google or Yahoo Analytics code integrated within your website!  Make sure to check your analytics account regularly to keep track of your visitors. (If you have not yet created an account, create a google analytics account now. It’s free !) 'GA' is an amazing tool to analyze the number of visitors, most viewed pages, the time a user has spent on each page, demograpic of visitor, conversions done and much more! The drop or rise in your search engine status can be analyzed through these reports.

Note that it is important to have the GA code implemented on all the pages that you wish to track on Google. So don’t forget to scan your pages to make sure that your GA code is properly placed. Do the same for Yahoo! analytics depending on your requirement.

2. Broken Links

Make sure that there are no broken links on your website. This includes not just the inner links or the external links but the images too. Search engines hate broken links so don’t make this an issue with your website. You can check you website for broken links using GPABLO. There are many tools which help you to check for the broken links.

3. Page Load Speed

If you read our blog regularly you already know the Google algorithm scans your websites load speed. After all, the viewers satisfaction is what matters for any search engine. So make sure your website loads as quickly as possible. Click here to do a speed test check-up.

4. Social Networking

If your website has signed up for a twitter/ facebook/ any other bookmarking site, then make sure to update followers and fans with news and related topics which can create an interest in your profile. It is important to stay involved in topical information related to your industry so that you are gaining more viral attention.  This can give your website a better chance at future link building opportunities.

5. Content

As you know, content is king in SEO. Hence, make sure that your content has the right keywords which match the page and provides ‘relevant information' to the visitor. Updating your content frequently will also help SEO. For example, publish new developments or upcoming events from the industry. Blogs can also help to increase traffic to your site. So make sure to add at least a new catchy post every week. (the more the better!)

6. Lead Management

If you have forms available on your website for prospects to fill out make sure you are subscribed to lead management system, which can help to manage leads properly. This way you can ensure you are not depending strictly on email.  A good lead management system can help you keep your leads on track and follow them through the sales cycle.

7. Off-page SEO

Make sure to keep promoting your business online through submissions in article sites, blog sites, forums and other online venues.  There is obviously much more detail involved in Off Page SEO but it all starts with getting relevant visitors to see your link in a helpful, non spammy way!

That is what the robots.txt file is for! All you need to do is put it in your root folder and follow a few standard rules and your good to go! The robots.txt file is what you use to tell search robots, also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders, which pages you would like them not to visit. Robots.txt is by no means mandatory for search engines but generally search engines obey what they are asked not to do.

Advantages of Using robots.txt

• Index Web Pages Faster

  Robots can index your web pages faster if you tell them not to crawl the folders mentioned in robots.txt. Say for instance the images, javascript or css folder.

• Avoid Duplicate Content Penalty

If you have multiple copy on various pages – maybe one for printing and another for viewing in the browser, chances are high that Search Engines will penalize for duplicate content issue. Using robots.txt this can be avoided.

Important Considerations Before Using robots.txt:

• Malware Robots can ignore your /robots.txt. and scan the web for security vulnerabilities, also email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention to it all.
• The robots.txt file can be accessed by anyone and can see what sections of your server you don't want robots to crawl.

So don't try to use /robots.txt to hide information or to make the website secure. It;s just about showing the robots which are all doors are opened or closed for crawling.

Creating a robots.txt File

The location of robots.txt is very important. Create a regular text file in notepad called "robots.txt” and upload it to your root directory (www.your-site.com/robots.txt). Note that search engines will look for the robots.txt only in the root folder and not in any other location of the website. In other words, put it in the top-level directory of your web server. If no robots.txt exists on the root folder bots index everything they find along the way. Remember to use all lower case for the filename: "robots.txt", not "Robots.TXT.

The structure of a robots.txt is simple. it is an endless list of user agents and disallowed files and directories.

“User-agent:” are search engines' crawlers or bots and “disallow:” lists the files /directories to be excluded from indexing.

Click here to find a list of robots.

Some Great robots.txt Operators?

1. To exclude all robots from the entire server

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Here all search engine crawlers are told (using *) not to index any of the pages in the website. “/” means root of the folder.

2. To exclude a single robot

User-agent: Googlebot-Image

Disallow: /

This will disallow Google image bot to crawl your website. These kind of tricks will help save the bandwidth of your host.

3. To exclude all robots from part of the server

User-agent: *
Disallow: /css/
Disallow: /services/internet-marketing.php

The above code will disallow the folder css and file internet-marketing.php under services folder.

Applicable to all bots.

4. Multiple robots giving different access like:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

User-agent: MSNBot

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /admin/

Here all bots are disallowed access but MSNBot can access all the folders except images

and admin folder.So the rules of specificity apply, not inheritance.

5. To allow all robots complete access

User-agent: *

Disallow:

There are no advanced features in robots.txt. You can do most of the things with the examples provided above.

Have any others to share?  Did you find this helpful?  Tell us about it below!

Importance of Optimizing Websites for Mobile Gadgets

According to ICT statistics internet access by mobile phones will be almost 1 billion by 2014.  Moreover, more than 80% of cell phones now come bundled with a web browser.

Websites Suitable for Mobile Gadgets

Generally there is specific information which people browse through mobile phones. Some examples include booking a movie ticket or air ticket, to learn the latest news, buying pizza or to learn the way to a particular location etc.

With these types of capabilities all on your phone mobile gadgets are suddently becoming a very attractive choice.  Now lets learn how to get your website optimized for Mobile Gadgets?

Planning Your Domain For Mobile Gadgets

Before you start your gadget design you should plan how your URL will view for mobile devices. The same domain can be integrated to the mobile phone adding the design and css for mobiles but there would be lots of testing that needs to be done before launching to the web. Also remember to keep things simple. For extremely complex or dynamic website content this is not a recommended plan.

There are standard URL methods to access for mobile phones.

a) Adding a sub domain to your existing site like http://mobile.yoursite.com.

In this case it is possible to deliver the content quickly and effectively on mobile Gadgets as the design and css elements are separate from the main domain. Examples of sites using mobile as sub domains are MSN,Reuters, Newsweek, Washington Post etc.

b)The internet now offers a special domain name that has been designated for mobile users called ".MOBI".  By using this extension your site can be accessed by http://yoursite.mobi. This is not widely known by users at this time.  You can read more about MOBI here. Sites using MOBI are BMW, Business Week, ESPN etc. Talk about sports and football!

c) Even though standards are set, popular websites use the different sub domains for Mobile Phones  like Google, Yahoo etc.

So we have planned how the URL for mobiles will display, now let's start designing.

Designing for Mobile Gadgets

As mobile devices have a different screen layout than PC/Notebook, you have to work differently with the available screen size. One of the major changes compared to your desktop is the screen resolution.

1. Once you have a specific place to put content for mobile users, you should consider the design limitations of the mobile client.  The common resolution of both Smartphone and Pocket PCs is 320 x 240.

2. Due to the narrow width you may find that the vertical design of web pages with navigation at the side may not be practical due to the small screen.  Always avoid horizontal scrolling.

3. Use less graphics.  It is recommended not to use big pictures / banners as it takes time to get the page loaded. Place only brief meaningful content as people won't be interested to read long articles or description.

4. Add alt and title tag for pictures because Smart Phone users may block images so they get content to load faster.

5. Never use scripting languages as there is no native support for Java, Flash or other ActiveX controls which users can download on their PC. Only limited versions of JavaScript are supported.

6. Don't uses frames or objects that have a fixed size, like tables.

7. Using the phone attribute -

<a href=?#? tel=?1.866.410.7090?>Call Us Now</a>

Windows Mobile supports <a ref="1.866.410.7090">Call Us Now</a>

This attribute allows you to directly dial the toll-free number. This will significantly improve calling rates!

8. Meta Tags – If you have mobile optimized website pages, give them a mobile meta-tag: MOBILEOPTIMIZED.  Mobile meta tags can be incorporated into mobile optimized. How do HTML documents identify the document as made for mobile?.

9. You can learn more about Google Mobile Site Maps here.

To add to this, the Google Mobile team recently launched Google Latitude, a fun new way to share your live location with friends. For those of you who aren't familiar, Google Latitude is a feature of Google Maps for Mobile that allows you to share your whereabouts and receive updates about your friends' approximate locations.

If you are using WordPress as a blog just install this plugin and let users browse your posts using mobile.

Conclusion

As this is a new era of web and as the developments and standardizations practices are getting formulated please get in touch to get updated. It is the right time to capture the market!  Just remember – while you are sitting pondering getting into mobile gadgets, some of your competitors are already pouncing on the opportunity!

.htaccess can help in a variety of ways to optimize a website for search engines and thereby helps to have better rankings.  This article is dedicated to those who want to learn more about what .htaccess is and also learn how it can help your website get found more easily.

What is .htaccess?

Hypertext Access, commonly shortened to .htaccess, is a configuration file which controls the directory it is placed in and all the subdirectories underneath it. It’s an incredibly useful feature which allows webmasters to control how many aspects of their website works. The .htaccess file is a very powerful configuration file and should be used wisely as it can affect everything and anything about your website. Some of the things you can do with your .htaccess file include:

• redirecting site pages
• change the extensions of pages
• password protect directories
• and much much more.

The file itself is just a small basic text file and can be edited. To learn more about .htaccess visit this site.

How to create .htaccess file?

Here’s how to create a text file suitable for an .htaccess file:

1. Open up a text editor on your computer. We recommend that you use Notepad.
2. Save the file  as .htaccess (including the initial dot).
3. Make sure that your text editor did not append a .txt suffix to the file name.  If the file name does have a .txt suffix (i.e. '.htaccess.txt'), remove the suffix by renaming the file.
4. Before entering code into your new file, make sure that 'Word Wrap' is turned off. This is important because most .htaccess commands need to be placed on one line only.
5. You can now enter your code into the file.
6. Upload the .htaccess file into your web space in ASCII mode. The .htaccess file will affect the folder that it is uploaded to and all its subfolders.

Features of .htaccess

There are many features and functionalities in .htaccess that can make a website more flexible, secured and SEO friendly. Mentioned here is only the most widely used features which can be implemented by anyone who has basic web knowledge.

1. Redirects

.htaccess uses redirects to look for any request for a specific page and if it finds that request, it forwards it to a new page you have specified. This is especially useful when you move your website to a new domain or changed the existing file names of your website.

Redirects are useful because if your pages are indexed by Google and you have changed the file / folder name or moved your pages filenames, search engines will use the .htaccess to help guide them to where the new pages are found. (In the industry, we call this a 301 redirect)

Simple Redirect

Here is the code for a simple redirect :-

Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://yoursite.com/newfile.html

Here when a request for old directory/oldfile.html is received, it is redirected to the new link.  In this case:

yoursite.com/newfile.html

301 Redirect

As mentioned earlier, a 301 redirect is the most efficient and 'Search Engine Friendly' method for web page redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it will preserve your search engine rankings for any page that you list in the .htaccess file. If you have to change file names or move pages around, this is the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted online as "moved permanently".

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yoursite.com/newpage.html

Redirecting non www URL's to www URL

What if you want your domain to get displayed or redirect in to a standardized format? A domain can be displayed in all the following ways:

• http://mywebsite.com or
• www.mywebsite.com or
• http://www.mywebsite.com.

The latter one is the standard and ensuring the others display in this format can be done with the following code:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mywebsite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mywebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This code will make sure that the URL is standardized to display the 'www' and will be of much help in tracking the pages / visits.

Why would you want to do this?

Often if you do not make this change search engines can index each version and get confused into thinking that they are reading the same page 3 times over.  With this adjustment search engines are then pushed down the proper path and no same page will be treated as a different URL.

2. Handling Errors

htaccess also provides methods to handle errors when an invalid  / false request is received by the server.

ErrorDocument 404

The ErrorDocument 404 will give you a chance to handle requests for pages not found. This situation may happen if the link pointed to a domain is not correct or the user changes the URL string / query string (after the domain name).

In order to specify your own customized error documents, you simply need to add the following command, on one line, within your htaccess file:

ErrorDocument code /directory/filename.ext

or

ErrorDocument 404 /errors/notfound.html

This would cause any error code resulting in 404 to be forwarded to yoursite.com/errors/notfound.html

Here are the other important Error Handlers using .htaccess

When a bad request comes to the server use :-

ErrorDocument 400 /errors/badrequest.html 

When trying to access a page where authorization is required use:

ErrorDocument 401 /errors/authreqd.html 

When encountering an Internal server error use:

ErrorDocument 500 /errors/serverr.html 

3. Security

Preventing Directory Listing

Do you have a directory full of images or zip files that you do not want people to be able to browse through? Create a .htaccess file inside any folder to disable the directory listing and insert the following :

IndexIgnore *

The below code would return a list of all files not ending in .jpg or .gif, but would still list .txt, .html, etc.

IndexIgnore *.gif *.jpg 

If your server is setup to prevent directory listing, but you want to list the directories by default, you could simply throw this into a .htaccess file for the directory you want displayed:

Options + Indexes

Blocking users by IP

Tired of getting hacked and you can see a specific IP constantly in your log files?

You can deny access based upon IP address or an IP block.

order allow,deny
deny from 123.45.6.7
deny from 012.34.5.
allow from all

The above blocks access to the site from 123.45.6.7, and from any sub domain under the

IP block 012.34.5.

You can also allow or deny by domain name rather than IP address like deny from .spamsite.com works for www.spamsite.com or virtual.spamsite.com, etc.

Prevent Hotlinking

Also known as ‘bandwidth stealing’, hotlinking refers to linking directly to  images, .js files etc. of another server. The victim's server in this case is robbed of bandwidth as the violator enjoys showing content without having to pay for the delivery. For better performance of your server don’t forget to add this code snippet.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|js|css)$ - [F]

Be sure to replace "mydomain.com" with your own. The above code creates a failed request when hot linking of the specified file types occurs.

Password protection

You can also protect your website or particular folders password protected using .htaccess and .htpasswd. For more details here is a nice little post

4. SEO Friendly URL’s

It's common to need to redirect dynamic URL's with parameters to a single static file:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^news.php?id=(.*)$ /latestnews.htm [L,R=301]
In the above example, a request to a dynamic URL such as http://www.mysite.com/news.php?id=8932 will be redirected to http://www.mysite.com/latestnews.htm

The below code will redirect productinfo.php?prodID=12 to products/12/ or products/99/

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^products/([0-9][0-9])/$ /productinfo.php?prodID=$1

This will match any URLs that start with ‘products/’, followed by any two digits, followed by a forward slash.

For example, this rule will match a URL like products/12/ or products/99/, and redirect it to the PHP page.

To comment a line in .htaccess just start the line with a hash (#).

Summary

Each and every step mentioned as part of this blog can improve the performance of a website drastically and will make sure your web site is more SEO friendly.  Hackers will also have a tough time if security measures are enabled using .htaccess. The benefits of implementing .htaccess is that it requires no programming knowledge and can save a great deal of time.

If you are a developer or code junkie like me then you will find this article very helpful.  If you read the top, glazed through all that code above and then read the summary this may be something that you send to your SEO optimization company or even your developer.  This article could give you (ahem) 'access' to a great deal of benefits!

Many of these shortcuts can also be used in Bing and Yahoo!. These shortcuts are helpful every type of person including people searching for a phone number, flight information, shoppers, SEO professionals and just about anyone!

Here are 10 helpful ways that can help get more fine tuned with your search results.

1. Related Websites

If you want to see related websites of a particular website just type “related:” followed by site name. For Example related:http://www.dell.com will show sites such as HP, Apple, Toshiba etc. which are the companies that also deal with PC’s, laptops, computer peripherals etc.  This will help us gain a good knowledge of our competitors' websites and maybe help you shop around a little!

2. Words in the title

allintitle:"Rise to the Top Blog" will list all the pages that contains the meta title “Rise to the Top Blog” in any web sites page title.  Using 'Image Search', the operator allintitle: will return images in files whose names contain the terms that you specify and in Google News, it will return articles whose titles include the terms you specify.

3. Words in the URL

inurl:google-surprises-us will list all the pages which contains the word “google-surprises-us” in the actual URL or domain name. In other words If you’re looking for specific URLs that contain certain words, this shortcut can find them.

4. Information from a specific website

If you include site: followed by domain / site name in your search, Google will restrict your search results to the domain / site you specify. For example, internet marketing toronto site:http://www.techwyse.com will show Internet Marketing information from the website techwyse.com.

5. Dictionary

This is definitely something that comes in handy for me a lot as well. You can see the definition for any word or phrase by simply typing “definition” followed by a space and then the actual word(s) that you wanted defined. If you want to see a list of definitions from various resources across the Web, type “define:” followed by a space and the word(s). Try typing  “definition SEO” and “define: SEO” in to Google search and see the difference.

6. Phone Number & Address

If you need to look up a US residence phone number or address you can do that as well.  Click here to get a list of phone book searches for the name “Bill Gates”. The results display, name, phone number, address as well as a link to map. The text to be typed in the search box is “phonebook: Bill Gates”.

Simply enter the person’s name along with a city, state, or zip code in the Google search box and you’ll be excited with the results.

7. Package Tracking

If you have purchased any goods online and if the package / goods are on shipment or in flight Google search can help you track the status without logging in to the tracking sites such as FedEx or UPS. First you’ll need the tracking number of your order, which you can get from the actual site/company that you ordered from. Second, you’ll need to know how it’s being shipped (via FedEx, UPS, or USPS). That’s it. Watch a demo of package tracking in action here.

If your package is sent by UPS and the tracking number is 123456, Just enter “ups 123456” in the Google search box. Even though it’s not necessary to enter the shipping company, it will provide you with more refined search results.

8. Flight Tracking

You can look up information on any flight by simply typing the airline name or code followed by a space and flight number into the Google search box. “Air canada 797” will show the status of Air Canada airlines for the flight number 797.

9. Weather

Google gives better results if we search for weather in a particular country, state or region using zip code.. Suppose that I want to know the weather conditions in San Francisco, all that I need to do is to type “weather San Francisco, CA”. If we do not it gives us the current weather but also gives the weather forecasts for the next few subsequent days.

10. Other Shortcuts

Other shortcuts which you may find useful:

• allinanchor:internet marketing toronto – will return only pages in which the anchor text on links to the pages contain the words “internet marketing toronto”.
• allintext: Two Way Live Voice Communication will return the pages that contain the text “Two Way Live Voice Communication”.
• info:techwyse.com will present some information about the corresponding web page such as the google cache, web pages that are similiar, web pages from the site etc..
• cache:techwyse.com/contactus.php will display the cached version of the page contactus.php
• wyselabs location:canada will show articles that match the term “wyselabs” from sites in Canada.

I invite every one familiar with this topic to include any additional information in the comment box below so that we all can broaden our knowledge base on this particular topic.

We all know that a more educated searcher means a searcher that finds what he wants!

This post is particularly aimed at giving a more detailed amount of information on social bookmarking rather than on social networking, which is a broader term. Social Networks relate to  groups of people who share interests and who interact on websites in a variety of ways  including file-sharing, chatting, messaging, exchanging photos/video etc. Social network sites are usually free to join. Examples include MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn etc.

Social bookmarking sites help users organize their bookmarks with informal tags using keywords, enabling them to reference these pages at a later date. Social bookmarking presents an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, catalog, rank, and share information on the Internet.  There are more than 100 social bookmarking sites of which the famous ones are digg, StumbleUpon, delicious, technorati, Twitter etc.

Modern day marketers build their online marketing strategies keeping in clear sight the enormous marketing potential these social bookmarking sites carry in putting across their message to millions and millions of online users.  A favorable impression created for a particular product or service among users can greatly impact the ultimate commercial success of that very product or service. The time has come when no marketing wizard worth his salt can ignore the importance of social book marking sites in promoting his products or service.  Ever hear of the Tipping Point?  Well this is one of those triggers that can make or break an online product.

Why so many social bookmarking sites?

We all know that there are several varieties of cars available in the market today and each and every one of these offer specialized  features. Similarly, there are a large number of social bookmarking sites with each and every one offering specialized features which have specific strengths in some particular segment. For example, the  mission of Newsvine is to bring together big and little media in a way which respects established journalism while Technorati is specifically for bookmarking blog posts. While some social book marking sites are SEO friendly and promote search engine rankings, others  may not help in the SERPs.  So to socialize a website we need to choose the right social bookmarking sites to submit our bookmarks. This explains the existence of a large number of social bookmarking sites specialized in varying sectors.

Social Bookmarking – Advantages & Features

Here are the common advantages and features found in most of the social bookmarking sites (but not all!)

• Can be accessed from anywhere in the world from any computer.
• Bookmarks can be added under categories for easy reference. Categories can also be customized so that only our favorite categories are shown.
• One can view the recent, most popular or the top rated event within 24 hours
• Helps users take more educated purchase decisions after going through the reviews / comments / ratings .
• Helps to grow your business.
• Social bookmarking can help in generating millions of page views per month. It attracts visitors from all over the world, thus the internet marketers use this web traffic to get the targeted customers.Click here to view the statistics.
• Social bookmarking has an edge over automated software such as search engine spiders as people control the tag-based classification rather than a computer software or algorithm. This has a massive benefit as people can understand the content and context of a website, in addition to finding and bookmarking web pages that may not have been picked up by the search engine spiders.
• Search engines index these sites at frequent intervals as the contents are updated regularly.

• When a URL is submitted to a bookmarking site it will check for duplication.  For example if I submit a site or page URL and if such a link already exists, then I will be notified. Note that bookmarking is based on URL and not on domain name. Many URL’s of same domain can be submitted but not the same URL.
• Widgets are provided for most of the social networking sites. Widgets can be placed on web pages by just inserting the “provided script” and through these widgets.
• Periodically checks and verifies the functioning of bookmarks; otherwise user will be notified of the broken link.
• Any one can become a member and it’s free. It’s just about filling in a few fields and submitting it to the concerned site. However, Paid bookmarking sites are available for pod casting.

Conclusion

Social bookmarking are here to stay. It is now part of many internet users everyday life!  The time has come when no marketing wizard worth his salt can ignore the importance of social bookmarking sites in promoting products or services. The colossal growth attained by some of the prominent social bookmarking sites like digg, StumbleUpon, delicious, technorati etc.is a testimony to the immense benefits that these social bookmarking sites bring to the Internet user.

You just need to identify the right bookmarking sites and keep on submitting your new posts or products and watch your business grow organically! 

That is how marketing seems to be going in this new century of ours!

SEO Strategies for Better SERP

SEO strategies that help generate a surge in SERP rankings and that which every programmer can follow successfully are given below. It should be mentioned that focus here is on “dynamic content” and not static content.

1. Meta Titles, Descriptions & Keywords

Meta Titles, Description & Keywords attain increased significance in the search engine algorithm and as such are a force in the overall ranking and indexing of pages.

For all dynamic pages Meta tags should also be dynamic as seen in: http://techwyse.com/blog/

You may click on any of the posts. If you take the view source of the topic detail page, it clearly shows that the Meta title  is the same as the title of the topic and Meta description

contains the first few characters of the topic description. In this case, even though the same page is processed the Meta tags will change dynamically according to the post. An option in the admin can also be provided so that the title and description will appear as we wish for each record. For this the two additional fields need to be added in the admin. 

On another note;  if you are looking for a great piece of blog software that is SE friendly, we highly recommend WordPress.

2. Search Engine Friendly URLS

Search Engine Friendly URLS  help search engines crawl web pages much faster. As search engines index pages based on the URL, the possibility of friendly URLs getting indexed faster are indeed brighter. http://techwyse.com/blog/internet-marketing/microsoft-launches-bing-search/ Here internet-marketing is a category and “Microsoft launches Bing search” is the title of the post and comes under the category – “internet-marketing”. URLs based particularly on categories prove much more effective in SEO strategy.

Programmers should ensure that the URL generated is valid.

Using .htaccess, and apache’s mod rewrite rules can help to achieve SEO friendly URLS

It should be noted at this time that if we are going for friendly URLS, no relative paths will work. All links, whether images, css or js, should be absolute. Click here  to learn more about absolute & relative paths.

3. Alt and Title Tags

Programmers must also make sure that proper “alt tags” are given for images and “title tags” for all links. For better relevance, a separate field needs to be given while uploading an image so that such a field can be used to display appropriate tag. Another option is to give the proper name for the image so that every field can be avoided. But I would prefer the former method because the latter method poses the risk of image overwriting if the same image names are given.

4. Page Loading

It is a known fact that search engine bots will crawl faster, pages that load more quickly and that which are better optimized, than pages that take longer to load, and that come without any page optimization.

a) Image optimization

Image optimization should also be given importance and images need to be optimized properly.  Always create thumb images if a smaller version of a big image needs to be shown. Personally, I have seen many sites make the images smaller by controlling the image width and height attributes. This is the wrong method and should NOT be followed.

b) Cache

If your site needs to load massive data from your database or uses a web service, it may happen that the pages will load rather slowly due to the excess server requests. In this case, the use of cache  files is a preferred method.

Cache is a method by which the contents from the database can be taken and written to a file in frequent intervals (which can be controlled by a programmer) and the interval depends on how frequent the contents are updated. The cache file needs to be updated only once a day if the contents are changed only once. This cache file is shown to the user when a request is made. In other words, this file will look as if we took the 'view source' of the dynamic pages.

Use of cache technology reduces the load time tremendously and gives “relax time” to the server. If you want to do crawl tests for your website, do it here.

5. JavaScript, Ajax and iframes

These are NOT SEO friendly and I would suggest minimizing the use of Java Script and iFrames.  I would advise to opt for server side validation rather than JavaScript.  In dynamic pages, avoid using Ajax to fetch records as it’s not considered SEO-friendly because bots cannot read the contents generated by Ajax. Remember that Ajax is JavaScript plus PHP and bots will avoid java scripts. Ajax can be used for loading things like image galleries, checking login credentials etc.  Just don't use it for content related areas.

So there you have it.  My own SEO guide dedicated directly to my fellow programmers!  If you found this helpful or have any questions please make sure to write a note below and I will make every effort to respond quickly to you!

Methods Spammers Use to Hijack a Form

1.  View-Source & URL submission

From the view source of web pages spammers know the field names as well as form action. Mostly this action page is used to send emails. For example, let’s say the action is set to send_mail.php and the field names are name and email_address. Spammers can easily submit the values through a URL like www.yoursite.com/send_mail.php?name=Jeff&email_address=jeff@gmail.com. They will have an automated program to change the name and email and will keep on submitting the URL and mails are sent.

2. Page submission

In this case spammers use their own page to submit the form, and the form action is set to www.yoursite.com/mail.php. This method is used so that the POST validation used in the mail script is over ridden. This process can also be automated.

3. Manual submission

Here – spammers manually insert the values and submit the form. This method, however, is rarely used and the solution to block manual submission are limited.

Methods to Block Spam Leads

1. Captcha Code

Captcha code is one of the best methods used by web masters to avoid spam mail. It is dynamic text, and is generally shown in an image box. With every load / refresh click, the captcha code changes. The user will need to enter the text shown in the image to an adjacent text field. Successful submission can only be made when both the values match in the server side. Captcha code can be integrated easily using PHP Captcha Library. A simple captcha code using icons would be more preferable so as to make it more user- friendly.

2. Server side validation

Make sure that all mandatory fields are validated properly In the server side. PHP Filter function can be used to attain this.  Java script validation won’t work if it’s disabled from the client browser; so server side validation is a must.

3. Filter all the Contents

Filter all the inputs from the form as spammers usually insert script tags or URLs in to form. It’s then mandatory to strip the html tags and characters which are mostly used by spammers such as ‘http://’,'mailto:’,'viagra’ etc.

4. Use “POST” Method

Always make the form method to POST (<form method="post">) and the mail sending script should check only for POST values and not GET or REQUEST method. This will make sure that URL submission won’t execute the script.

5. HTTP Referrer

HTTP Referer will make sure that the request has come from the same domain. Submission of forms from another domain can be blocked using this method.

6. Blocking IP

If spamming is done through manual submission, the solution is to block the IP address and for this the htaccess file can be used to implement this.

7. SQL Injection

If the form details are saved in to database use mysql_real_escape_string to avoid SQL injection.

Spam Mail Summary

All methods mentioned above, either singly or in combination, could insulate you from a host of spam leads that one is confronted with in every day life. These could ultimately turn out to be your bulwark against all unethical practices resorted to by spammers, who as we all know, do create inconveniences for all web masters.

This post, showcasing the methods adopted by spammers and the counter measured to be initiated, is intended to enlighten every one on the ways and means of making your website more secure and trustworthy.  If none of these work, maybe you know where to buy a shot gun?