Category Archives: Webmastering

webmaster related blog

Webmastering

Google launched Instant Preview feature

This is the second major change Google is doing to its search results, after September’s Instant Results one that created so much noise in the SEO world, changed the search engine optimisation approach and made experts watch more deeply into those long tail keywords. Basically, the Instant Preview feature allow people to take a quick peek at every website’s preview listed in the search results.

This could be yet another major change while it could harm a lot companies neglecting their website design and not only. However guys at Google say this new feature will make it easier for users to find exactly what they want without browsing through each and every site in the results but only by looking at the websites’ preview. It’s like browsing through a newspapers the most important headlines and reading only the ones that really interest one.

Google claims that people will be more satisfied with these results and they referenced to a previous testing they did on multiple users. It seems that the ones that will benefit the most from this new feature are the well-established companies with popular logos that could make the users visit their sites instead of others. As for the Instant Results feature, this one does not change the search results either, so there has not been a major algorithm change.

Major aspects that should be taken in consideration for getting more clicks seem to be the colors used on the website, logo position and size and the whole page layout. Every improvement brought to the design could mean extra-traffic for a website. This change could also bring another interesting change : sites ranking on lower spots get more traffic then the ones above due to a more appealing layout.
It is a game where the first impression will count but only time will tell whether this will have a major impact on some websites’ traffic or not.

Webmastering

Internet Explorer 9 better than other browsers for HTML5 Compliance

W3C, the Worldwide Web Consortium has recently revealed the results of the first HTML5 conformity to HTML 5. According the this test, the browser that best suits the latest web standards set is no other than Internet Explorer 9. This won the test over other popular browsers like Google Chrome 7, Firefox 4 beta 6, Safari 5 and Opera 10.6.

Although HTML5 specification are not finalised yet and this test does not cover all its specs, one thing is sure: Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 is a changed browser with a different approach. Seven aspects of HTML5 specifications were tested: “audio”, “video”, “canvas”, “attributes”, “foreigncontent”, “getElementsByClassName” and “xhtml5”, while others like API file or web workers were skipped for this test. Other standards like CSS have not been tested.

The final W3C test clearly shows that IE9 is at the top of HTML5 conformance table, followed by the other four popular browsers. Although Microsoft’s browser has not been praised from a lot of points of view it seems they are making a killer release for Web standards.

However, according to W3C these results are not the final ones while the HTML5 Test suite is still under development and the results might change at any time. This test suite is designed to help developers write application that are fully compliant with HTML5. These being said, you can see the results in the attached table.

Webmastering

How to optimise Youtube videos

As local searching is getting more and more popular lately, we covered some tips on how to rank higher in Google Local listings a few weeks ago but now it’s time to hit another popular subject these days and this is related to videos on Youtube. Youtube is nowadays starting to show on top of organic searches results and with few tweaks one can easily outrank authority sites like Amazon, Wikipedia or just the competitors’ sites.

This article will show you how to optimise Youtube videos for getting more exposure and more targetted traffic any webmaster desires to have. Though this is not the only video site available, it clearly is one of the most popular among Internet users and second, ranking in Youtube is a little bit easier than in the organic spots.

There are three things on which Youtube relies when ranking videos : number of views, rating and content of title and description. When it comes to title, anyone can use 99 characters for a particular video so it is best to use A. major targeted keyword and B. related keywords.

When it comes to description, users may use up to 5,000 characters so use its wisely. From keywords inserted in the description to call-to-action lines like « share this video » etc. Also, do not forget to use tags which are still very helpful when it comes to getting more visible for Google.

Another things to consider would be related to broadcasting and sharing :
– Videos should not be private
– Comments should be enabled for users interaction
– Comment on other videos as well, add video responses
– Keep syndication and ratings enabled

From this point on, it’s all about how popular the video can become and how you popularise it in other places. Not to forget about other blogs, Twitter, Facebook, this can get you a tremendous level of traffic, if done properly.

Webmastering

20 SEO tips anyone should consider

Although the Internet is filled with tips regarding SEO of an website, another updated one should be handy for anyone trying to rank a website to the top of search engines, whether we are talking about a beginner or a more experienced SEO guy. So here are top 20 SEO tips any webmaster should take into consideration when creating/promoting a website.

1. Use proper title and description for both human readers and search engines.

2. Do a proper keyoword research even before creating the website.

3. URL structure – use key search terms in it.

4. Use anchor texts when doing internal linking.

5. Use proper ALT tags for your images

6. Write your main keywords in bold. Once or twice should be enough.

7. Sharing is caring – make use of social bookmarking sites and let people spread the word easy.

8. Create links not only to homepage but try to acquire as many as possible to your internal pages as well, whether links from outside or from your pages.

9. Use only unique content, we all know content is the king nowadays.

10. Canonicalization issues – www and non-www domain. Decide upon which one too choose and do a 301 redirect from one to the other.

11. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google, Yahoo and Bing.

12. Submit it to blog directories or local business directories, depending on what niche you are in.

13. As well, make use of RSS feed directories – they are gems for traffic and links

14. Use video websites to promote yourself ; as well, get links/exposure through well researched and written articles.

15. Use web 2.0 sites for links – Squidoo, HubPages etc.

16. Watch out for site loading speed, nowadays it is part of Google’s algorithm checking list.

17. Use robots.txt for pages you don’t want to be crawled.

18. 404 errors are easy to spot and repair – do its !

19. Check and fix broken links.

20. Get more content and more links, enough is not enough !

Webmastering

Four great Firefox plugins for SEO

Although there are a multitude of Firefox plugins helpful for SEO, this article will showcase the ones that are used almost day by day and really could make your life much harder if would not be available.

We should start with the most popular one nowadays, SEOQuake. This plugin is amazing if you look at the incredible amount of information it features about analysed websites. It is not good only for root domains but also great for individual pages from a blog/site. By using it you get instant access to page page rank, Yahoo backlinks, Google index, domain age, source, description, keywords, titles, keyword density and many others, fantastic information for any SEO. Moreover, if it is activated while you do a search all the data from top results can be integrated in that very page and then sort by PR, backlinks or any other parameter you might find helpful. It also has a feature to show whether a link is nofollow or dofollow.

Aaron Wall’s Rank Checker is another definitely awesome tool for a daily basis usage. It is great for checking keywords ranks on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live. The great thing about it is that you can export your results in a CSV document and whenever you are doing a check on your rankings in the future you can compare them with the actual rankings. Awesome tool.

SEO for Firefox is another brilliant tool that can create impressive reports with data like Google page rank, Yahoo links, .edu links, Dmoz presence etc, mostly as SEOQuake does. However this one has the advantage of providing instant access to other SEO tools for keyword research, Google trends and traffic estimator, and a great feature is that all the data can be exported to CSV.

Flagfox is great for finding out the current server’s physical location where the website is hosted. Not only that, but Flagfox also shows the ISP, whois and DNS, page code validation, pings and tracerouts and many others.

So here they are, four awesome Firefox plugins for every SEO to make full use of. The list could go on and on while there are literally hundreds of plugins like those, however they are some of the greatest ones we have worked with so far.