Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Matt Cutts Discusses Webmaster Tools

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Add Social Features to Your Site

Adding Social features to you site can generate buzz and traffic to your pages. make you site like other social media sites on the web by which your visitors will be able to see, invite, and interact with their friends from existing sources of friends, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others. And you'll be able to more actively engage your visitors by adding social features from a growing gallery of social applications.

Make you site social feature enable by the help of Google Friend Connect.

Google Friend Connect is a service that that helps you grow traffic by enabling you to easily provide social features for your visitors. Just add a snippet of code, and, voilà, you can add social functionality -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

Social gadgets created by Google. Google Friend Connect provides a core set of social gadgets such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing. The key gadget is the members gadget. This gadget provides core social features for your visitors:

* sign-in with their existing Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account
* invite and show activity to existing friends from social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more
* browse member profiles across social networks
* connect with new friends on your site

Social gadgets created by other developers. For the past year, the developer community has been creating hundreds of applications for OpenSocial, an open standard for social applications. Once you have added Friend Connect to your site, you can offer many of these applications to your users, simply by pasting the relevant snippet into your site.

* OpenSocial Diagram

Once you have added the members gadget, and the additional social gadgets, your visitors can start inviting their friends and more deeply engage with your site.
Reaping the rewards

URL Re-Write Codes

If your pages are dynamically generated and more than two special characters (?, #, @, & etc) are there in the URL then that will be a problem for indexing of the page. To avoid this you need to create a new file at the root of your website and name it as ".htaccess". Here you need to write down some codes collected from different sources.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)\.html$ index.php?cat=$1&page=$2

Explanation of the code

First line indicates to enable rewrites. The second line is the redirects rule,
RewriteRule has 2 parts, the first part, the from part, “^/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)\.html$” is to tell apache that if you get a url which looks like this, redirect it to the second part, the to part, which may be like“index.php?cat=$1&page=$2“

The technique is you need to put the links on your page, which are static, and when some one clicks or Search engine follow them it will redirect them to the actual dynamic page

In the from part there are 2 variables which are alphanumeric, which is defined as “([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)” (from a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _-]+)) the variable ends as soon as a character is reached which is not in the range, specified there. In this case it’s the ‘/’, then the second variable starts which is for the pages. As you can see in this case, one can use there keywords on the urls for better ranking

If you had moved a file to a new location and want all links to the old location to be forwarded to the new location. Though you shouldn’t really ever » move a file once it has been placed on the web; at least when you simply have to, you can do your best to stop any old links from breaking.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.html$ new.html

Though this is the simplest example possible, it may throw a few people off. The structure of the ‘old’ URL is the only difficult part in this RewriteRule. There are three special characters in there.

* The caret, ^, signifies the start of an URL, under the current directory. This directory is whatever directory the .htaccess file is in. You’ll start almost all matches with a caret.
* The dollar sign, $, signifies the end of the string to be matched. You should add this in to stop your rules matching the first part of longer URLs.
* The period or dot before the file extension is a special character in regular expressions, and would mean something special if we didn’t escape it with the backslash, which tells Apache to treat it as a normal character. So, this rule will make your server transparently redirect from old.html to the new.html page. Your reader will have no idea that it happened, and it’s pretty much instantaneous.Forcing New Requests

Sometimes you do want your readers to know a redirect has occurred, and can do this by forcing a new HTTP request for the new page. This will make the browser load up the new page as if it was the page originally requested, and the location bar will change to show the URL of the new page. All you need to do is turn on the [R] flag, by appending it to the rule:

RewriteRule ^old\.html$ new.html [R]

Using Regular Expressions

Now we get on to the really useful stuff. The power of mod_rewrite comes at the expense of complexity. If this is your first encounter with regular expressions, you may find them to be a tough nut to crack, but the options they afford you are well worth the slog. I’ll be providing plenty of examples to guide you through the basics here.

Using regular expressions you can have your rules matching a set of URLs at a time, and mass-redirect them to their actual pages. Take this rule;

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 an URL like products/12/ or products/99/, and redirect it to the PHP page.

The parts in square brackets are called ranges. In this case we’re allowing anything in the range 0-9, which is any digit. Other ranges would be [A-Z], which is any uppercase letter; [a-z], any lowercase letter; and [A-Za-z], any letter in either case.

We have encased the regular expression part of the URL in parentheses, because we want to store whatever value was found here for later use. In this case we’re sending this value to a PHP page as an argument. Once we have a value in parentheses we can use it through what’s called a back-reference. Each of the parts you’ve placed in parentheses are given an index, starting with one. So, the first back-reference is $1, the third is $3 etc.

Thus, once the redirect is done, the page loaded in the readers’ browser will be something like productinfo.php?prodID=12 or something similar. Of course, we’re keeping this true URL secret from the reader, because it likely ain’t the prettiest thing they’ll see all day.

Multiple Redirects

If your site visitor had entered something like products/12, the rule above won’t do a redirect, as the slash at the end is missing. To promote good URL writing, we’ll take care of this by doing a direct redirect to the same URL with the slash appended.

RewriteRule ^products/([0-9][0-9])$ /products/$1/ [R]

Multiple redirects in the same .htaccess file can be applied in sequence, which is what we’re doing here. This rule is added before the one we did above, like so:

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

Thus, if the user types in the URL products/12, our first rule kicks in, rewriting the URL to include the trailing slash, and doing a new request for products/12/ so the user can see that we likes our trailing slashes around here. Then the second rule has something to match, and transparently redirects this URL to productinfo.php?prodID=12. Slick.

Match Modifiers

You can expand your regular expression patterns by adding some modifier characters, which allow you to match URLs with an indefinite number of characters. In our examples above, we were only allowing two numbers after products. This isn’t the most expandable solution, as if the shop ever grew beyond these initial confines of 99 products and created the URL productinfo.php?prodID=100, our rules would cease to match this URL.

So, instead of hard-coding a set number of digits to look for, we’ll work in some room to grow by allowing any number of characters to be entered. The rule below does just that:

RewriteRule ^products/([0-9]+)$ /products/$1/ [R]

Note the plus sign (+) that has snuck in there. This modifier changes whatever comes directly before it, by saying ‘one or more of the preceding character or range.’ In this case it means that the rule will match any URL that starts with products/ and ends with at least one digit. So this’ll match both products/1 and products/1000.

Other match modifiers that can be used in the same way are the asterisk, *, which means ‘zero or more of the preceding character or range’, and the question mark, ?, which means ‘zero or only one of the preceding character or range.’

Adding Guessable URLs

Using these simple commands you can set up a slew of ‘shortcut URLs’ that you think visitors will likely try to enter to get to pages they know exist on your site. For example, I’d imagine a lot of visitors try jumping straight into our stylesheets section by typing the URL http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/css/. We can catch these cases, and hopefully alert the reader to the correct address by updating their location bar once the redirect is done with these lines:

RewriteRule ^css(/)?$ /stylesheets/ [R]

The simple regular expression in this rule allows it to match the css URL with or without a trailing slash. The question mark means ‘zero or one of the preceding character or range’ — in other words either yourhtmlsource.com/css or yourhtmlsource.com/css/ will both be taken care of by this one rule.

This approach means less confusing 404 errors for your readers, and a site that seems to run a whole lot smoother all ’round.

Canonical Hostnames

Description:

The goal of this rule is to force the use of a particular hostname, in preference to other hostnames which may be used to reach the same site. For example, if you wish to force the use of www.example.com instead of example.com, you might use a variant of the following recipe.

Solution:

# For sites running on a port other than 80
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^80$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.example.com:%{SERVER_PORT}/$1 [L,R]

# And for a site running on port 80
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R]

Trailing Slash Problem
Description:

Every webmaster can sing a song about the problem of the trailing slash on URLs referencing directories. If they are missing, the server dumps an error, because if you say /~quux/foo instead of /~quux/foo/ then the server searches for a file named foo. And because this file is a directory it complains. Actually it tries to fix it itself in most of the cases, but sometimes this mechanism need to be emulated by you. For instance after you have done a lot of complicated URL rewritings to CGI scripts etc.

Solution:

The solution to this subtle problem is to let the server add the trailing slash automatically. To do this correctly we have to use an external redirect, so the browser correctly requests subsequent images etc. If we only did a internal rewrite, this would only work for the directory page, but would go wrong when any images are included into this page with relative URLs, because the browser would request an in-lined object. For instance, a request for image.gif in /~quux/foo/index.html would become /~quux/image.gif without the external redirect!

So, to do this trick we write

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /~quux/
RewriteRule ^foo$ foo/ [R]

The crazy and lazy can even do the following in the top-level .htaccess file of their homedir. But notice that this creates some processing overhead.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /~quux/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ $1/ [R]

301 Redirect

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently".

You can Test your redirection with Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker

Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection

IIS Redirect

* In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
* Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL".
* Enter the redirection page
* Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource"
* Click on 'Apply'

ColdFusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.new-url.com">

PHP Redirect

Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"
%>

ASP .NET Redirect

JSP (Java) Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.new-url.com/");

Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.new-url.com/"
end

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.

The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect to www (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com

The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Sources
----------
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitemanagement/urlrewriting.html
http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php
http://www.johny.org/2008/05/13/apache-url-rewrite-for-seo/

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Getting Traffics From Social Media Sites

Social media marketing is the recent trend to drag visitors to your websites. Let’s be familiar with one of the most popular social media website "DIGG" where a user can submit news and other interesting stuffs, can make it popular and control it by a huge number of communities present on DIGG. News is submitted to various numbers of category and subcategory present on it. The most popular ones will go to the front page automatically. Users can give their vote on the topics by clicking DIGG button beside it. Doing it is very simple.

Looking for traffic then post new, interesting and unique stories. Once your story has gone to the home page you will get unique traffics over 10,000. You can find other website like propeller, yahoo buzz, Mixx, Technorati, Stumbleupon and so many others who are having same kind of function on Internet.

Collect the initial strategy - Once you have logged in first time just browse around the site for about a week and watch the activity of peoples, what kind of news were getting popular, give comments, participate in the discussion. Make your presence on digg.

Make Friends- One of the important factor is creating friends of similar kind of interest that you have. DIGG their stories and tell them to digg yours. You can do it by sending shouts. Another way to invite your friends is by clicking on "share this news" with all my friends. This may not be so effective like shouting a story but once you have more number of friends you can go for it. The more number of friends you have the more will be your digg. Be a friend of the popular users on digg, digg their stories without asking any thing in return. Promote your best online stories on digg.

Use of friend adding software- This is a software which adds friends randomly but you need to be very careful while using it other wise you might be caught by digg admin. Now when you have lot of friends invite them to digg your story of course your story must be unique and interesting for the readers. Stay in touch with friends to whom you have sent shout and who sent shout to you.

Commenting on Digg- Post your comments on popular stories having higher number of diggs also do not forget to leave your signature with link to yours.

"Digg This" Button - If you have a blog or article section, which has already a fair number of visitors. Keep a Digg this button on your posts.

Other Social Media site - Also don't forget about other social media sites participate on them also. It is easier for your stories to be on front page, as they are not having that kind of competition as digg has.

10 Very Handy Tools for Power Diggers

1.Digg Alerter - very handy application tool to track the status of your own stories. Shows you live dig numbers and where they are. Keep it running all day long to monitor your stories.

2. Digg This (a FireFox extension) - allows you to simply highlight text on any web page that you are on, then right click and directly submit that URL to digg, without having to fill up a large part of the digg submission form.

3. Smart Digg (a FireFox extension) - allows you to see if the web page that you are browsing on is already submitted to Digg, and if it is, how many Diggs it has received. Very handy tool if you are constantly researching for stories to submit to Digg.

4. Digg Button Animation Enabler - Excellent way to let you digg a friends story when you read it on his site, and if it has a Digg badge, without requiring you to visit Digg.com website to digg it... thus allowing remote diggs.

5. Google Reader Digg News - Excellent way to display Digg buttons, and Digg badge in your own news feed reader, so that you don’t have to visit digg each time you digg a story within your feed reader.

6. Feedit - Great way to display digg stories that hit the front page. It’s better than the digg feed because it has links to the full story, comments and submitter.

7. TINC - Who's digging you? - A great tool to find out who is digging your stories and provides links to their submissions and user profile in case you want to reciprocate.

8. Digg Comment Viewer - An excellent tool for people who comment frequently. I suggest you download this. It’s a far cleaner, better and more efficient way to see who is leaving what comments on your submissions and the posts ratings. You can easily click around to not only see your friends' comments but also what friends they have as well.

9. Social Blade FrontPage Data - Allows you to monitor the front page of Digg. It gives you the insight as to when a story reaches the tipping point, beyond which it quickly becomes popular. This information is priceless! It records the exact number of diggs when the story went popular as well as the percentage of your friends that dugg the story, along with the category and other elements.

10. Update Scanner - Lets you monitor when any page on the Internet has been updated. Especially useful for sites and pages that do not have RSS feeds. Monitoring a page, that regularly publishes good content, but that doesn’t have an RSS reader, will allow you to get to the story before other Diggers do!

Source- http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Use-Digg-To-Get-More-Traffic&id=1084458

Friday, May 2, 2008

RSS Feed Promotion

Implementing Blogs, RSS feeds can increase traffic of your website. Your existing visitors can get it easily and subscribe. But this may not sufficient for you. The more and more new visitor subscribe your feed the more will be your chance to get business. Publish your feed worldwide.

1. Once you have created your RSS feed you need to validate RSS feed to ensure the code is correct.

2. Let the people subscribe your feed in an easy way. Put the universal RSS feed button with a hyperlink to your RSS feed’s file. Use auto-discovery by which RSS readers can automatically find RSS feeds on a Web page. Use the following code in between the head section. . Use the cool buttons from yahoo, MSN, Google so that visitors can easily subscribe it to their personal pages.

3. Submit your site to some popular and well-known RSS feed listings that allow submission of you feed. Here are some useful links.

http://www.rss-network.com/submitrss.php

http://www.rss-locator.com/submit-feeds.html

http://www.syndic8.com/suggest.php?Mode=data

http://www.daypop.com/info/submit.htm

http://www.feedster.com/add.php

http://www.rocketnews.com/search/index.html

http://www.technorati.com/developers/ping.html

http://aggregator.userland.com/

http://www.postami.com/rss.finder/submit_feed.php

http://www.finance-investing.com/submitrss.php - Only submit finance or investment related feeds.

http://www.security-protection.net/submitrss.php - Submit only security or protection related feeds RSS feeds select appropriate category

http://www.2rss.com/index.php

http://www.newsmob.com/index.php?m=c - submit rss news feeds

http://demo.rocketinfo.com/desktop/AddRSSFeed.jsp

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/xml/feeds.cgi - harvests only feeds dealing with educational technology and related issues. All feeds are reviewed before being added to the list.

http://ngoid.sourceforge.net/sub_rss.php - submit News using XML

http://www.completerss.com/AddFeed.aspx

http://www.feeds.com.br/index.php?ax=add

http://w.moreover.com/main_site/aboutus/sourcesubmission.html

http://www.genecast.com/news/create.jsp - RSS news feed submissions

http://www.memigo.com/feed

http://www.pubsub.com/add-feed

http://bulkfeeds.net/app/add

http://pingomatic.com/?oldpinger - Pings your site, RSS feeds

http://www.yenra.com/headlines/submit.html

http://www.easyrss.com/easyRss?lg=en&pc=help

http://www.newsxs.com/en/sources