Getting traffic is essential for a website. Even it is more important, if you are using Google Ad sense. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS compacts your web content with codes which can be broadcast throughout the web world. These broadcasts are called feeds. These feeds are distributed to feed readers who subscribe for RSS Feed.
Using RSS feeds to get traffic can be both "push" and "pull." First I'll explain how to use RSS to "pull" traffic. Most websites and blogs can be set up to generate an RSS feed. Feed burner is a good option to set up RSS Feed for your blog or website. Feed burner is a syndicating service. Most blogging platforms come with something called an RSS or an ATOM feed. This allows for people to be able to view posts from your blog without actually having to go to it.
This feed can be put on Feed burner in order to
* Get a better feed that offers its readers a choice of feed readers, bookmarking options, etc..
* Lets you see how many people are subscribed to your blog and how often they find your posts interesting enough to actually go to your blog
* Lets you add ad sense ads at the end of your posts directly from the feed
* Allows you to syndicate , and therefore advertise, your blog post summaries on other websites such as myspace.
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Friday, August 6, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Google Places Guidelines
Google Places is a free marketing tool for local businesses. The benefits of these listings include showing up in web search results and mobile search results. Updating these listings is free and available to the business 24×7x365. Not something you can easily do with the traditional yellow pages. Definitely something you need to consider beyond Google and tap into multiple local listing websites and search engines.
Here are a few guidelines and information to know about when using Google Places. Many of these guidelines apply to other local listing websites as well. Many of these points are pretty self-explanatory. Violating these guidelines and your listing can be suspended. The basic premise is that you need to present your business in the local listings as you would in the traditional world.
1. Only the business owner(s) or authorized representatives may claim the local listing(s).
2. Don’t pack your listing with keywords like in your business name.
3. Along the same concept, do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name.
4. You cannot use PO Boxes, it has to be physical address.
5. Do not provide phone numbers or web addresses that redirect consumers to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
Here are a few guidelines and information to know about when using Google Places. Many of these guidelines apply to other local listing websites as well. Many of these points are pretty self-explanatory. Violating these guidelines and your listing can be suspended. The basic premise is that you need to present your business in the local listings as you would in the traditional world.
1. Only the business owner(s) or authorized representatives may claim the local listing(s).
2. Don’t pack your listing with keywords like in your business name.
3. Along the same concept, do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name.
4. You cannot use PO Boxes, it has to be physical address.
5. Do not provide phone numbers or web addresses that redirect consumers to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
Business Directories - Add your Business for Local Search
Below is a list of recommended local search directories to list your business in. The majority of them are free, though they do offer paid listings as well:
Yellow Pages Online : Free Listing with option for paid features
AOL Local
Mapquest
Anywho
Superpages – free
Best of the Web Local – Free and Paid Listings
InsiderPages: Free and Paid
Brownbook.net: Free
DexOne
Localeze – Free and paid options. Localeze listings also send updates to the following sites:
Google Maps
Yahoo Local
Bing Local
Openlist
GetFave
Addresses.com
Yellowbot
Local Business Review Sites:
The majority of these should offer free basic listings.
Yelp
Citysearch
Urbanspoon
Citysquares
RateItAll
Merchant Circle
Kudzu
Genie Knows
MojoPages
I have collected the resources from few websites and blogs. I am sure there are some more I am missing, if you see any left out – please let me know!
Yellow Pages Online : Free Listing with option for paid features
AOL Local
Mapquest
Anywho
Superpages – free
Best of the Web Local – Free and Paid Listings
InsiderPages: Free and Paid
Brownbook.net: Free
DexOne
Localeze – Free and paid options. Localeze listings also send updates to the following sites:
Google Maps
Yahoo Local
Bing Local
Openlist
GetFave
Addresses.com
Yellowbot
Local Business Review Sites:
The majority of these should offer free basic listings.
Yelp
Citysearch
Urbanspoon
Citysquares
RateItAll
Merchant Circle
Kudzu
Genie Knows
MojoPages
I have collected the resources from few websites and blogs. I am sure there are some more I am missing, if you see any left out – please let me know!
Local SEO Tips - Strategy for Local Search Optimization
Geo listing is an important factor in local search optimization. Local web marketing is a good way to promote your local business. Local search is accessing "citations" throughout the web. Citations are basically references to your business and address from reputable sources, like Yellow Pages. Keep in mind that the point behind this is not to access links from these sources (though that can be helpful), but to have them list your address and business name.
Local directory sites funnel information to search engines like Google & Yahoo. It will be benefited when search engines crawls these local directory sites. Search engines will then review this data and its accuracy when determining your sites relevancy for a local search query.
I recommend the following points for listing your business into local business directories:
- Always add permanent and accurate data (Address) about your business to local business directories. The more often a search engine finds consistent information about your address, the more accurate and relevant it is determined to be.
- Try to add your business in as many reputable local business directories as possible. Remember to always keep your address the same when submitting your information, don’t use “street” in one address and “boulevard” in another.
- You can add your address listed on your website. It is a good strategy to add your address on every page of your website. The footer or blog sidebars are good places for this, as the information tends to stay the same as users browse your site, and this way you won’t get damaged or penalized for anything like keyword stuffing.
- You can also list the address twice on your website, listing an abbreviated state one time, and the full state name another time. This way search engines won’t confuse the abbreviation with any other common abbreviations, such as AUS (Australia or Austria) or MD (Maryland or Doctor).
- You should optimize the address you place on your website by letting search engines know that this is an address and not just some random words and letters. This can be accomplished through the use of microformats, which is code you can place within the address. Microformats are the type of code you see within Google’s Rich Snippets feature. By including this code around your address, you’re essentially telling search engines “Hey, this is an address and it’s important!”
* Here is an example of how the code would be used. You can copy this directly if you wish, and replace the standard information with your specific information.
- You can also help your customers (and yourself!) by providing driving directions from nearby cities. With driving directions you are not only providing useful information about how people can find you – but you will also be using local words, locations and phrases that people may query when they are looking for your type of business.
Local directory sites funnel information to search engines like Google & Yahoo. It will be benefited when search engines crawls these local directory sites. Search engines will then review this data and its accuracy when determining your sites relevancy for a local search query.
I recommend the following points for listing your business into local business directories:
- Always add permanent and accurate data (Address) about your business to local business directories. The more often a search engine finds consistent information about your address, the more accurate and relevant it is determined to be.
- Try to add your business in as many reputable local business directories as possible. Remember to always keep your address the same when submitting your information, don’t use “street” in one address and “boulevard” in another.
- You can add your address listed on your website. It is a good strategy to add your address on every page of your website. The footer or blog sidebars are good places for this, as the information tends to stay the same as users browse your site, and this way you won’t get damaged or penalized for anything like keyword stuffing.
- You can also list the address twice on your website, listing an abbreviated state one time, and the full state name another time. This way search engines won’t confuse the abbreviation with any other common abbreviations, such as AUS (Australia or Austria) or MD (Maryland or Doctor).
- You should optimize the address you place on your website by letting search engines know that this is an address and not just some random words and letters. This can be accomplished through the use of microformats, which is code you can place within the address. Microformats are the type of code you see within Google’s Rich Snippets feature. By including this code around your address, you’re essentially telling search engines “Hey, this is an address and it’s important!”
* Here is an example of how the code would be used. You can copy this directly if you wish, and replace the standard information with your specific information.
- You can also help your customers (and yourself!) by providing driving directions from nearby cities. With driving directions you are not only providing useful information about how people can find you – but you will also be using local words, locations and phrases that people may query when they are looking for your type of business.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
URL Rewrite or Mod Rewriting Tips
Most of the time developers asked me why long trail URL's are not good from SEO's point of view. It creates clash between developers and SEO people. But it is very much important from SEO point of of view. I highly recommend the following points for rewriting any URL:
Add or Remove a Trailing Slash: Many developers use virtual url, which do not directly map to the file and directory layout on web server’s file system.
Example: An ASP.NET application with URL format similar to this: http://abc.com/questions/60857/modrewrite-7-0 or a PHP application with URL format that looks like this: http://xyz.net/questions/60857/url-rewrite/. If you try to request these URLs with or without trailing slash you will get a normal web page page. That is OK for human visitors, but may be a problem for search engine crawlers as well as for web analytics services.
Different URLs for the same page may cause crawlers to treat the same page as different pages, thus affecting the page ranking. Having or not having a trailing slash in the URL is a matter of taste, but once you’ve made a choice you can enforce the canonical URL format by using one of these rewrite rules:
Enforce Lower Case URLs: If you links to a web page by using different casing, e.g. http://xyz.net/2008/07/IISNET-Uses-Url-Rewrite-Module/ vs. http://xyz.net/2008/07/iisnet-uses-url-rewrite-module/. In this case again the search crawlers will treat the same page as two different pages and two different statistics sets will show up in Web Analytics reports.
What you want to do is to ensure that if somebody comes to your web site by using a non-canonical link, then you redirect them to the canonical URL that uses only lowercase characters:
Canonical Hostnames: Very often you may have one IIS web site that uses several different host names. The most common example is when a site can be accessed via http://www.yoursitename.com and via http://yoursitename.com. Or, perhaps, you have recently changed you domain name from oldsitename.com to newsitename.com and you want your visitors to use new domain name when bookmarking links to your site. A very simple redirect rule will take care of that:
Redirect to HTTPS: If you want your site to be easily discoverable and more user friendly, you probably would not want to return 403 response to visitors who came over unsecure HTTP connection. Instead you would want to redirect them to the secure equivalent of the URL they have requested.
Example: http://www.paypal.com. If you follow it you will see that browser gets redirected to https://www.paypal.com.
With URL Rewrite Module you can perform this kind of redirection by using the following rule:
Return HTTP 503 Status Code in Response: HTTP status code 503 means that the server is currently unable to handle the request due to maintenance. This status code implies that the outage is temporary, so when search engine crawler gets HTTP 503 response from your site, it will know not to index this response, but instead to come back later.
When you stop the IIS application pool for your web site, IIS will return HTTP 503 for all requests to that site. But what if you are doing maintenance to a certain location of the web site and you do not want to shut down the entire site because of that? With URL Rewrite Module you can return 503 response only when HTTP requests are made to a specific URL path:
Prevent Image Hotlinking: Image Hotlinking is the use of an image from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. Unauthorized image hotlinking from your site increases bandwidth use, even though the site is not being viewed as intended. There are other concerns with image hotlinking, for example copyrights or usage of images in an inappropriate context.
With URL Rewrite Module, it is very easy to prevent image hotlinking. For example the following rewrite rule prevents hotlinking to all images on a web site:
Reverse Proxy To Another Site/Server: By using URL Rewrite Module together with Application Request Routing module you can have IIS 7 act as a reverse proxy. For example, you have an intranet web server and you want to expose its content over internet. To enable that you will need to perform the following configuration steps on the server that will act as a proxy:
Step1: Check the “Enable proxy” checkbox located in Application Request Routing feature view is IIS Manager.
Step2: Add the following rule to the web site that will be used to proxy HTTP requests:
Preserve Protocol Prefix in Reverse Proxy: The rule in previous tip always uses non-secure connection to the internal content server. Even if the request came to the proxy server over HTTPS, the proxy server will pass that request to the content server over HTTP. In many cases this may be exactly what you want to do. But sometimes it may be necessary to preserve the secure connection all the way to the content server. In other words, if client connects to the server over HTTPS, then the proxy should use “https://” prefix when making requests to content server. Similarly, if client connected over HTTP, then proxy should use “http://” connection to content server.
This logic can be easily expressed by this rewrite rule:
Rewrite/Redirect Based on Query String Parameters: When rewriting/redirection decisions are being made by using values extracted from the query string, very often one cannot rely on having the query string parameters always listed in exact same order. So the rewrite rule must be written in such a way so that it can extract the query string parameters independently of their relative order in the query string.
The following rule shows an example of how two different query string parameters are extracted from the query string and then used in the rewritten URL:
Add or Remove a Trailing Slash: Many developers use virtual url, which do not directly map to the file and directory layout on web server’s file system.
Example: An ASP.NET application with URL format similar to this: http://abc.com/questions/60857/modrewrite-7-0 or a PHP application with URL format that looks like this: http://xyz.net/questions/60857/url-rewrite/. If you try to request these URLs with or without trailing slash you will get a normal web page page. That is OK for human visitors, but may be a problem for search engine crawlers as well as for web analytics services.
Different URLs for the same page may cause crawlers to treat the same page as different pages, thus affecting the page ranking. Having or not having a trailing slash in the URL is a matter of taste, but once you’ve made a choice you can enforce the canonical URL format by using one of these rewrite rules:
Enforce Lower Case URLs: If you links to a web page by using different casing, e.g. http://xyz.net/2008/07/IISNET-Uses-Url-Rewrite-Module/ vs. http://xyz.net/2008/07/iisnet-uses-url-rewrite-module/. In this case again the search crawlers will treat the same page as two different pages and two different statistics sets will show up in Web Analytics reports.
What you want to do is to ensure that if somebody comes to your web site by using a non-canonical link, then you redirect them to the canonical URL that uses only lowercase characters:
Canonical Hostnames: Very often you may have one IIS web site that uses several different host names. The most common example is when a site can be accessed via http://www.yoursitename.com and via http://yoursitename.com. Or, perhaps, you have recently changed you domain name from oldsitename.com to newsitename.com and you want your visitors to use new domain name when bookmarking links to your site. A very simple redirect rule will take care of that:
Redirect to HTTPS: If you want your site to be easily discoverable and more user friendly, you probably would not want to return 403 response to visitors who came over unsecure HTTP connection. Instead you would want to redirect them to the secure equivalent of the URL they have requested.
Example: http://www.paypal.com. If you follow it you will see that browser gets redirected to https://www.paypal.com.
With URL Rewrite Module you can perform this kind of redirection by using the following rule:
Return HTTP 503 Status Code in Response: HTTP status code 503 means that the server is currently unable to handle the request due to maintenance. This status code implies that the outage is temporary, so when search engine crawler gets HTTP 503 response from your site, it will know not to index this response, but instead to come back later.
When you stop the IIS application pool for your web site, IIS will return HTTP 503 for all requests to that site. But what if you are doing maintenance to a certain location of the web site and you do not want to shut down the entire site because of that? With URL Rewrite Module you can return 503 response only when HTTP requests are made to a specific URL path:
Prevent Image Hotlinking: Image Hotlinking is the use of an image from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. Unauthorized image hotlinking from your site increases bandwidth use, even though the site is not being viewed as intended. There are other concerns with image hotlinking, for example copyrights or usage of images in an inappropriate context.
With URL Rewrite Module, it is very easy to prevent image hotlinking. For example the following rewrite rule prevents hotlinking to all images on a web site:
Reverse Proxy To Another Site/Server: By using URL Rewrite Module together with Application Request Routing module you can have IIS 7 act as a reverse proxy. For example, you have an intranet web server and you want to expose its content over internet. To enable that you will need to perform the following configuration steps on the server that will act as a proxy:
Step1: Check the “Enable proxy” checkbox located in Application Request Routing feature view is IIS Manager.
Step2: Add the following rule to the web site that will be used to proxy HTTP requests:
Preserve Protocol Prefix in Reverse Proxy: The rule in previous tip always uses non-secure connection to the internal content server. Even if the request came to the proxy server over HTTPS, the proxy server will pass that request to the content server over HTTP. In many cases this may be exactly what you want to do. But sometimes it may be necessary to preserve the secure connection all the way to the content server. In other words, if client connects to the server over HTTPS, then the proxy should use “https://” prefix when making requests to content server. Similarly, if client connected over HTTP, then proxy should use “http://” connection to content server.
This logic can be easily expressed by this rewrite rule:
Rewrite/Redirect Based on Query String Parameters: When rewriting/redirection decisions are being made by using values extracted from the query string, very often one cannot rely on having the query string parameters always listed in exact same order. So the rewrite rule must be written in such a way so that it can extract the query string parameters independently of their relative order in the query string.
The following rule shows an example of how two different query string parameters are extracted from the query string and then used in the rewritten URL:
Monday, August 2, 2010
How to Generate Website Traffic
Everyone wants to know how to generate more web site traffic. Unless you know the techniques, you can’t run a successful business in web world. There are many techniques with which you can easily generate or drive traffic to your website. I want to explain some high-impact traffic generating techniques so that you can implement them to minimize time and to maximize the results.
- Social Bookmarking
- Social Networking
- MySpace
- FaceBook
- Web 2.0 Pages
- Article Submission
- Press Release
- Forum Posting
- Blog Commenting
- Directory Submission
- Classified Ads Posting
- Regional Traffic
The main goal of this traffic generation is nothing but maximizing your Search Engine Rankings so that your website would get displayed in the Top of SE’s for your main targeted keyword.
- Social Bookmarking
- Social Networking
- MySpace
- Web 2.0 Pages
- Article Submission
- Press Release
- Forum Posting
- Blog Commenting
- Directory Submission
- Classified Ads Posting
- Regional Traffic
The main goal of this traffic generation is nothing but maximizing your Search Engine Rankings so that your website would get displayed in the Top of SE’s for your main targeted keyword.
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