All Posts Tagged With: "276"

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), there are all sorts of techniques you can practice to try to get your site indexed as high as possible in the search engine rankings. In addition to these many techniques, there are also a variety of guides and tools found around the internet that webmasters can use, many of which are completely free to anyone.

This post is an attempt to collect the best available search engine optimization resources from around the web and provide them to you in one post. If you know of any useful ones that I’ve missed, please let me know in the comments below!

Search Engine Optimization Guides

• The Bloggers Guide to Search Engine Optimization - SEO Book provides a detailed write up of everything SEO, with a focus on blogs. This should be your very first stop whenever you set out to learn about search engine optimization.
• Beginners Guide to SEO - Free single page detailed guide designed to teach beginners the basics of SEO.
• Complete Guide to SEO for WordPress - Jim Westergren provides a detailed guide to SEO specifically for WordPress users.

Search Engine Optimization Tools

• Advanced Google Search Methods - Tool that allows you to search Google in a variety of unique ways. Great for keyword research.
• Backlink Analyzer - Popularity and link analysis tool.  It shows what anchor text is linking into a page or site.
• Backlink Checker - Checks backlinks pointing towards your website. Also great for checking out competitors backlinks.
• Blacklink Watch - Shows you the anchor text and PageRank of inbound links for free
• Digital Point Keyword Tracking Tool - Tool that shows you the results of your query from both Wordtracker and Overture for determining which phrases are searched most often.
• Google Datacenter Watch Tool - Lets you do a search on Google from their 700+ data centers.
• Google Rank Position - Shows Google PageRank and PageRank position, number of indexed entries, and Google directory status.
• Keyword Density and Prominence Tool - Allows you to analyze keyword density of a specific web page and its tags.
• Keyword Selector Tool - Lets you easily enter keywords and search for related searches and how often those keywords were searched for in the last month.
• MultiRank Checker - Allows you to check your sites ranking while at the same time checking up to 9 competitors.
• Ranking Tool - Tool by SEOMoz that lets you check your search engine ranking of up to 5 keywords per day.
• SEO Analyzer - Provides a report that gives a quick analysis of your website.
• Strongest Subpages Tool - Provides an organized report of the top pages on your website.
• Tattler - Link analysis tool that allows you to pull backlinks from Yahoo Site Explorer. You can run a single URL, or multiple URLs, and you can grab additional backlinks from the returned results simply by right-clicking on any URL. Can also export all your data to an Excel spreadsheet.
• Top 10 Analysis Tool - Shows how your link profile compares with the link profiles of the top 10 ranked sites.
• Yahoo Search Rankings - Free online tool to check your Yahoo! search ranking position.

Search Engine Optimiation Firefox Extensions

• SEO For Firefox - Provides a ton of information directly from the web page or the search engine results page. Includes Google PageRank, cache date, domain age, backlinks in Yahoo, number of .edu links, the number of cached pages, and many other stats with a simple right clic.
• SEO Quake - Adds SEO results to search results and on top of each webpage.
• RankQuest SEO Toolbar - Provides access to more than 30 SEO tools in a web browser toolbar.

Is their a free SEO guide, tool, or Firefox extension that you use?  Let me know in the comments below!

Have you ever noticed those little images that appear in your web browser next to the blog’s name and wondered what they are, or maybe wondered how to go about how to add one to your blog? This post is being written in the hope of answering your questions regarding favicons.

What is a favicon? The name favicon has been around since Internet Explorer 5, when Microsoft decided that their web browser would start checking the website’s server for an image associated with a website. If present, this icon will then be displayed next to the bookmark text to help those with a lot of bookmarks locate the ones they are looking for quickly and easily.

Since then, the favicon naturally began to be used as a visual element that helps create brand identity. Once you give your website a favicon, people will then associate that image with your website, and in many ways, you as an individual.

Favicons usually appear next to your website logo in the address bar, but can also be found in a variety of other places, including next to your bookmarks, next to your website feed in many feed readers, or even at the top of your individual tabs in your web browser.

How do I create a favicon for my website or blog? A favicon is simply a 16×16 .png file that is converted to an icon resource and saved with the file name favicon.ico. Typically the image is either your blog’s logo, or an abbreviated version of that logo (such as Google’s “g” favicon). In order to avoid additional load time, it is recommended that you not use more than 16 colors in your image. You’ll also want to exercise extreme caution if you decide to make a dynamic favicon, as this can sometimes effect your website’s load time, as well as possibly costing you money by hogging your hosting bandwidth.

Once you’ve created an image that you want people to associate with your blog, you will then need to convert your image over to the favicon.ico format. It is best to have a logo with a transparent background, to avoid having your logo appear like it is in a box. Once you have a website logo saved on your computer’s desktop that you are comfortable with, I recommend you visit FavIcon from Pics. This website will walk you through the steps of getting your file converted to a favicon.ico file and then give you the option to download it in a zip file. You’ll want to save it somewhere on your hard drive and move on to applying the favicon to your website.

How do I apply the favicon? Once you have the favicon, placing it on your website will depend on which blogging services you use. For WordPress users, you can simply upload it to your uploads folder, or if you aren’t using any sub directories that you want to have a different image, you can actually just load it to you root directory. If it sounds like I’m speaking gibberish, you can use the Favicon Manager plugin and load the favicon.ico file wherever you want (and just point towards it in the plugin options panel).

For Typepad users, you can find instructions here. You simply load the file into the File Manager and it should be recognized automatically. If you have multiple websites on your Typepad account, you will instead need to place the favicon.ico file in your individual folder for that particular website (otherwise it will be used on all your Typepad websites).

What if my favicon isn’t showing up? You will want to make sure you have the following two lines of code placed in your website’s header between the head tags:

<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/ico">
<link rel=”shortcut icon” type=”image/ico” href=”/favicon.ico” />

This will help ensure all types of web browsers find your favicon. Unfortunately, when sources such as RSS feeds check for updates, they don’t require the website to load, so this information is not sent to them. As a result, you will want to place it in the root of your directory to ensure that your favicon will be found. For most WordPress users, your root directly is the public_html folder.

This means you will have it in your public_html/favicon.ico folder, as well as in your public_html/wp-content/uploads/favicon.ico (where the browser looks for it) . If you prefer to have it in only one spot, you’ll need to update the header code to point towards the root directory.

If your problems are specific to Internet Explorer 7, I recommend you check this out FAQ by Jeff.

In my personal opinion, I feel that it is extremely important to have a favicon on your website. I’ve also found that using your favicon in your profile pictures (MyBlogLog picture, etc.) will help improve your brand identity with others, so you may want to consider that as well when setting up your profile with different companies.

Oh, and an added bonus for favicon lovers! If you really love favicons and maintain a WordPress blog, you can check out the Favatars WordPress plugin as well, which will place the favicon of the website the commentator uses next to their comment.

As we head further into the 21st century, having an E-mail address is becoming an extremely important part of every day life.

Luckily, as a consumer, you have several choices when it comes to getting an E-mail address, and most of them are free! Most internet service providers will give you an E-mail address with their internet service, but they probably aren’t the best choice you have available to you. Unless your provider is a large company with a heavy commitment of their resources to their E-mail service, their virus scan and phishing protection is probably lacking. Therefore, I recommend taking advantage of online E-mail services. They are accessible from any computer, allow you have a copy of every E-mail backed up for you, and they are probably alot safer.

Here is a list of the most popular options currently available:

GMail

• Advantages - HUGE storage room. Its difficult to run out of room here. Google also offers an E-mail notifier and a unique integrated chat system to go along with their E-mail. GMail also sorts your replies with the original messages. Great search functions.

• Disadvantages - Currently GMail is in beta, and a cell phone or invitation from a current user is the only way to get an account. Hit up your friends with a GMail address for an invitation.

Yahoo! Mail

• Advantages - Yahoo! Mail is probably the most commonly used service, meaning it has all the bugs worked out and has alot of nice features. It has also recently undergone a revamp to help it keep up with Google’s GMail.

• Disadvantages - The bad news with the popularity of this program is the amount of users. It can sometimes make it difficult to get the E-mail address you want, especially if you have a common name. The amount of storage room is also considerably less than what GMail offers.

Hotmail

• Advantages - No real advantages. This is a standard E-mail service by Microsoft.

• Disadvantages - The spam filter is not quite what the above two are and you have to deal with advertisements. It prefers Internet Explorer (for obvious reasons) over alternate browsers.

Windows Live Mail

• Advantages - Because this is a Microsoft product, you can expect it to work well once completed. Also, if you use other Windows Live products, there will probably be some nice integration features.

• Disadvantages - Currently in very early beta. It will be awhile until this is comparable to GMail and Yahoo.

Mail.com

• Advantages - Free and offers personalized mailing address, making it ideal for business purposes. Lots of domain name choices.

• Disadvantages - Less common, making it more difficult to remember the E-mail address.

If you prefer to have your E-mail loaded directly on to your desktop (using a program such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird), most of these services will allow that as well via POP3.

Which service is best for you will probably depend on your situation, or more than likely, your loyalty to Yahoo! services, Google’s services, or even Microsoft’s services. I use products from all 3 companies, but I love my GMail hands down. They are all free, so give them a try and let me know what you think!

If you decide to go with GMail as your E-mail service of choice, or you manage several E-mail addresses, see my post about why you should be using GMail.