Monday, August 23, 2010

Important Factors to Get High Google Page Rankings

Doing the right things in search engine optimization is the best way to succeed in acheiving high rankings on Google and other search engines. There are lots of factors that you have to work on to make your website performs better than your competitor's sites.

1. Accessibility of web pages

Search engines needs to access your web pages so make sure that the pages of your website are accessible. Search engines may ignore your site and won't get good rankings.

Points to make web pages accessible to search engines.

- Web servers must not return an error code when search engine spiders visit your web pages. Search engines won't index your site if this happens.

- Web pages contents must make sense to search engines. Avoid using Flash movies or images to present the main content of your web pages.

- Check the HTML code of your web pages. Some of HTML errors can prevent search engines from indexing your site. The fewer HTML errors your web pages

have, the better. You can check errors of your web page with HTML validator.

- The robots.txt file must allow search engines to index your web pages. Search engines won't list your website if you accidentally blocked all bots or all directories of your website (this can happen with a simply typo in the robots.txt file).

2. Right Choice of Keywords

The most important thing that determines whether your SEO campaign is a success or not is choosing the right keywords. It's best to focus on longer keywords for search engine optimization. One word keyword are much more competitive so this is not advisable for websites that are newly published.

3. Good Backlinks

It is impossible to get high rankings on major search engines like Google for Websites Without good backlinks. The links that point to your website have a major impact on the position of your web pages in Google's search results. Get as many good links as possible from related web sites.

4. Unique Website Content

Create unique and trustworthy content that separates your web site from the others. Websites that contains articles that can be found in most of other websites will have a hard time to get good search engine rankings. You can write on things that you know best. If you're an expert in a special field, write as much as possible about that field to make sure that your web pages becomes the best resource for that certain topic.

5. Meaningful Site and Information Architecture

Show search engines which pages of your website are related by using folders and logical linking. Search engines should figure out that a group of web pages on your site relates to a certain topic. A good site architecture shows search engines that your website is more than just a collection of random web pages.

Note : Search Engine Optimization is very tricky so be careful in optimizing your web pages because a small error in one element can pull your page ranking down.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Tips to get quality links for SEO

One of the important points about SEO is having right links. There are lots of ways to gained quality links.

1. Be involved in a community related to your topic

You can interact to web pages that has common interest to your site. You can contribute on forums or blogs that are related to your website. If you can build good reputation on these people in the community,there will be a great chance that they will link to your site.

2. Offer long-term, unique and compelling content

If your website is unique and compelling, more people would likely link to it. You can post unique articles or offer useful tools for people who used the internet regularly.

3. Solve problems of a targeted group of people

Publish tutorials like videos and articles on your website or offer practical tools for solutions to any prblems or answers to any questions. Most people now used the web whenever people needed help or some information. You can also attract good links through this mehod.

4. Humor and Entertainment

Contents that are humorous and entertaining is mostly shared more than ever before. If your the contents of your web pages offers something funny, chances are more people would like to link to your site.

5. Directories and link building

There are great directories that add value to the Internet. But be careful upon submitting your site because there are also a lot of low quality directories. Make sure that the directory is on topic, moderated, credible and well structured. Be sure also that your website will be added to the right category.

6. Consider social networking sites

Nowadays, more people spend a lot of their time on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. You can spread the contents of your site here to draw attention and build linking to your site easier for users that are less tech savvy.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Five Important Points About SEO

Most of the people thought that being listed on the first page in Google results upon searching a specific keyword will bring them more sales and visitors. However, there are lots of people who don't know the real concepts SEO (search engine optimization) and they expect something wrong about it. In fact, there are some webmasters that are still expecting that their website will be listed first on Google by just submitting their site to Google. Maybe it worked a long time ago but not nowadays.

1. SEO takes time

Search engine optimization needs time to take the results. Do not expect the results tomorrow or next week after you optimized your website today. Search engines have to update their index therefore they will find new pages that are optimized and new links to your website to improve your ranking score.

2. Web pages must be up to date

Keywords must appear on your web pages to get high rankings for that certain keywords. But there's an exception, if there are lots of other websites that link to your website with that keyword, you can also get high rankings for that certain keyword even if that is not listed on your website.

The keywords you want to be on top in search engines must appear in the right elements on your web pages. So from now and then, you have to update the HTML code of your web pages to make the search engine spiders or robots easily parse or crawl your site.

3. Choose the right keywords

Optimizing your website needs the right keywords. SEO is not about getting a high Google Pagerank. It is about having high listing for the right keywords therefore the right people searching for the them would come to your site. You just have to optimize your website for keywords that can attract the right kind of visitors to your web pages.

4. You need right links

The key to high rankings on Google are good backlinks. Usually, a lot of people create backlinks automatically but this won't help the rankings of your site instead they might get you banned from Google's and other search engines' index.

Right links come from related websites which contains the right keywords in the link text. To get good links from other websites, make your web pages attractive and have contents that are worthy to link with so that other people can talk about and share to other people.

5. You must be realistic

Search engines like Google have more trust on old and established websites that have a lot of backlinks. Getting on the first result page for a highly competitive keyword is very difficult so start optimizing on less competitive keywords and then proceed to the more competitive terms. Search engines must have to build trust to your website before they give your web pages good rankings for highly competitive keywords.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Add Facebook Like Button on Blog Post

Facebook has developed a lot of Social plugins which can easily be embeded and connected to other web applications such as blogs. I 've been posting about creating facebook official page amd promoting facebook page with like box plugin before and now, what I will post is to add a Facebook Like button in every post of your blog. This will let your readers to share your posts to their facebook accounts which will also let you know how many people liked your post. For the demo, notice the like button after every title of my posts. To have this on your blog, just follow the simple instructions below.

1. Login to your Blogger Account. Click on Design and then Edit HTML.


2. Check box beside the statement “Expand Widget Templates”.



3. You can actually place the like button anywhwere you want. In my case I place it after my Post Title. To do this, look for
and below this place the code below. You can also place it after your blog post and in this case place the following code after .



<iframe allowTransparency='true' expr:src='"http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=" + data:post.url + "&layout=standard&show_faces=false&width=100&action=like&font=arial&colorscheme=light"' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' style='border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:40px;'/>


4. Click on SAVE TEMPLATE button and reload your blog to view the changes you have made. The like button must now appear in each of your post.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

CSS Transparency Effect for All Browsers

Another interesting property of CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is transparency. Like the border radius property, which you can see on my post about CSS rounded corners with no images, this is treated differently in all browsers. It will take a four statements to completely make transparency effect in all browsers. But you don't have to worry on this statements because they will not interfere with each other. Below is the CSS statements for a class to make a 50% transparency effect.


.transparent_class {
    opacity: 0.5; /* standard CSS */
    filter:alpha(opacity=50); /* Internet Explorer */
    -moz-opacity:0.5; /* Mozilla Firefox */
    -khtml-opacity: 0.5; /* Safari */
}

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Javascript Floating Images on a Web Page

Here is a javascript code which will make images floating and moving in any direction on your web page. You can see the demo of this functionality at SEMAJ - The Officail Site of James Cuerpo Figues. Notice the two animated butterflies looks like flying around my web page. If you want this on your website, I provided the download link below. Just open the index.html on your browser and you can see the sample page containing floating images. You can copy the codes easily and apply it to your web page if you want.

Download the source code of floating images in zip file by clicking here.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

PHP Check if Javascipt is Enabled in Browser

Do you want to check in php if javascript is enabled or not? Now, here is a simple trick in php to check if you have javascript enabled in your browser. The trick is that you have a form with a hidden value which will be set as on if it is submitted by a javascript code. Of course, if the form was not submitted, javascript is disabled in your browser. Please read the comments carefully so that you will be guided with the code.


<?php

// this would not work if no html tags
// you can comment the line after this if you already have a open html and body tag
echo '<html><body>';
// stores the value of js if the form is submitted otherwise off
$js = array_key_exists('js', $_POST) ? $_POST['js'] : '';
// if $js is on, the form was submitted by the javascript submit()
if ($js=="on"){
    echo "Javascript is enabled.";
}
// otherwise display the form and try to submit the form with javascript
else{
    echo '<form name="js_form" method="post"><input type="hidden" name="js" value="on"></form>';
    echo '<script type="text/javascript">document.js_form.submit()</script>';
    echo "Javascript is disabled.";
}
// you can comment the line after this if you already have a close body and html tag
echo '</body></html>';

?>

Monday, August 2, 2010

Dynamic Multiple File Uploads in PHP

I have a PHP script here which will let you specify the folder name and the number of files to be uploaded. Here is the preview.



This program has basic form validation and notifications on entering the data for the file uploads. You are free to copy the code and customize it the way you want it to be. I also provided comments in every lines of code for your guide in tracing or debugging.


<?php

// display open div wrapper
echo "<div class='wrapper'>";
// form for folder name and number of files
$num_form = "<form method=post>
    <table border='0' width='400' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='3' align=center>
    <tr><td>Folder Name</td><td>
    <input type=text name='fname' class='bginput'></td></tr>
    <tr><td>Number of Files</td><td>
    <input type=text name='num_imgs' class='bginput'></td></tr>
    <tr><td><input type=submit name='go' value='GO »' /></td></tr>
    </form>";


// check if the form for folder name and number of files was submitted
if(isset($_POST['go'])){
    //check if both fields were provided data
    if($_POST['fname']=='' || $_POST['num_imgs']==''){
       // notify the data error
       echo "<div class='notify'>Please provide data on both fields.</div>" . $num_form;
    }
    // check if the number of files is valid
    else if(number_format((int) $_POST['num_imgs']) == 0){
       // notify invalid number errors
       echo "<div class='notify'>Invalid number of images inputted.</div>" . $num_form;
    }
    else{
       // get the current directory path
       $thisdir = getcwd();
       // check if the directory already exists
       if(!is_dir($_POST['fname'])){
          // create the directory and change the file permissions
          mkdir(($thisdir.'/'.$_POST['fname']) , 0777);
}
       // form for file uploads
       $form = "<form method=post enctype='multipart/form-data'>";
       $form .= "<table border='0' width='400' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='0' align=center>";
       // input fields depending on the number of files entered
       for($i=1; $i<=$_POST['num_imgs']; $i++){
          $form .= "<tr><td>Image $i</td><td>
          <input type=file name='images[]' class='bginput'></td></tr>";
       }
       $form .= "<tr><td colspan=2 align=center><input type=submit name='add_image' value='Upload Files'></td></tr>";
       $form .= "<input type='hidden' name='fname' value=".$_POST['fname']." />";
       $form .= "</form> </table>";
       // display form file uploads
      echo $form;
    }
}
// check if form file uploads was submitted
else if(isset($_POST['add_image'])){
    // check file name was set
    if(isset($_FILES['images']['name'])){
       // counter for files uploaded
       $ctr = 0;
       // loop through all files to be uploaded
       while(list($key,$value) = each($_FILES['images']['name'])){
          // check if any blank field is entered
          if(!empty($value)){
             // increment counter
             $ctr++;
             // filename stores the value
             $filename = $value;
             // replace blank space with _
             $filename=str_replace(" ","_",$filename);
             //folder name
             $foldername = $_POST['fname'];
             // set upload directory path
             $add = "$foldername/$filename";
             // upload the file to the server
             copy($_FILES['images']['tmp_name'][$key], $add);
          }
       }
       // notify successful uploads
       echo "<div class='notify'>You have successfully uploaded $ctr file(s).</div>";
       echo "<br/><a href='multiple-uploads.php'><button>Upload more files »</button></a>";
    }
}
else{
    // display form for folder name and number of files
    echo $num_form;
}
// display close div wrapper
echo "</div";

?>


I have also here the CSS code for basic formatting of the program.


.wrapper {
    font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
    font-size:12px;
    width:420px;
    margin:0 auto;
    padding: 10px;
    background:#f4f4f4;
}

.notify{
    padding:2px 10px;
    background:#fff;
}

Sunday, August 1, 2010

CSS Rounded Corners With No Images

Rounded corners in CSS today is now possible without using images with the border-radius property.


This can be done by the following CSS code in Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, Google Chrome, iCab and Konqueror.


.rounded-corners {

    border-radius: 20px; /* CSS 3 */
    -o-border-radius: 20px; /* Opera */
    -icab-border-radius: 20px; /* iCab */
    -khtml-border-radius: 20px; /* Konqueror */
    -moz-border-radius: 20px; /* Mozilla Firefox */
    -webkit-border-radius: 20px; /* Safari */

}


But this method does not have the same implementaion in different browsers and not all browsers support this property most especially internet explorer. Even IE8 does not support border radius. But this does not mean that it is not possible to have rounded corners in IE.

I tried googling about css rounded corners for internet explorer, and find this HTML REMIX CSS Curved corner (border-radius) cross browser. They had a detailed instruction and demo on how to make rounded corners possible in all browsers including IE6, IE7 and IE8. They also provide updates so I believe you can easily do this on your own. Just follow the easy steps they provide and you can now possibly made a cross browser rounded corners with no images used.