Web Design & Development Blog

Search Engine friendly URLs Explained

There are two types of URLs which are picked up by search engines: dynamic and static. Dynamic URL page addresses are a result form the search of a database driven web site or the URL of a website which has a script built in to it and are generated from specific queries to a site’s database based on the display results generated by a template. Static URL pages are specifically hard coded with the page addresses until the developer changes it manually.

One of the problems with creating or using dynamic URLs with your site is that indexing causes due in part when looking at SEO as a means to advance your business, is that there are many non-standard characters such as ?, & , %, =, and more other characters that show up in dynamic URL usage. The reason for this is that in many cases, anything after these types of characters are then ignored.

There was a time when people would just create an URL without thinking how it would affect their site in the rankings. In today’s world the URL is just as important as anything else. Search engine friendly URL’s make it easier for the search engines to crawl your site and look for keywords that many times are derived from your search engine friendly URL. Many times your site can actually be punished and not included in the rankings if it doesn’t have a search engine friendly URL. Search engines such as Google and others will not take the time to go through sites they feel are not search engine friendly and cause them a hassle to try and figure out what you’re trying to say with your site.

Keep It Simple

There are three main aspects that the URL structure should cover: presence of keywords, framework of files and directories, sub domains and the actual domain names.

The domain is the topmost factor in the ranking factor in where Google and other search engines consider when they rank a website, but, there are some rules that need to be applied when ensuring your site is ranked higher:

• Domain names with multiple dashes (-) will not typically rank as well as ones that have one or two word domain names
• Older, more authoritative websites will end up outranking newer ones as these older sites will be perceived to have been the originators of the keywords or a trademark term
• Multiple words in a domain name can be detected individually by most search engines regardless of dashes.

When optimizing your website many people try to get to fancy and use keywords or other things that really don’t help their rankings. One of the easiest ways is using search engine friendly URL’s. Rules for using keywords in the URL include descriptive names, directory names and file names are a good idea from a marketing standpoint and is simpler for visitors to remember and fully explain what visitors will be seeing. ULR rules include: an avoidance of excessive keyword usage as this is a prevalent sign of spam; separate keywords with hyphens in directory and file names; do not use the underscore character unless you are treating it as a composite term such as if you want to name “California_hotels” will be treated as such and not as “California hotels”; keyword importance is greatest in this order: domain name, sub domain, directory, sub directories and file name.

Getting keywords in the URL whenever possible is also a good idea, as it makes it easier for the search engines to spider or crawl your site. The easier you make it for the search engines the more likely you will be included and at a much faster rate. Search engine friendly URL’s are something more people should strive to do.

More than Just a Name

When it’s time to determine your domain name which will be of your search engine friendly URL do some time and research into it. People many times just put anything down and in reality can hurt themselves and eventually their website when it goes live. Another great way to make your site more search engine friendly is to optimize it more, making things easy to find and not all cluttered up. Search engines come to crawl or spider your site and they are only their a few minutes at best. First impressions are important and have a search engine friendly URL’s are the first step, but don’t let it stop there if you want to rank high in search engines. Make sure your site is as equally important as your search engine friendly URL’s. If you work towards doing both of these things you should be fine.

As a website designer, I am often asked which type of site is better, HTML or FLASH? Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear cut answer. – it just depends. If you have a content site or a shopping site, then HTML is definitely better. HTML sites convey information and content, whereas flash sites convey image and offer interactivity. That is the short and simple answer. Lets take a closer look and see what the advantages and disadvantages of HTML and FLASH are.

HTML sites

HTML is very flexible and suitable to sites that are frequently updated, for example news sites. HTML is the preferred language for the search engines. Virtually all top ranking sites on the major search engines are HTML based.

If browsers are looking for information online, they want it fast, and they want it up-to-the-minute. Generally, browsers searching for information do not want a multimedia experience. HTML is ideally suited because it loads fast and can be updated frequently.

The disadvantages of HTML websites are they are static and flat. They convey information and while they can convey a style and a theme, they are limited to static images on the page.

FLASH

FLASH websites convey an image and an atmosphere. This is perfect for design industry websites, such as hair, clothing, night clubs or web design. FLASH adds motion and sound to websites.

From a designers perspective, FLASH is the preferred medium because designers have absolute control over the layout, and can place images and colors exactly where they want them.

FLASH has several disadvantages. The main disadvantage is the search engines can’t access the content, and very few FLASH websites rank at the top of the search engine results. This is a huge disadvantage. A number of work-arounds are possible, such as a parallel HTML site, created for the search engines. This is helpful, but not as good as a straight HTML site.

The other main disadvantage of FLASH is it requires a plug-in which must be downloaded and installed. Many new computers come with the FLASH plug-in installed, but still some people are reluctant to take this extra step. For many people, the extra multimedia experience isn’t worth the effort to download the plug-in.

When considering a FLASH website, it is important to be clear on what the browser wants when they visit your site. If they just want information or to check the specs of a product, then FLASH is just going to annoy them and you will lose sales. If, however, browsers visit your website to see your design capability, whether it be for clothes, websites, or shoes, then FLASH may well be important to building your image in the minds of your visitors.

Another problem with FLASH is that printing is difficult. If you have pages on your site that are primarily text, you will want to use HTML.

The Art of Compromise.

While most of the HTML versus FLASH debate focuses on the extremes of all HTML websites or all FLASH websites, there is plenty of middle ground.

FLASH does add appeal to a website no question of that, and static HTML sites have a certain flatness to them. A solution to this is to use FLASH elements, for example the page headers or small parts of the page, with the FLASH embedded in the HTML. This gives the best of both worlds!

What Are Payment Gateways

Payment gateways are an ideal way for online business to accept credit cards. In its simplest terms, it’s a credit card processing terminal. Payment gateways do many different things for business and let’s look at a few of those.

Payment gateways almost always increase your sales and are the most secure ecommerce platform. People feel more secure using a credit card these days and when you marry that with payment gateways, it is the fastest and quickest way to accomplish buying and selling of merchandise. Often times if you do not accept payments through payment gateways, many customers will simply go to another website to purchase the product. These are times of customers want it now/buy it now and if you are set up to accept payments through payment gateways, you make it the better off you and the customer will be. Customers like the ease of operation and that is one thing that payment gateways give them. Secondly, costs can be cut way down by using payment gateways. You will need fewer employees on staff, thus your overhead will be smaller. Payment gateways come in two different forms. One is the secure order form and the second form comes by way of a merchant side application. The secure type take you to a third party site that does the processing and this is the most popular one out there. The merchant side is an application program interface that is integrated into the server that is holding the merchant’s ecommerce website.

Options to Consider

When you decide on a payment gateway to go with, some of the things to consider include the ease of operation for your customers, available features, cost and reliability. Customers tend to get impatient, so the payment gateway you choose should be very user friendly and the purchasing process should be quick. The longer customers have to wait, or deal with problems in the checkout portion of the transaction means a lost customer to that web site.

When looking to review the various types of payment gateways, you must ensure that the gateway is fully compliant with the security initiatives which are put forward by the major credit card providers: Visa Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP), MasterCard Site Data Protection (SDP) and the Discover Information Security and Compliance (DISC). If you find that any other version of payment gateways do not discuss or guarantee these security initiatives, you may just end up paying higher fees, possibly having your account closed, or, worst case scenario possibly having your organization added to “The Match File”, which is known as the credit card processing blacklist.

Features What Works For Your Business

There are many different payment gateways that are really great and also some that aren’t so great. The payment gateway you choose will depend on the type of business you run and how important credit cards are to its success. PayPal is one of the more popular online payment gateways which have been around a very long time and people use it every day with great success. For most businesses, this works well.

There are many features of payment gateways which many merchants are unaware of which can make your business flourish even more. Some of the more common features include: virtual terminal, fraud prevention, recurring billing, eCheck processing and integration.

If you want a merchant account credit card processing gateway, then there are those out there which may cost you a little more but if you’re in business for the long haul than maybe that’s the way you need to go. It all comes down to the cost factor when you talk about payment gateways. Some cost a little more, but you will have to decide which is best for your business situation.

Do I Need Meta Tags

First thing to decide is what are meta tags and how important they really are. The importance of meta tags can’t be underestimated. Meta tags are used to add information to the HTTP header of a webpage, which tells the search engines what the page is about and other information such as: your web site title, author and article name, among other things.

Meta tags can either improve your search engine rankings, or they can hurt them. Keywords in the meta tags need to be chosen very carefully as when you submit your website to the search engines, it’s one of the first thing they pick up. Some search engines dis-regard the keywords entirely, but most use meta keywords to some extent, along with many other factors.

Having good keywords in your Meta Tags will not rank your site by itself, but it certainly will help. Since Meta Tags have been abused in the past, it is very important to only use words that actually appear on the page in your meta. If you use words that do not appear on the page, the search engines will think you are trying to fool them and it will work against you.

It is also important to avoid repetition. If you repeat the same keywords over and over, or even more than twice, the search engines will either ignore your meta, or they may ignore your webpage complete, or it will count against you in ranking.

What Meta Tags to use?

There many different Meta Tags but really only 3 are important. These are the TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS, in that order. If these 3 are used properly, the others are not necessary.

Tips On Using Meta Tags The Correct Way

The importance of meta tags, which are associated with keywords, is critical for your web site. The following are some hints to help you choose good keywords that will hopefully get your web site higher ranked:

• Easy does it. The best way to use Meta tags is sparingly. Meta tags are one of many factors that go into ranking your site. Make the Meta relevant and descriptive and then stop.
• Unique to every page. Make sure every page has unique Meta Tags. Using the same Meta Tags site wide works against you. Better to have none at all than repeat your Meta.
• If you’re selling a product, make sure you put the product name and model number in the keywords.
• Variations of the keyword in meta tags are important as long as you don’t stray too far away from the original keyword.
• Other options to consider include if you sell products in a certain area such as a city or state then these keywords should be added to ensure the search engines find them in the meta tag header.

Don’t Use Framed Sites

Many search engines are not designed to pick up meta tags which are used on frame sites, therefore, it’s always best to submit an introduction or index page to search engines first. This way they can be indexed and more than likely, the framed sites will also be listed.

The importance of meta tags as you can see is something that many people don’t know about or understand, but they can make a big difference in a site’s search engine rankings. There are also many sites on the Internet where you can submit your site which will allow it to be analyzed for not just meta tags, but other vital search engine ranking information. Such sites as www.seochat.com/seo-tools/ are an excellent place to start where you can have your site’s meta tags analyzed to see how well they are working within the site with the keywords you have chosen.

If your web site has been developed using HTML, PHP, Perl, MySQL, other than Microsoft specific languages such as ASP, ASP.NET, MSSQL, all can be hosted with Linux web hosting services.

There are several advantages that Linux web hosting has. Let’s look at some of those right now.

One of the primary advantages in moving toward Linux web hosting services is it being the most powerful and stable among web hosting platforms. Another advantage is not just in what the platform can deliver, but, rather what lies in the background services, web server equipment, licensed software and 24/7 web hosting server monitoring and both professional technical support and services.

Another important feature and perhaps the crowning the coup d’état is the web hosting services provides on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, support of PHP/Pearl) bunch. All of which have proven extremely useful as a coexistent web hosting entity.

Linux web hosting’s primary advantage is the no fee cost associated with the software. Since Linux is cheaper than Windows, it has become a viable option for people who are on a tight or non-existent budget when it comes to web hosting. As Linux is an open source platform, many upgrades and add-ons are always available as developers are constantly coming up with new add-ons which are easily integrated into the open source code development page, which Linux hosts. Many people think that Linux web hosting is more secure than windows, but that has really never been proven, so there’s no real-world claims to encourage web developers to switch. Web designers and programmers do make the choice to use Linux web hosting above all others due to its ease of use and scalability.

Overview of Linux Web Hosting

When you have decided upon the many important and tangible benefits offered as part of Linux Web Hosting include: the latest builds of RedHat Enterprise Linux with PHP, Perl with modules, MySQL, CPanel v10 control panel, Fantastico Deluxe Add-on panel, lots of free scripts and much more, comes at a fraction of what it costs for a lot less than what is offered through Windows 2003 web hosting services. You can generally see at least a 25% price difference between both popular web hosting.

Based on this price difference, Linux web hosting is a viable cheaper alternative based on a web developers need. Other developers find that when they do require a more robust developing environment, they move toward or stay with a Windows platform. No matter how you slice it, Linux web hosting is a web hosting platform that for the price is very hard to beat. With web designers and programmers always coming out with new features to add to it, the future looks very bright for Linux web hosting. Linux web hosting has found a nice niche between other web hosting and developers seem to like what it does for them. If you’re looking to cut costs, Linux web hosting is probably the best way to move forward; but, if you’re not, than your best solution would be to go with Windows which gives you a little more. One thing that will never alter is the cost factor and as Linux web hosting is free, you can’t beat the price or all the options it does give you. Perhaps this is why Linux web hosting keeps growing in popularity.

What Is An Internet Protocol?

Internet protocols are data-oriented protocol for transferring and communicating data across network. This protocol is usually sent from one computer to another on the Internet. Internet protocols are widely used and transferring data is their main use through networks or LANs. Many Internet protocols are connected through ethernet connections which is the most widely use connectivity tool. Just like anything though Internet protocols does have its problems. It may not seem like a lot, but just like anything it doesn’t always go through the way we like it. For instance the delivery of email through your IP or Internet protocols really can’t always be guarantee and there is a reason for that. Internet protocols read Internet address such as an IP address, but they can’t guarantee it will reach the destination it was intended for.

Internet Protocols and You

As with anything else, Internet protocols, connections and service continue to get better. Remember how much we all thought dial-up connectivity was the greatest invention? To make that memory worse is the fact we thought 28K was fantastic and FAST!

Two of the most familiar and most used internet protocol is TCP/IP. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP). When looking at the OSI model layers, the TCP/IP protocols can be found in the lower layer of the Internet Protocol Suite as part of the routing protocol layer. Internet Protocol (IP) resides within the network-layer protocol (Layer 3) and contains all the addressing information (IP addresses) and source control information that is responsible for packets being routed. Along with the TCP protocol, the IP protocol is the heart of the Internet Protocols.

Internet Protocol Routing

IP routing is dynamic in that routing calls for routes are calculated automatically at regular intervals by the routing software as opposed to static routing which are established by the network administrator changes the router configuration.

An IP routing table, which has a combination of destination address/next hop pairs, which is needed for dynamic routing. IP routing is specifically designed for IP datagrams to travel through internetworks one hop at a time. As the entire route is not actually known at the onset of the packet journey and are recalculated at each of the hops to what the destination address by matching what is put into the datagram for the destination address.

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the protocol that is used to actually transport the data in the IP environment and corresponds. The TCP resides in Layer 4 of the OSI reference model. TCP provides stream data transfer, reliability, efficient flow control, full-duplex operation and multiplexing.

Other Internet Protocols

With the advancements in Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP, originally introduced only a few short years ago, there has already been great advancements and as Internet protocol connections improve, this is something that business and individuals are taking a serious look at. Internet protocols keep changing and that will never stop the world’s quest to give everyone the best connection possible no matter where you live.