James Cellphone

If you want to increase your SEO and design sites that stand out from your competition, check out the following user-friendly webmaster resources.

Google Webmaster Central
Check out Google Webmaster Tools – the following features make it easy for developers to easily design/create comprehensive sites.

Before you get started, you need to sign up for a Google account. Google offers one-stop shopping for webmasters (at no cost!). This comprehensive hub teaches you all the necessary tricks and tools to build dynamic sites that are SEO effective – keyword searches, subscriber stats, etc. Google basically spells out the basics for you and makes it VERY easy to follow.

• Webmaster Guidelines – You need to start with the Webmaster Guidelines first. It’s important to read and follow Google’s guidelines according to their specifications. These guidelines help Google index and rank your site. Read the “Quality Guidelines” carefully because it details SEO penalties and the reasons behind why Google drops sites from its index.

• Design and Content Guidelines – Details step-by-step how you need to design your site, content, etc. (i.e. “Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.”)

• Technical Guidelines – Google gives specifics about robot.txt files and advises to test sites to make sure sites work well in different web browsers, etc.

• Quality Guidelines – These guidelines give you the specific dos and don’ts when it comes to GOOD SEO practices – stay away from black hat techniques such as cloaking. Don’t duplicate content, etc.

• Webmaster Checklist – Google makes it easy for you to check off each step as you move through the design process. It also makes sure you are on track with best SEO practices, according to Google’s criteria.

The Google Help Forum and Webmaster Help Center/FAQs make it easy to quickly find answers to common problems/questions concerning SEO and web development.

Yahoo! Site Explorer
Yahoo! Site Explorer is a free, easily accessible tool that allows you to search all sites/pages indexed by Yahoo. In order to access Yahoo! Site Explorer, you need to first create a Yahoo account.

The best SEO feature is that you can easily research competitor’s sites (a great way to find your competition’s links and link to your competitor’s sites).

Submit a URL and check out how many pages and inlinks are listed. Click on the “explore” button for each site and find out more information about each page/link.

Site Explorer’s APIs is also a great resource tool for web developers (especially when it comes to your SEO). You need to apply for an Application ID to use this service (click on the right hand side of the page to get started).

Site Explorer’s APIs allows you to track sites’ traffic and usage in Yahoo. It provides the following data:

• Inlinks and page data

• Ping and Update notifications– you can notify Yahoo of changes to your site

Bing Webmaster Central
Microsoft has jumped on board with Bing Webmaster Central. The Webmaster Tools allows you to research crawling and indexing and view statistics in Bing. It also identifies other sites that link to your site and submit XML sitemaps.

You need to sign up for a MSN account and then log into Webmaster Central. Before you can use their Webmaster Tools, register and authenticate your sites first. Webmasters have access to a comprehensive blog, forum and Help section if they have further questions.

Webmaster Tools features the following resources that will help improve your SEO in Bing:

• Robots.txt validator

• HTTP verifier

• Keyword research

This article has been written to assist people who perhaps are new to internet marketing get their website noticed by the search engines. Of course there is a lot more that ought to be done, but for the sake of simplicity, I will talk about only one topic in this article – the use of Google Webmaster Tools.

Note: Google Webmaster Tools is able to be utilized on a lot of the website building sites, so although these notes are particularly for WordPress, you can still use this information to help the search engine optimization on your other sites. You should usually be able to locate all this sort of information under a ‘Settings’ tab when you are editing on your website.

You can get your sites verified by pasting the meta tag code from the Google Webmasters Tools site into the appropriate place when you are in edit mode for your site on the website building site.

Back on the Google Webmasters Tools site, you can also often get your site sitemapped by clicking on the ‘Add Sitemap’ button, then typing in ‘sitemap.xml’ in the box next to your site’s address.

Go to the website at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

If you have a little look around here, you will see how Google sees your website. This site can give you valuable information regarding the traffic to your site and how you can increase it by taking careful note of your View Links Data, Top Queries and Page Analysis.

The important thing about this site is that by submitting your sitemap directly to them, they will be sure not to miss any of your posts or pages.

So, sign up for your account (a good idea is to use the same log-in information for this account and your Adsense account [if you don't have an Adsense account yet, just keep it in mind, because you probably will open one at some later stage and you can use the same account details for it]. Ditto for AdWords.

When you log in you will see your Dashboard. Add your site address with the www. but not the http://.

Click ‘Add Site’

You will then need to verify your site, so choose the ‘Add a Meta Tag’ option. Scroll down a little and you will see a code, which you need to copy and paste into your site’s header. Open a new window and go into your WordPress Admin area. Go to ‘Appearance’ then ‘Theme Editor’ then select the Header from the list on the right-hand side. When it comes up, scroll down to where you see the script and paste your meta tag code in just ABOVE this script and BEFORE the script.

Click ‘Update File’

Go back to your Webmaster Tools window and click on the ‘Verify’ button. If you have done everything correctly, you should get a message confirming verification.

Now, head back to your Webmaster Tools Dashboard and next to your site URL there will be a column titled ‘Sitemap’ – click on the link that says ‘Add’. Choose ‘Add General Web Sitemap’ and put in sitemap.xml where required. Click on ‘Add General Web Sitemap’

You need to put some good content onto your site, if you haven’t already done so, before moving on to more SEO strategies. If your site was created on one of the website building sites, once you have put some content on your site and you have published it, you can use other search engine optimization strategies, also.

Many of us install server-side (ASP, CGI or PHP) scripts on our web sites, and many of this scripts store data on the server. However, poorly designed scripts can experience performance problems and sometimes even data corruption on busy (and not so busy) web sites.

If you’re not a programmer, why should this matter to you?

Answer: Even if you’re just installing and using server-side scripts, you’ll want to make sure that the scripts that you choose don’t randomly break or corrupt your data.

First, some examples of the types of scripts which store data on web servers include:

(Of course, many scripts in each of these (and other) categories are well-designed, and run perfectly well even on very busy web sites).

1. Follow-up autoresponders typically store the list of subscribers to the autoresponder, as well where in the sequence of messages, each subscriber is. Examples of autoresponder scripts: http://www.scriptcavern.com/scr_email_auto.php

2. Classified ad scripts store (at least) a list of all the classified ads placed by visitors. Examples of this type of script: http://www.scriptcavern.com/scr_classified.php

3. Free for all links scripts store a list of all links posted by visitors. See some example scripts listed at: http://www.scriptcavern.com/scr_ffa.php

4. Top site scripts usually store a list of the members of the top site as well as information about the number of “votes” that each has received. For examples of this type of script, see http://www.scriptcavern.com/scr_topsite.php

So what kind of scripts have problems? And what sort of problems am I talking about?

Well the principle problems all relate to what happens when bits of data from multiple users needs to be stored on updated at the same time. Some scripts handle these situations well, but others don’t…

DATA CORRUPTION

Here’s a common data corruption problem that can occur with many scripts:

1. When some bit of data needs to be updated, a copy of the server-side script starts running, and then starts updating it.

2. If another user comes along and does an update before the first copy of the script has finished, a second copy of the script starts running at the same time.

3. There are a number of ways things can now go wrong, for example:

(a) What if the first copy of the script reads in the data, then the second copy reads the same data, then the first copy updates the data, then the second copy updates the data? Answer: any changes made by the first copy of the script can get lost.

(b) What if the first and second copy of scripts are both adding multiple bits of new data to the store at the same time? For example, imagine each needs to store the headline, description and the name of the person posting a classified ad. Well, what can happen (with some scripts) is the two classified ads can get intermingled, so you might get (for example) HEADLINE-1, DESCRIPTION-1, HEADLINE-2, PERSON-1, DESCRIPTION-2, PERSON-2. Or worse yet, you might get bits of each part of each classified ad, mixed with the bits of the other. This type of thing is usually really bad news, as your data may consequently becoming unusable from that point on.

Does this sound too unlikely a problem to worry about? Don’t bank on it… even if it happens only 1 time in 1,000, or 1 in 10,000, eventually it will happen: You need a solution.

So the real question is: is it possible for programmers to create scripts without these kinds of problems? Fortunately the answer is yes, and there are a number of ways that programmers can address it:

1. They can store each bit of data in a separate file. This isn’t necessarily a total solution by itself (in particular, a script which just does this could still have problems if multiple copies of a script update the same file at the same time), but it does make data corruption less likely, and if corruption does occur, at least it won’t corrupt the entire data store in one go.

2. They can use file-locking. This means that if one copy of a script is working with a file, another copy of the script is prevented from working on that file, until the first copy has finished. File-locking works if done correctly, but programming it into a script needs to be done very carefully and precisely, for every single possible case… even a tiny bug or omission can allow the possibility of data-corruption in through the backdoor!

3. They can use a database (such as MySQL) to store the data. Provided the data is properly structured in the database, the database handles the locking automatically. And, as the programmer doesn’t have to write their own special locking routines, the possibility of bugs and omissions are much reduced.

PERFORMANCE PROBLEMS

Of course, avoiding having your data corrupted should be the paramount consideration in choosing a script, but is there anything else we need to be concerned about?

Answer: Performance

Of course, all webmasters are aiming to build busy high traffic web sites… but will your scripts be able to handle the load?

Go back and re-read the paragraph on file-locking. Now think about what would happen if all the classified ads on your classified page were stored in a single file (or all the links on your top site, or all the subscribers to your autoresponder, etc.).

What would happen?

Answer: Because each update can only be performed after the previous update has been completely finished, your site may be slow, or even unable to handle all your users’ requests.

So what’s the solution?

There’s two options that programmers can use:

1. They can use lots of small files and file-lock each individually (for example, one per classified, one per top site listing, etc.). Of course, this needs to be handled very carefully…

2. They can use a database (like MySQL), as databases allow any one individual record (“row”) to be updated, even when another is also being updated.

IN CONCLUSION

Now, let’s summarise:

1. Scripts that store data in files need to use file-locking to avoid data-corruption, and they also need to break the data into separately updateable chunks to avoid performance problems on busy web sites.

2. Scripts that store data in databases (like MySQL), provided of course that they have been properly coded, are usually less likely to suffer from data-corruption or performance problems.

And one additional point:

3. Even the best script is not immune to hard-disk hardware failures, your web host being struck by lightning, and all the other snafus that can happen. So, do take regular back-ups of any data that you can’t afford to lose!

In short, even if you’re not a script programmer, you need to be aware of data storage issues. In future, when considering a script for your web site, don’t be afraid to ask some hard questions about how it stores data and how well it handles multiple users.