If I had to pick only one plugin for firefox it would be the Web Developer Toolbar add on. I use it every day. I’m not really a developer. I do make simple web pages but I use it most the time evaluating websites. I use it to look at a site when I get an email or phone call from a prospect. I also use it when I’m link building.
When somebody comes to me to do their SEO the first thing I do is go to their website. I turn off CSS and Javascript using the toolbar to see what search got are seeing. You do this by clicking on the CSS pull down menu and clicking Disable Styles > All Styles and clicking on the disable pull down menu and click on “all javascript”.
The next thing that I do is click on the information tab and go to “view meta tag information”. I can tell if they are using meta tags at all. Sometimes you see all kinds of odd tags like “revisit after” which no search engine uses. Sometimes I see they have 2 descriptions.
I like to use the resize feature. Click on the resize pull down menu and change the size of the window to see how the site looks in different sizes.
This is not for SEO but I like to use the “Display Anchors” feature in the information pull down menu. I use this when I want to link to a specific forum post.
Under Images you can click on “display alt attributes” to see if they are using them. You can also tell it to show you images size. Find broken images is helpful too. “Show images full size” will show you real quick if they are not optimizing their images.
The Web Developer toolbar does quite a bit more but since I’m not a developer I don’t really use it. Let me know what your favorite features are in the comments. I would love to hear them.
I am currently setting up a forum for a client. The client wanted me to take out post timestamps because he did not want people to track when he made posts. It was also for other users so nobody got in trouble for making forum posts at work. I could not find much on the web on how to do this so here is what I did. There may be more files that need this done. These were all I could find.
#
#—–[ OPEN ]——————————————
#
index.php
viewtopic.php
search.php
viewforum.php
#
#—–[ FIND ]——————————————
#
$post_date = create_date(
#
#—–[ AFTER, ADD ]——————————————
#
$post_date = substr($post_date,0,11);
#
#—–[ SAVE/CLOSE ALL FILES ]———————
#
# EoM
I have a client that has a site in coldfusion and I needed to fix their URL’s so they are search engine friendly. I don’t have access to the server so I needed a coldfusion solution. What I wanted was to make it so there were no ?, &, or = signs in the URL and convert them to /’s. I also wanted to 301 redirect the old URL’s to the new URL’s. Here is what I came up with
<cfset urlstring = cgi.path_info>
<cfloop from="1" to=#ListLen(urlstring,"/")# index="i">
<cfif i mod 2>
<cfset paramName = "URL." & ListGetAt(urlstring,i,"/")>
<cfelse>
<cfparam name="#paramName#" default="#ListGetAt(urlstring,i,"/")#">
</cfif>
</cfloop>
<cfif cgi.QUERY_STRING contains "=">
<cfset moveUrl = #rereplace (cgi.QUERY_STRING,"[=?&]","/","ALL")#>
<cfset newUrl = #cgi.path_info# & "/" & #moveUrl#>
<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<cfheader name="Location" value="#newUrl#">
</cfif>
About a month ago I needed to do some work on a site where I needed to change a lot of code on every page. I set up IIS on my machine and copied the site to it. I then set up Dreamweaver so that I would work on the site locally. When I opened Dreamweaver I had all the files for my site listed on the left side. I found that when I did a search and replace in Dreamweaver I had the option to do it to the entire current site. That was real cool and I was using for some simple things. I got to a point where I needed to switch out some tags with tags. I like to use normal HTML whenever I can especially header elements.
The problem was that I need to find a string but leave the stuff inside the tags alone. Dreamweaver allows the use of regular expressions. I know very little about regular expressions so I was looking everywhere on how to do this. I finally found one document online that told me how. I can’t remember what that was but here is what I learned. I use (.+) in the search and $1 in the replace. If I want to find <span class=”HeaderL1″>My Heading</span> with <h1>My Header</h1> I search for <span class=”HeaderL1″>(.+)</span> and put <h1>$1</h1> in the replace field. I then tell it to search and replace the entire site. Make sure to have “use regular expressions” checked.
There is a nice plugin that help you do “noindex, nofollow” to certain pages to remove lots of duplicate content. These plug ins don’t cover pages that are not in WordPress. Here is an example WordPress robots.txt.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /rss/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /comments/
I went from 100 pages in the supplemental to 9. This is not for all blogs. Some blogs have different URL’s. Check your supplemental index by typing
site:domain.com –view ***
This will show the pages you have in the supplemental index.
Now that you have your domain name registered and your web host set up we need to put up a website. A lot of people like to use WYSIWYG or What You See Is What You Get editors like MS Front Page or Dreamweaver. Those are not necessary. It is not difficult to design your webpages in a nice text editor. I’m going to start out with the basic structure of a website. The most basic web page looks like this.
Read more…
Now that you have your domain picked out you need a place to host your website. If you thought there were a lot of domain registrars wait till you start looking for a web host. There are a lot of them. There are several ways to host your site. Read more…
I’m starting a series of posts that teach you how to get started as a webmaster. It is going to be very specific and written so that somebody with no knowledge in this area can get started. The only thing I won’t cover is how a site looks graphically. If you put your site together the way I specify you will be able to get a good designer to come in and make it look nice and you will be able to change designs easily in the future. Read more…
I have made a lot of changes to my blog lately and I wanted to update some of the things I have done to protect my blog and things I have done to improve it. The most important thing I did was update to wordpress 2.0.7. After what happened to Graywolf I thought it was best to keep on top of WordPress updates. I noticed the other day that somebody came to my site with the term
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There has been a lot of talk about the long tail. According to Wikipedia “The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article”. I think shoemoney is the one who made it popular for SEO and SEM. The idea behind the long tail is not new just what we call it. I have talked about it for years.
to me is a phrase typed into a search engine that is 4 or more words. 3 words I consider medium tail. There are some 3 word phrases that are easy to get and some that are very hard. One of the things that goes with long tail is that most of the time you may only get 1 visitor a month or even one visitor from that term ever. I used to run some pretty busy spam sites that were auto generated from lots of keyword research. One of the things I would see in the logs was that over 50% of my traffic over a month period were from phrases that were only typed in once that month.
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One of the things I often have to do when I take over a website is convince the owners that their current site is turning people away. There is a nice article about this at inforworld.com called “What users hate most about Web sites” that expresses what I have been trying to say for some time. I wrote about some of this a while back.
When most people get on the web they are looking for information. Most people that come to a companies website are looking how to contact them. If you sell something they are looking for your product and the price. People do not like to read. I used to have a business on ebay and I would put stuff in huge red 28 point letters that gave the shipping information. I constantly got email when people were surprised about the way I did shipping. I read over at www.digg.com a lot and it is very common for people to digg an item or makes a comment on an item just from reading the items title. You need to get them what they want as fast as possible. Don’t get me wrong some people do read every word on your site but they are a very small minority. Put the text furthor down the page. The first seen part of your page or fold as some put it should be clean with few choices.
