Web Style Press, Best Practices from all the Web, Build Better Websites » Web Guidelines

Worth of Google Plus and +1 Button for SEOs and CEOs

Hiroshi — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 03:58:57 +0000

Launch of Google plus is a disaster for FaceBook. That is what I believe. If not now, it will be. Atleast 50% users from Facebook will leave and join Google Plus. All the spammers, SEOs, webmasters, networking gurus who were at Facebook for spreading their websites will move to the Google Plus. Because Google Plus is the social networking website from the Google Search Engine. Google makes rules for webmasters and developers. Google Plus will decide which website to promote and which to demote. They have a +1 button to promote content. This is what I claim that the content with more +1s will be getting more search results and web traffic. Google Plus and +1 button will affect site traffic and site ranking.

They say:

Add +1 to your pages to help your site stand out
+1 buttons let people who love your content recommend it on Google search

If they are saying it directly then what doubt is left behind?

Proceed the following link to get the Google Plus +1 button for your website today.

Google Plus +1 button code

While this can be a trick from Google to attract users from all over but this is what they have to say in addition to above.

How does +1 affect search results?

+1 helps people discover relevant content, a relevant website or a Google search result from the people they already know and trust. Adding the +1 button to your pages lets users recommend your content, knowing that their friends and contacts will see their recommendation when it’s most relevant in the context of Google search results.

Does +1 affect my site’s performance in search?

Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1’s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking.

How will the +1 button affect my traffic?

Personalized annotations next to your page in search results may increase your site’s visibility and make your site’s snippet more compelling, which may in turn increase the odds that users will click through to your page.

Will +1’s from my site show up in search results?

If a user +1’s a URL on your site, the Google search result snippet for that URL may be annotated in search results.

All this means that if you are a webmaster, web developer, SEO, CEO of any web property – you can not ignore the importance of the +1 button and Google Plus. This is the next best thing for SEOs and CEOs. I have even started getting emails from different SEO companies offering several +1s packages as SEO service.

More +1s is directly proportional to the more visitors to your website and more authority for your website. Get the Google Plus button and use Google Plus to exaggerate about your website and you will be the next successful webmaster or publisher or even blogger from rest of your fellows.

Worth of Google Plus and +1 Button for SEOs and CEOs is a post from: Web Style Press, Best Practices from all the Web, Build Better Websites

Traffic Widgets Can Get your Website Banned

Hiroshi — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 01:15:35 +0000

Many websites exchange website traffic with you by giving you a piece of javascript code to place in your website and your website starts displaying catchy misleading images which lead visitors to other websites. At every image click you might see a pop up and if you keep visiting more and more these websites more pop up will appear and your browser may crash. The important thing is to note is this, these all target websites share same widgets which lead you to many other such websites. Many times the images displayed are tempting but those are modified and are specially prepared in photoshop to only catch user’s attention.

The important thing to note is, you can not do any activity like this where you exchange traffic to website only for more website traffic. This whole concept is wrong. Your website should not offer misleading links and images to other websites. These widgets shockingly provide you almost same traffic as Google does. Your website analytics will show you that. In such case be aware that your website will be penalized. This is also against web accessibility standards.

These guys are involved in promoting crappy websites in an unethical way. On asking they will say that:

Our exchange program is not a paid-to-click program. The site owners do not need to visit any link. The visitors just read news they like and they don’t get paid for it. We are not engaged in sending unwanted emails. We send the offers personally only to sites that have good and valuable content. Our widgets don’t redirect visitors without their knowledge or consent. People just click the news that attracted their attention on their own.

Thus, our program doesn’t break Google AdSense TOS and can be used together with Google AdSense. Most of our partners use the Google service and they are happy with the result of our exchange program as well.

Fact is, your Google AdSense account might get banned if you display such widgets at your website and Google might remove your website from search results as well. Google says that they actively monitor landing pages of your website and ban publishers who do not follow web standards. Placing traffic widgets might give you instant adsense cash but not for long and you will land in adsense blacklist.

Avoid such websites which give you widgets like that and claim to double traffic for website. Trust in going slow and steady. Write quality content, post regularly and be patient. Only organic traffic would lead your website to success. Let others find you via quality of your website content and do not indulge yourself into invalid activities to promote website in unethical ways. If you are into making money online avoid traffic widgets.

Traffic Widgets Can Get your Website Banned is a post from: Web Style Press, Best Practices from all the Web, Build Better Websites

Redesign Brainstorming – Keep in Mind Before you Redesign

Hiroshi — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:44:56 +0000

Sooner or later you will feel dissatisfied with your current blog / website design. You will have to change the website design for better either for expanding needs or better look and feel. I recently needed to redesign my one of blog’s theme. I have much experience in designing websites and blogs so luckily I know how to take it to the best level and what you need to keep in mind and what to take care about while redesigning your current theme / design so that you may not have to start over and do the tweaks. Alright I will share everything and process what I went through in designing my new blog theme. Once you go through reading all this, you will know what to keep in mind for best results. I have also included updates which I did to my blog for better user experience, better SEO and better ads placement.

I needed to redesign the blog theme. Why? Let me explain:

What I was Unhappy About?

Current theme was kind of lame.
Header needed to be professional. There was a lot of free space in header.
I needed a clean theme with all white background so that user may focus on content and theme may load faster
I needed to remove recent posts, recent comments and popular posts from sidebar.
I needed a single sidebar. There were two thin sidebars. I needed one wide sidebar.
I needed a sidebar where 300px width ads can be placed.
I needed two ad spots at the top of the post. So I needed content area where 336px and 300px width ads can be adjusted.
I needed two ad spots at the bottom of post similar to top.
I needed to remove categories from the right-sidebar and bring them down to the blog content.
I needed to take categories, tags, pages at the bottom of the blog because search engine crawler crawls pages from top to bottom and left to right.

Research – RnD – Preparation

The Google ad width was 336px which I was using at the top.
Next to that, ad can be of 300px width.
Sidebar can be of 312px width inwhich 300px width ad could be easily adjusted.
The screen area available for display is 1004px width.
I need to place two ads at the top of post and two at the bottom.
Categories can go down to content.
Below the bottom ads, I can place ‘tags’, ‘share buttons’, ‘top searches’ etc.

So here is the model.

Top header
Rightsidebar with 312px width
Leftside area for content (336+300px+extra space)
Two top ads below title
Content
Page navigation
Two bottom ads
Tags and category for post
Share buttons
Related posts + 300px ad spot
Related searches

Give a look to mashable.com, instantshift.com and smashingmagazine.com for layout and elements orientation and style because pros do it best in every way. Blog the should be SEO ready, search engine friendly, user friendly, clean and there should be no empty spaces and you should choose ads spots wisely so that you have enough space for ads yet site / blog may look good.

Then I redesigned the blog keeping these things in mind and after that checked for W3C validations.

How to Use Sidebar Wisely?

There is no need to display recent posts widget. Anybody can view your blog’s main page for recent posts and activity. Infact do not display widgets in sidebar. Display sharing / subscription options and RSS buttons at the sidebar top. Make sure you have 300px min. width available in sidebar so that you can place ads of 300px, or two 120px or two 150px ads in sidebar. Keep sidebar for the ads. You don’t wanna put all the eggs in one basket. Place ads from different advertisement networks.

Content Area VS Ads Spots

Alright, you have got the main content area where you gonna post the actual stuff. I have been placing one 336px width google ad at the top and one same at the bottom of the post but you know that left some empty space infront of ads. My writing style did not allow me do ad float left and type some text infront of it, so it was always the post title, then 336px google ad below and the empty space infront of it and then below an image and then below the text for post.

The best practice to do is to not leave any area empty in your blog or website. Fill the website with proper elements and stuff according to space available and other limitations. What I did was this. I made content area bigger enough to fit two ads at the top of the post. one 336px width ad and one 300px ad side by side at top of the content and then content below. Same I did for area below the post. Two side by side ads below post. One 336px and one 300px width. That’s it. All spaces filled and I used more space for ads as well.

Where is the space for More Ads?

You know, sometimes you need more ads space to experiment with another advertisement network to make some extra bucks. Now the sidebar has got ads, top of the post and bottom of the post has got ads and what next?

There is a cool plugin many bloggers use named as ‘related posts’. It displays related posts for the topic. We use it below the post. That related posts area can be of 336px width and infront of that you can have 300px width ad.

Categories, Tags and Pages Links Placement

You know what? These are not important. You do not need to show whole category tree in the sidebar. Soon you will have lots of categories and lots of tags and even lots of pages. Take all these at the bottom of blog. Above footer you can use categories and few popular tags. In footer use page links. That’s it. Search engine crawler crawls from top to bottom and left to right. So the actual content should be near top and left of all the available area.

Based on the stuff I described, I have designed my theme and I am pretty much happy about it. What do you keep in mind before redesigning the theme? or what did you find useful in your latest design technique and approach?

Redesign Brainstorming – Keep in Mind Before you Redesign is a post from: Web Style Press, Best Practices from all the Web, Build Better Websites

Find out Exact Reach of Sites and Comparison with Each Other in Real Time

Hiroshi — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:20:00 +0000

Use Google Analytics to monitor your site’s reach or any other analytical program but how you can compare sites which are not yours? Google trends enables you to see exact reach of any site and its comparative reach with other sites. Here is how it is.

Go to http://trends.google.com/trends?hl=en

Type or Paste the URLs (in following format) of sites you want to compare and see their reach. e.g.

engadget.com, mashable.com, techcrunch.com

Hit search trends button. You will get bars and graphs to show you how much reach any site has got in some countries including United States, United Kingdom, India, Canada, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, Malaysia, Philippines, South Africa.

The above comparison is of my favorite sites. This gives you which website is hitting more in any country related to any other similar site. If you have got some websites of your own or blogs, you can compare their relative reach in the same way easily using this method.

Find out Exact Reach of Sites and Comparison with Each Other in Real Time is a post from: Web Style Press, Best Practices from all the Web, Build Better Websites

Standard and Non-Standard Links

Hiroshi — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:22:11 +0000

Links are the Web’s number one interaction element. Violating common expectations for how links work is a sure way to confuse and delay users, and might prevent them from being able to use your site. Lets see what Markup Gurus say about links, and when links meet the standard or non-standard criteria. The usability guideline for any type of navigational design is to help users understand three major points:

Where they’ve been?
Where they are?
Where they can go (past, present, and future)?

These three are interrelated: If we consider browsing a site, a journey; then knowing your past and present locations makes it easier to decide where to go next.

Standard Guidelines for Links

Make obvious what’s clickable.
For text links, use colored or underlined text.
Don’t underline non-link text.
Differentiate visited and unvisited links.
Explain what users will find at the other end of the link via ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags to enhance scannability and search engine optimization (SEO).
Don’t use “click here” or other non-descriptive link text.
Avoid JavaScript or other fancy techniques (flash) that break standard interaction techniques for dealing with links.
Don’t open pages in new windows (except for different files i.e. PDF files).

Standard and Non-Standard Links is a post from: Web Style Press, Best Practices from all the Web, Build Better Websites

Correct Way To Use Robots.txt File

Hiroshi — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:30:59 +0000

Suppose You want to Disallow two directories at your website i.e. some-directory and another-directory located at:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/some-directory
http://www.yourwebsite.com/another-directory

to be crawled by search engines and Allow all other directories and page of whole website to be indexed and crawled then here is how to do it in a right way.

Wrong Way

This is wrong way of creating a robots.txt file for your server for above requirement.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /some-directory/
Disallow: /another-directory/

In above example: You disallowed two directories but you did not allow anything other than that at all.

Correct Way

User-agent: *
Disallow: /some-directory/
Disallow: /another-directory/
Allow: /

In above example you just disallowed desired two directories and allowed all other website directories and pages.

This confusion about the code is very common. We generally read for robots.txt file and get the code and add * and mention what to disallow and upload the file.

To allow all the website for all search engines and all their crawlers (A search engine may own more than one crawler or bot for different tasks) here is the code:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Google Webmaster Tools are very helpful in doing right thing what your website deserves. From there you can generate robots.txt file by choosing some options. I would recommend Google Webmaster Tools to every webmaster.

Correct Way To Use Robots.txt File is a post from: Web Style Press, Best Practices from all the Web, Build Better Websites

Force File download – Do Not Display Open In Browser

Hiroshi — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:13:11 +0000

In your HTML directly link to the file which is to be downloaded.
i.e.

Download Pdf.

You will get a pop-up box asking whether you want to save the file or open it directly. Now you want to download it. The solution is to open your .htaccess file and write there few lines according to your requirement mentioning extension of files which you want to download directly and you are done.

Place the following code into your .htaccess file.

AddType application/octet-stream .pdf
AddType application/octet-stream .doc
AddType application/octet-stream .csv

This script will force download all files having extensions .pdf, .doc or .csv.

.htaccess File

.htaccess files (or “distributed configuration files”) provide a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis. A file, containing one or more configuration directives, is placed in a particular document directory, and the directives apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof.

There is .htaccess file present by default at the root directory of your server. If not, you can always create a file named as .htaccess, code it and upload it in the desired directory or at the root level of your website.

Force File download – Do Not Display Open In Browser is a post from: Web Style Press, Best Practices from all the Web, Build Better Websites

Modern Font Styles For Websites

Hiroshi — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 17:45:27 +0000

I have described about using nice and clean fonts in web page. Now lets see some more details about using fonts in web pages.

As we know Verdana, Arial and Tahoma are being used from the beginning. In Web 2.0 Style, and many open source softwares such as WordPress, now-a-days some other fonts are being used which are neat and clean and stylish too. Best part is, to use these, no installation of fonts is needed. In Windows XP these are present by default. I have selected some examples of look and feel of some chosen fonts over here.

Font Styles Comparison

Arial “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

Verdana “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

Tahoma “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

Trebuchet MS “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

Georgia “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

Lucida Grande “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

Lucida Sans Unicode “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

sans-serif “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

Font Families

It happens so that we can define a family of fonts while creating web page. If one font is not available in user’s machine; then next font style will be displayed. i.e

Web Style Press, Best Practices from all the Web, Build Better Websites » Web Guidelines

Worth of Google Plus and +1 Button for SEOs and CEOs

How does +1 affect search results?

Does +1 affect my site’s performance in search?

How will the +1 button affect my traffic?

Will +1’s from my site show up in search results?

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Traffic Widgets Can Get your Website Banned

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Redesign Brainstorming – Keep in Mind Before you Redesign

What I was Unhappy About?

Research – RnD – Preparation

How to Use Sidebar Wisely?

Content Area VS Ads Spots

Where is the space for More Ads?

Categories, Tags and Pages Links Placement

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Find out Exact Reach of Sites and Comparison with Each Other in Real Time

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Standard and Non-Standard Links

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Correct Way To Use Robots.txt File

Wrong Way

Correct Way

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Force File download – Do Not Display Open In Browser

.htaccess File

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Modern Font Styles For Websites

Font Styles Comparison

Font Families