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Google Penguin & The Effects to Website

June 15, 2019 by ivanc82 Leave a Comment

What is Google Penguin?
Penguin is the newest code-named update series Google has rolled out. Panda was an update that focused on the quality of legitimate sites and their content, giving boosts to sites with high-quality content while reducing the ranking of low-quality content farms. Penguin focuses on the other end of things. The Penguin update emphasizes removing sites from the rankings if they are found to be using black-hat techniques.

As the lords and masters of the Search Engine Optimization industry, Google sets the rules. Updates to these rules generally take place in the form of updates to the algorithm that regulates the ranking of a given page for a query. These updates may be minor, such as tweaks that affect only a small handful of spam websites or ban a certain domain. Others may be far more volatile, such as the recent Panda updates.

Black-Hat Techniques 
Black-hat is a term taken from the hacking community, meaning shady or illegal tactics. The opposite would be white-hat techniques, which are strategies for following the rules most effectively. The exact definition of what falls into one or the other colour that depends on the changing rules of the game.

In the early days of SEO, nearly anything was white-hat. Spamming keywords in hidden areas of a website was common. Creating networks of websites to link to a legitimate site for a massive SEO boost was an easy way for webmasters to make money. Eventually, Google caught on to these methods of gaming the system and started labelling them black-hat. They actively punish sites that take advantage of these tactics today.

Modern Day Black-Hat 
Penguin has a fixed definition of what is considered a webspam or black-hat technique. Here are some of the more common tactics that Penguin flags for punishment.

  • Keyword stuffing. This is when the keyword density on a page becomes so high that it could be an obstacle to the quality of the content
  • Cloaking. This is when certain code is used to cause the search engine web crawler to see different content than a user sees visiting a page
  • Link schemes. Creating a large network of machine-generated spam sites with the intent to link to a legitimate site, causing a huge boost to incoming links, is one possible link scheme. These schemes are considered artificial means of bypassing the current system of link exchanging for quality
  • Scraped or duplicate content. Stealing content word for word, stealing and spinning content or posting multiple instances of the same content are all ways to use one piece of content multiple times, sometimes via outright theft. These are all considered webspam and are punished

The History of Penguin
The first Google Penguin update was implemented on April 24, 2012, though it was not publicly identified as Penguin until the 26th. Penguin was meant to be a smaller-scale update than Panda, affecting only three per cent of English-language queries.

Shortly after the initial implementation of Penguin #1, many webmasters cried out about unfair traffic loss. Google created a feedback page for two purposes. It allowed webmasters to report black-hat sites that still maintained high rankings, and it allowed webmasters who felt their sites were penalized unfairly to receive reconsideration.

The second Penguin update occurred on May 25, 2012. It continued the anti-black-hat strategies of the original Penguin while processing many of the requests made via the feedback form. This generally improved the accuracy of the ongoing Penguin initiative.

For several months, Google warned users that the next Penguin update would be a major shake-up of the industry. Instead, they rolled out Penguin #3 on October 5th, a minor update that affected less than .3 per cent of queries. The SEO industry breathed a sigh of relief, though larger updates continued in other initiatives, including Panda.

The fourth Penguin update, labelled by Google as Penguin 2.0, rolled out on May 22 of 2013 and was the first Penguin update of the year. It was another relatively minor update, though Google has not released the exact details of what it targeted. Research into the evidence suggested that it was targeted at the page level rather than implementing site-wide penalties for entire domains.

Another Penguin update is undoubtedly forthcoming, but there is no announced date for its implementation.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Black Hat Techniques, Google Penguin, Keyword Stuffing, SEO Tips

SEO Tool To Boost Website Ranking – Not One Time Job

June 15, 2019 by ivanc82 Leave a Comment

There are many people who have just enough knowledge of the way the Internet and search engines work to know that search engine optimization is important, but not enough knowledge to know that it will not just solve all your problems. SEO is not something you can apply and then sit back and wait for people to visit your website. Yes, it is important and it is an extremely clever concept, but the incorrect application of SEO will no more increase your website traffic than handing out free balloons will make an ice cream shop’s profits go through the roof. Yes, it can help; no, it is not the whole deal.

It is no good setting up a website and paying lip service to the basics of SEO – throwing together some backlinks in other places, using keywords and submitting a sitemap – and then, when the doors are not battered down by enthralled readers, complaining “but it had SEO! Clearly, SEO isn’t as good as I was told it was!”. Correctly applied, SEO will certainly boost your Google ranking. Whether it will get you to the first page of results, only time will tell – but it is useful.

The major mistake people make is in treating SEO as the silver bullet that will make all the difference – if that were the case, then Google ranking would be entirely meaningless because everyone would have SEO on their site. It needs to be remembered that good SEO and good content is the most potent combination for Google rankings.

When writing content for a website, making it SEO compliant does not simply rely on having the right keywords in large enough volumes on the page. Although a good keyword volume will certainly help you – it certainly will not hurt – there is more that you can do to send your page ranking higher. In many cases, it can be something as simple as where you put your keywords that propels you from page two of the results up to page one. Bear in mind that no-one knows search logarithms like the search engine creators, so following some advice that comes from them will always help.

For one thing, the placement of keywords in what you consider your “title” section will be relevant. If you are running a blog like this one, using your keyword in your title is not essential, and for the ease of natural reading it should probably not be something you do every time – too much repetition is jarring for the reader because after a while all they can think of is your keyword. However, regular use of keywords in titles will pay off – Google weights what is in the title more heavily than what is in the text.

Additionally, and in a way connected to this, the placement of keywords in links will also help you. Most blogging platforms immediately turn the titles into links. In addition, rather than leaving a link in its “naked” form – for example, www.linktothis.com/link – you should seek to make it a titled hyperlink with the text including your keyword. This, too, is weighted more heavily than an isolated keyword reference.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: SEO Tips

Understanding HTML Color Codes

June 15, 2019 by ivanc82 Leave a Comment

When I help people with web pages, I encourage them to edit the HTML directly and not rely on programs like Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe GoLive to layout their pages. One of the things that most people have a hard time grasping is what HTML Color Codes mean and how they work.

HTML Color Codes are 6 characters wide and look like “#80FF12″. This is really made up of 3 2-digit hex numbers that represent Red, Green, and Blue. I probably just lost a good portion of the readers, didn’t I? Let me back up and explain some things about hex values and color.

How to describe a color using numbers? There are a lot of ways to specify a particular color, but one of the ways that’s used with computers is to specify the values of Red, Green, and Blue to mix together to achieve the desired color. As we vary the amounts of Red, Green, and Blue we can create most any color you desire.

Why does this relate to computers? Computer displays, TVs, LCDs, and other “projected light” display devices use pixels to display what you see on the screen. The color value for those pixels is specified in a RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) value. For example, if your PC monitor is set to 1024 x 768 resolution, then there are 768 lines (going across your screen from top to bottom) on your screen, each line has 1024 pixels or little dots in it. Each of those pixels or little dots is actually made up of three smaller dots or light sources: a red one, a green one, and a blue one.

Ink is different. Printers that you use with your computer generally specify color as a four (or more) color “reflective” ink value made up of Yellow, Magenta, Cyan, and Black which is abbreviated as YMCK. Your computer uses formulas to convert the RGB values to CMYK values so that you can print what you see on your screen accurately.

How does the computer represent an RGB color value? As 3 separate values (one for Red, one for Green, and one for Blue) and each one ranges between 0 and 255. If you count the 0 as a value, that’s a total of 256 possible values. When you put the Red, Green, and Blue values together to represent a color, you get a possibility of 16.7 million colors (256 x 256 x 256). That’s a lot of colors and most people consider this to be “true” color because it can represent most photographs and images.

OK then, what is a Hex value? I’m glad you asked! Your computer stores information as single ones and zeros. Each of these tiny single values is called a “bit”. We then combine 8 of these “bits” to make a “byte”. So a byte is 8 bits. If you recall from high school math, you can count in various “bases”. We normally use base 10 or “decimal”, which uses 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 to represent a number. Likewise, if we use the ones and zeros I just mentioned, we’re talking about just two possible values for each digit, 0 or 1, and this is called base 2 or “binary”. However, in computers, we also use base 16, or hexadecimal (hex for short) because it packs more values into a single space. Hex uses the following digits to represent a number: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F. To represent the number 128 in decimal or base 10 takes 3 digits (128), in binary it takes 8 digits (10000000), and in hex or base 16 it takes just 2 digits (80). So by using hex values we save storage space and gain efficiency.

OK, my head hurts now, how does this relate to HTML color codes? HTML colors codes are made up of 3 sets of hex numbers, one for Red, one for Green, and one for Blue.

For example:
000000 is black (0′s for all three colors)
FFFFFF is white (255′s for all three colors)
FF0000 is all RED (255 for Red, 0 green, 0 blue)
00FF00 is all GREEN (0 Red, 255 green, 0 blue)
0000FF is all Blue (0 red, 0 green, 255 blue)
FFFF00 is Yellow (255 red, 255 green, and 0 blue)
808080 is a gray (128 red, 128 green, and 125 blue)

Generally, in HTML, you also put a “#” in front of the color code, but this is not necessary when you specify all 6 digits. If you make profiles for mySpace.com, leave off the “#” too because they filter them and it won’t display the color correctly if you use the “#”.

You can use the calculator that comes with Microsoft Windows to convert between Decimal and Hex values. Open the calculator and select View and then Scientific. Once you do this, you’ll see more buttons and controls on the calculator. Clíck “Dec” and the key in a number. Now clíck “Hex” and it’ll convert the number to hex. To convert from Hex to Dec, clíck on “Hex”, key in the number, and then clíck “Dec”. Sometimes you’ll get a color specification in Decimal, for example (128, 30, 80) and you can use this method to convert it to hex (80, 1E, 50) which would look like this for your HTML color #801E50.

I hope you understand more about HTML Color Codes and how colors are stored and specified in computers.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: HTML Color Code, SEO Tips, Web Design Tips

How To Optimize & Speed Up Website Load Time

June 15, 2019 by ivanc82 Leave a Comment

Speeding up your site will help in SEO and a faster loading site will get more incoming traffic than a site that is not optimized as visitors don’t need to wait for slow page loading. This is all can be done by using the methods below such as website caching, minifying CSS and Javascript, using CDN and more. Our website speed up guide below will be able to help you to speed up your site.

Reduce the use of Images, Flash and Javascript
By reducing the use of images, Flash and Javascript, this will help to save the website load speed for HTTP requests.

Avoid resizing images in HTML
An image that is resized in HTML will definitely slow up the loading speed as the URL requested the original large file size. Best to use thumbnails with specified HTML width and height attribute width=”400″ height=”280″.

Optimize image size by compressing the image file size
There are many ways to optimize image size, by reducing its size without losing the quality of the image. Use image editing software such as Irfanview or Photoshop to compress the file.

For Photoshop user, you can adjust the image quality to its optimized level at 55% and save the file using Save For Web & Devices. refer to the picture below

Minimize HTTP redirects
Minimizing and eliminating unnecessary HTTP redirects will reduce the wait time for site visitors.

Minify Javascript and CSS files
Minify CSS and Javascript files is a method of compressing the files to remove unnecessary blank space, backslashes, shortening its code size and make web pages load faster. You can minify your CSS and Javascript by using online compressor tools below.

CSS Compressor
Minify Javascript

Load Javascript at end of the page located before HTML closing body
It is best to implement all javascript at the end of the page rather than at the beginning. This allows the browser to render all important CSS for website and Javascript to be the last script to render.

Use Content Delivery Network
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a large scale of distributed server systems deployed at the different region around the globe. Therefore CDN will be able to pull and deliver contents faster depending on the location of the website visitors, this definitely speeds up website loading speed.

Optimize the website with .htaccess caching
The htaccess cache is a method of using browser caching to speed up your site. The basic way for using htaccess caching is by setting up Cache-Control Headers. This is where you specify the type of files to cache and set the number of seconds until it expires.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: CSS Minification, How To, htaccess Caching, JS Minification, Minify CSS, Optimize Image, Optimize Website, SEO Tips, Setup CDN, Website Loading Time, Website Speed Optimization

Thoughts of SEO

June 15, 2019 by ivanc82 Leave a Comment

One. Writing web pages.
I reckon that if you have something to say, you really can’t beat words for saying it. But, in my opinion, much of today’s website copy is like the man who winks at a girl in the dark: he knows what he’s doing, but nobody else does!

For instance, why would anyone in their right mind kick off the copy on a Home page along the stultifying lines of: “Based in Lincolnshire, we have been in the chub-fuddler business for 50 years”? Yet they do, and this is their main preamble. Even worse, many begin what they think is their sales pitch with: “Welcome to the website of Charlie’s Chub-Fuddlers” Neither of these gambits says anything about anything; and the terrible truth is that lines of this kind are everywhere.

Let’s clear the decks, your opening headline (which should be an H1paragraph, by the way) should say in no uncertain terms what it is you are offering vis-a-vis service or product. (Not to mention the benefit of owning the damn thing.) This is the line that both the search engine and the customer will see first. It is the line that convinces both to stick around. In addition, this headline should reflect and tie-in neatly with your HTML meta tags of Title, Description and Keywords.

Make no mistake, your headline is crucial for winning good search engine listings and for making sales.

Two. The benefit is the soul of advertising.
I mentioned ‘benefit’ above, so maybe I should enlarge briefly upon that. It is an unwritten rule in the advertising business that people don’t buy products, they buy the benefits of owning them. They buy because the product gives them kudos among their peers, or makes them feel good, or does precisely the job they need at less cost, or because they imagine they have found a bargain. For instance, one car is very much like another, but a Jaguar will bring more admiring glances than a Ford. Likewise, one cocktail dress is very much like another, but the one with the Emmanuelle of Paris label will make the wearer feel more glamorous.

So the words that you throw willy-nilly onto your website are important, and they are important in two distinct respects. First, they will prompt the search engine robots to give your site a high listing. Second, they will encourage your potential customers to buy your product. On these grounds, make every word count. And to give you an example of what I’m saying, here’s how the chub-fuddler headline (above) should look: “Charlie’s chub-fuddlers do the job faster and more accurately than any other chub-fuddler on the market. So you get more, high-tolerance chubs for your money.” Or words to that effect.

Three. Web page – how long, how wide and why?
There is a distinct difference between webpage writing and, say, print brochure writing. A brochure is designed to sit in the hands of its readers and be manipulated, depending on their predilection, front to back or back to front. A web page, on the other hand, has no tactility. It just sits there and stares back at you. The browser experience is completely different from the brochure experience.

Research shows that people won’t read every dot and comma of a web page, the way they will a brochure. With a web page, they tend to duck and dive, picking up snippets of information here and there. In which case, a web page should only say as much as it needs to say provide appetisers then stop. If you have a lot to say, the better bet is to continue the theme on another page. And do believe it, your readers will go with you, just so long as what you’ve written is interesting enough.

One of the best ways I know is to use bullet points. But I feel that you should use these only after your main preamble, as a kind of reminder of the main features and benefits of your product or service. Too many bullets point too soon tend to demonstrate that the writer is stuck for words.

Something more. Quite a large proportion of website owners feel compelled to set their copyright across the page from edge to unforgiving edge. This is vastly in error. Very few eyes can follow a printed line with any accuracy over a width longer than six inches. This is why books are printed, on average, about six inches wide and why newspapers have columns.

The moral is clear. Keep the length of web page copy within reason, and keep the width of that copy within reasonable eye span.

Four. Neglect the smaller search engines at your peril.

The following figures are not exact by any means. Copywriters don’t do exactitude, we only do near enough for jazz which is why we aren’t all actuaries. Anyway, the big three search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN seemingly account for around 75% of the Internet’s search traffic. And if you are nuts enough to want to add that lot up, you may find that it will run into many billions of searches per month.

Anyhow, by extrapolation, it appears that the remaining, lesser-known search engines must handle 25% of the traffic between them, which I can tell you with some accuracy amounts to about 950 million searches a month.

Wow! you say. And quite right, too. What seems plain from all of this is that if you aren’t deliberately targeting the smaller engines, you are neglecting, even rejecting some 25% of your potential customers.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: SEO Copywriting, SEO Headline, SEO Tips, Writing Headlines

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