Hungerford Web Design Blog

We Break up for Christmas tomorrow. I’d like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Here’s to 2008

It has started as a bit of an experiment really and also as a way of listing some of the links I use for others but to be honest, I am already about 5mins away from deleting it……our new directory.

It’s a third party script (which is Ok, not great - but ok): LINK REMOVED

Don’t bother bookmarking it as it probably won’t be there long:

• What’s the point in another directory? Well for me it was to be able to personalise it to the things “I” think are interesting or important for the readers of this blog and users of our site.
• Why not use the blog? Well, I’ll be brutally honest that I was being selfish. I wanted to see what impact it would/could have from an SEO point of view - big mistake! I’ll go into why in a few days…it’s going to take me that long to sort it out.

I genuinely thought it might be a good idea to create a really well set up directory with areas specifically for SEO, web development, accessibility and security but all I can see now are listing problems, spam, management overhead and a whole heap of hassle.

I wasn’t expecting the directory to suddenly sprout 5m links and propel the site to pr10 but I did want to see if I could attribute any positive trend to it once it had become semi-established…..all I have now is a whole heap of respect for somebody who makes a living from running a directory.

In short, if you consider creating a directory………..step slowly away from the keyboard, walk towards a wall and bang your head against it - it’ll be less painful in the long run!

R.I.P directory (for now)

Technorati Tags: Accessibility, Bang Your Head, Big Mistake, Blog, Directory, Few Days, Hassle, Heap, Keyboard, Point Of View, Running, Third Party

Following on from our previous SEO tips for beginners:
SEO for beginners Part 1
SEO for beginners Part 2
SEO for beginners Part 3
SEO for beginners Part 4
SEO for beginners Part 5
SEO for beginners Part 6
SEO for beginners Part 7

I decided to start doing a bit more for those who are more tech-savvy and will understand a bit more of what’s going on.

There are some staple things which I think are worth repeating:

• Your site should have a clear structure and hierarchy
• Ideally you should be using text links. If that is not possible then every page must be reachable from a text link
• Produce a sitemap detailing all of your pages, either dynamically or manually.

All of the above is also useful in creating an accessible site for disabled users or those with difficulties. If you are a business in England then you should also be aware that you may have legal obligations towards creating accessible sites.

Most if not all search engine spiders can parse text only (I’m not talking about image crawlers like google image bot). To understand how a search engine sees your site, you need to see i in the same way that a search engine would.

By far and away the most well known text-browser is Lynx. You can download Lynx and view the Lynx website if you wish. I will refer to Lynx throughout this article. If you are using something else then please just take it for granted that I refer to whichever text browser you use.

Installing Lynx:
Lynx doesn’t come with a pretty installer so it’s a bit of a manual fudge to install it. So long as you are comfortable moving and editing files it really should take under a minute. If you are not techie then don’t worry, just take your time and follow these steps (Taken from the Lynx installation doc):
1/ Make a folder on your C drive called lynx_w3
2/ Unzip the contents of the lynx_v283.zip file into that folder
3/ Make a shortcut to lynx.bat and place it on your desktop
4/ Double click the shortcut. Lynx will open with google.com as the home page.

Using Lynx:

This version is set up with google.com as the home page. Use the down cursor
to navigate to the search box, then type in your search terms.
Links are shown in blue. The links will change to red as you cursor past
them. Press enter or right cursor to follow the link.

Summary of the main Lynx commands:

Down cursor: scroll down page.
Up cursor: scroll up page
Right cursor: follow a link
Left cursor: Go back to the previous page
Press G to type in the address of a page.

Lynx is installed, what next?
Take a look at your page in Lynx, how do you think it looks? Here we are looking at our Hungerford Web Design and Development website Click the image to go view full size:

As you can see, everything displays pretty well. If you are running a Macromedia Flash site or using loads of funky JScript to produce your content you will see a VERY different layout. Your site will not be read properly by search engines. Use the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid!)

I appreciate this is a pretty short article, I’ll be expanding upon it as we move forward. In the meantime, following these tips, you should find your site displays well to disabled users and search engines alike:

1. For important text that you want a bot to read and index, use plain text not images
2. Try to avoid javascript where possible, it has a place but content generation is definately not it
3. Create standards based sites, they are usefull in development as well as post-production
4. Flash is EVIL!
5. Ensure all of your links are valid and displaying the correct text
6. Try to keep the number of pages down, don’t create a page fo the sake of it (This is arguable as the importance of a site could be factored by pages indexed). I believe quality over quantity will keep your visitors coming back and prompt people to link you
7. Where you are using variables (page.php?nocss) avoid using them for links where possible (or provide an alternative) whilst google now indexes dynamic links, not all search engines do.

Technorati Tags: Business In England, C Drive, Crawlers, Doc 1, Double Click, Google, Hierarchy, Intermediates, Legal Obligations, Lynx, Search Engine Spiders, SEO, Text Browser, Text Browsers

Firstly I would like to make sure we are all singing from the same page. What is a breadcrumb?

Home > Blog > Post

Breadcrumbs are a navigational trail. It shows users what category or section of your site they are in as well as an easy way to traverse your site.

The usefulness of breadcrumbs can vary. On a small site with 5 pages I would argue that they are not particularly useful. On a site with many sections or areas of information they can be invaluable.

Why are they useful?

From an SEO point of view they can be extremely useful for ensuring that your category areas are listed as well as the actual page. From the point of view of an accessible user with sight difficulties they can give context to your page where images are not available (likewise for users with text-only browsers). Additionally they are often preferred over static menu bars.

The simplest way to implement a breadcrumb system is from the ground up. All sections of your site are within their own directory. For a car sales site this would be similar to the following:

index.html
/carsales/
/carsales/index.html
/carsales/carsforsale.html
/carsales/carssold.html
/servicing/
/servicing/index.html
/servicing/prices.html
/servicing/booking.html

etc etc.

In this example our breadcrumb would look like this if we were on the servicing page:
Home > Servicing
If we then looked at the prices page it would look as follows::
Home > Servicing > Prices
If our user then wanted to navigate from the prices page back to the main serving page they would simply click the “servicing” link between Home and Prices.

Doing this manually can take some time……my next post will be a way of automating this so that the links are created dynamically. For a huge site, automating it can make a big difference. If your site is fairly small you may wish to just manually create the breadcrumb trail. To see an example of breadcrumbs you can view our main site: Hungerford Web Design

Technorati Tags: Blog, Breadcrumb Trail, Car Sales, Carsforsale, Category Areas, Firstly, Images, Point Of View, Sight Difficulties, Static Menu, Web Design

You may (for whatever reason) store particularly sensitive information in your webspace. Passwords, links, and anything else.

You may want to be able to access these files by FTP for example, but do not want someone stumbling across them and being able to read or use them. Here we will deny external access to those files using a .htaccess file.

You will require that your server has the mod_access module installed for these rules to work.

In our example, we have a password file stored in /home/username/www/passwords/my-passwords.psswd

We create a .htaccess file (that is “DOT”htaccess) and within it:

<Files ~ “\.psswd$”>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>

Save the file and upload it to the directory holding the files you wish to protect (in our case /home/username/www/passwords/ )

Simple

Technorati Tags: Access Files, Directory, Dot, Htaccess File, Lt, Password File, Passwords, Upload

One of the things which gives a potential attacker some help is them knowing which versions of software you use. This can be very easy to find out, particularly if you have never taken steps to secure this information.

For example: I would like to know what software apache.org are using/have used so I look at netcraft (for example) http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.apache.org

192.87.106.226 Linux Apache/2.2.3 Unix mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.7g 12-Apr-2007

I now know that I should look for exploits relating to linux, apache v2.2.3, mod_ssl 2.2.3 and OpenSSL0.9.7g.

By hiding this information you can either report simply “unknown” or just “apache” and no other info. This doesn’t directly make your box more secure, what it does do is start to make the task more difficult for a would-be attacker and for such a small amount of effort it really does seem silly not to do it. So how?

The first thing is to set the ServerTokens directive. I am using a RH linux box so if you know your OS differs, find the corresponding location of your httpd.conf: Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: 192, Apache 2, Apache Server, Apache Software, Attacker, Default Server, Exploits, Httpd, Linux, Linux Apache, Linux Box, Minimal Server, Netcraft, Quotes, Report Url, Rh Linux, Server Apache, Syntax, Telnet Program, Terminal Type

Ever since folders and pages were concieved, people have asked which is best. Do I want http://www.hungerfordwebdesign.com/ or http://www.hungerfordwebdesign.com/index.php ?

Well, the truth is that it doesn’t really matter. What matters most is that anyone linking to you is using the same link all of the time. Therefore search engines which crawl these sites will always index your site in the same way and thereby increase your presence.

There are a number of ways of achieving this, you can use your htaccess as follows:

Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: Base Url, Consistency, Ditch, Folders, Header Location, Htaccess, Index Page, Index Php, Lt, Presence, Request Uri, Search Engines, Server Request, Truth, Url Header

A number of questions SHOULD be asked when attempting to produce a good SEO portfolio for your site. I have listed some of them here to help:

Q:Do I need a third party consultant/company?
A: This really is dependant on either your existing knowledge about SEO, your funds and how quickly you would like results. If you do decide that SEO really isn’t an area of expertise for you then it really is best to find a professional to complete the work. Make sure they really know what they are doing though or you will be wasting your money. Some of the other questions here should help you.

Q: What is pagerank and do I need to worry about it?
A: PageRank is an algorithm (mathematical equation) used by Google to represent the importance of a page and its content. Google uses this algorythm as a factor when deciding how to place your site within its index. A number of factors can affect your search engine ranking and pagerank is a significant one (but not the be all and end all).

Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: Algorithm, Algorythm, Concensus, Consultant Company, Google, High Quality, Keywords, Mathematical Equation, Meta Tags, Party Consultant, People, Portfolio, Questionable Content, Search Engine Positioning, Search Engine Ranking, SEO, Third Party, Time Effort, Wasting Your Money, What Is Pagerank

I have been away for a while working on a number of projects but I have cleared the diary to add some more value here. If you have anything you would like to discuss or you would like some advice on any of the topics we cover here, please contact me.

It’s officially one month since this blog started. So far we have:

• Displayed over 3.5 thousand pages to nearly 900 unique visitors.
• Recieved an average of 30-50 unique visitors per day
• Written over 30 unique posts (roughly 1 per day) within 16 categories
• Deleted 46 spam comments
• Had 92 pages listed in google
• Had 22 Articles submitted to Digg with a total of 44 diggs (Although I must say that these figures are fudged as I tend to submit my own articles to make it easier to digg them).

It may sound a bit stupid but I am really proud of these achievements that have happened in just one month. Lets hope the trend of 0-900 visitors increases the same every month Although I’ll be the first to admit that I know they wont.

As always, if there is anything you would like to see me write about or any tool you would like to see developed then please drop me a line.

here’s to many happy months of blogging