Now that you are convinced that blogging can be useful for your business, you will sooner or later face a dilemma: How often should I blog? Indeed, blogging is not a one-off thing and you will certainly have to update your blog regularly. Should you perform this form of content creation daily, weekly, or monthly? In fairness, there isn’t a simple answer to this question. Ask 10 different bloggers and you will end up with 10 different answers. I do not pretend to own the answer to this question, but what I can do is provide you with some things that you need to consider when determining your blogging frequency, and I hope that you will find these useful when it comes to making your own decision. Search engines The search engines spiders do like fresh content and posting content frequently on your blog should allow your site to get indexed better. Best SEO practices include making sure that your – Read the full article
If you run and manage your own website or blog, chances are you probably already know what a sitemap is. And what it looks like. But do you know exactly what it’s for? A sitemap is essentially a list of your website’s pages – often organized in hierarchical order, showing how each of these pages are linked or related. It can be in the form of a document, or an actual web page, with a general top-down view of the overall contents of your website – much like, say, a “table of contents” would list and describe the pages of a book. A sitemap will typically also identify the URLs of each web page, and the data under each section, so that arriving at any one of your website’s pages is just a click away. Okay, that’s cool and all, but why do you need to create your own sitemap? How will it affect your website content, if it’s nothing – Read the full article
The last few days I utilized the new search engine Bing. I was skeptical at first of the new Microsoft product but was quickly impressed with the raw power of this new “decision” engine as they are branding it. I took notes in search results compared to yahoo and Google and I am going to share some of my insights into what I discovered (and opinions) 1. Bing has a better image search, I like the pop out feature to see the image a bit larger as well as the amount of images that are returned on the first page. It looks like they use “citations” to determine the image and do not have as much focus on alt and title tags. As webmasters have used images as an opportunity to put more keywords into the meta data, Google images has become less relevant. 2. Bing is showing favor to major websites, they are not showing site links except for – Read the full article
In the process of promoting your website, you’ve undoubtedly invited some electronic guests to your website — by submitting your site to Search Engines, Directories, etc. These guests, called Spiders or Crawlers, collect information from your site much like human visitors do. Much like inviting strangers into your home, you’ll get both good guests and bad guests. A robots.txt file specifies where you would not like these computer visitors to go. Also known as the robots exclusion standard, this is a simple text file placed in your root directory, named “robots.txt”. (www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt) You do not have to specify where this file is to any of the search engines. To aid in web crawling, there are some folders and files we don’t want any robots to visit. For example, any directories containing dynamic files, documentation for webservers, or information we don’t want showing up on Google. Make a list of those directories and files and continue to step 2. Now, just – Read the full article
