"Cu capãtul arcurilor, trecînd,
rãzboinicii
mîngîie roua..."

Yosa Buson (1715-1783)

The module called Ping and Related Articles adds pingback functionatily to Joomla similar to the functionality you can find in Wordpress and it add similar articles with the subject of the pages from your website.

You can publish the module to the pages of want on your website (some pages or all of them). The first step is to index them as your website is accessed and to add the related articles. The second step is to create a XML sitemap that you can use to submit to Google, Yahoo or Bing - you can select the name of the XML file, but it will always be written on the Joomla website index folder (for example the link of the XML file will look something like http://joomla.webdesign-software-code-seo.com/sitemap_pingrelatesarticles.xml. The third and final step is to ping other websites to let the know about your pages. Because the considerable quantity of pages of some websites, we decided to keep the pinging in the background (it pings one article every few minutes) to avoid the load of the server and to spam the Update Servers.

A Ping is a message is used to let other people know that you have published new content on your site. The ping message is sent to different Update Servers (the list has about 90 items, but the list is always updated and improved), including blog listings like Google Blogs (for example).

Call to undefined function xmlrpc_encode_request()

If you get this error you have to have to install the XML-RPC PHP extension, or ask your provider to install it if you are on a hosted domain. The module will no work without it.

The module works on Joomla 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 and 2.5.

Our refund policy: you have 3 days (72 hours) to test our product and to ask a refund. After the 72 hours period expires no refund is possible.

More information: here.

One of our more recent projects involved some modification to a flash web page and it's improvement from the search engine optimization point of view. The client was complaining that his page was loading very slow and it was not very accessible from the main search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing). I am not going to write about my experience with that particular web site, but the use of Flash for web development is slowly dying while the seo is having more and more influence over web design.

Reasons of having a fast loading web site

The speed of a site reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests (from human visitors and crawlers/spiders as well). Faster websites make the users happy (that kind of happy that may make them stay more and return), a slow site will make the user spend less time there - it may make them close the browser window or tab before the site was loaded completely.

Remember that the mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are used more and more often and they usually access site via public wi-fi or the internet access offered by phone companies. If your web page is not optimized also the that devices it will load slower or not at all - you may loose a visitor for the moment and there is a risk that the visitor will never return (from any device or computer connected to the internet).

From another point of view: if an e-commerce site is making 100.000 euros per day (for example), a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you several million euros in lost sales every year.

Effects of fast loading web sites

Last year Google incorporated site speed as one of the over 200 signals used in determining search rankings. Of course, it's not the most relevant one, but a site with great content and fast loading pages will be almost all the time in the top. Yup: don't forget the content of the site. Everybody loves (including the search engines) a site that shows them something interesting and they don't have to wait to get it.

A fast loading page will have a greater impact to the visitors, whatever it's design. There are 3 very important things that will impress a visitor of your site: the design, the speed and the content. The crawlers/spiders used by the search engines are blind, so they don't care about the design. But they will consider the other 2 things (among others).

Several tips how to get fast loading web sites

Remember that in web world HTML rules. Whatever language you use (php, perl, C/C , Java/JSP, ColdFusion, ASP or C#), they all get as result a lot of HTML tags. Over that you may add CSS, Javascript and Flash in order to make you web site more attractive and put a lot of image in the page to make the visitor watch them.

In order to make your page to load fast you must keep it as closer as you can (without losing the quality of the design) to HTML. Avoid using big files in the site (like Flash video, big images and animated GIF's), but if you really have to use them remember to use as fewer as you can.

Don't use too many images

It's a well known thing that images can greatly enhance the look of a site, but also they can really slow it down if there are too many. You should decide if all your images are really needed (they can easily be replaced with css effects and sometimes they should have).

Use the height and width tags

Using the height and width tags for images tells the browser the size and the place of the image before loading it, otherwise the page has to wait and to load the image before the text. The same thing happens also with the tables.

Faster images: reduce their file size

Using a lot of images can bring some additional megabytes to a page. Reducing the size of the files on server will decrease the traffic and the time of loading the site.

Use external CSS and javascripts files for faster pages

CSS can greatly improve your web sites load time! There is a big difference between defining the CSS for every element of the page inside the script and the definition of the style sheet with all the classes and id-s into an external file. Using the external file will allow the browser to cache all the formatting and stylizing for your pages instead of having to read each and every single tag all over again.

Do you use the same script on multiple pages? Switch to an external script: load the javascript files from one source instead of adding all that code to each of your pages like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="yourscript.js"></script>

That way the browser already has it in it's cache and won't have to read it each time another page loads. This one saves a ton of load time, specially for larger scripts!

Split up long pages: multiple short pages load faster

It may happen that you have some long texts you want to present to the visitors, some that could fill in several A4 pages on both sides and small font size. Split the text into several short pages instead putting in into a summer-day long page. The pages will load faster, the attention of the people will not be lost (nobody likes to scroll a lot to the bottom of the window) and you will also increase the number of internal links (if it happens once or twice it does not count, but long texts may happen more the once).

Keep your code clean

There are several popular wysiwyg editors that are integrated into the scripts of the page (into the backend) that allows you to save the clear readable text as formatted html text. Usually these wysiwyg editors allow the user to copy paste formatted text from the packages like Open Office or Microsoft Office that have a lot of useless code (for example empty tags <font> </font> or <span> </span> and <font size="4"> <font color="white"> the text </font></font>).

Removing any of those excess tags or adding the properties to only one or two tags will not only speed up your load time, but make you pages validate a lot cleaner.

The list can continue with at least a dozen tips. I prefer to stop here, I may continue some other time with additional information. Util then, if you are not clear about something in the text or you need more detailed information about anything don't hesitate to contact us.

For some time the seo specialists (and a lot of other guys that have some idea about search engine optimization) has recommended that URLs on the page should contain hyphens instead underscore because the some search engines were considering hyphens as word separators but the underscores were just letters inside words. But lately, at least since 2007 for Google, all main search engines are considering both as word separators. Some of them considered underscores as separators from the beginning. There are people that still don't know that: I've seen recent articles (written at the end of last year) that still treats underscores as letter inside words.

As a web developer I started to use underscores to separate words from the beginning because of the language: I am generating the URL from the title or the article (whatever the content – no matter if it's a blog, a news portal or an online store) and there are a lot of words that uses hyphens as the grammar requires in the Romanian language (I could give you some examples, but it would be meaningless for the most of you) and even some names contains hyphens.

As I told you in the earlier articles, the best URL is the one that's readable by both the humans and the search engines and it's the clearest and easiest to understand. From my point of view, these conditions are accomplished using underscores as word separators and the hyphens only where they are needed.

Wordpress, for example, started from the beginning with the hyphens as word deliminator and they are stick with it. That's a good thing, even sometimes I am not sure if the names in the titles are of two individuals or one name created from two other names put together.

Every search engine has it's own rules to process the html tags inside the head tag. Following next are some some general rules.

The <Title> Tag

First, the title of the html page should be relatively short and describe the page content accurately. Wherever possible, try to include keywords but without distorting the true purpose of the title.

It is one of the most important elements of SEO when it is used properly. A website can increase organic search traffic for each page by using an appropriate keyword within this tag, but this is only effective though when the actual content of a page is about that specific keyword. Search engines are indexing the content of the page as the meta tags and they can easily figure out whether or not the title tag is appropriate for the content contained on a specific page. In order to get full benefit of this tag, the keyword used within it should appear in its exact form within the content of the page. This is the best way to relay to the search engines exactly what a page is about and what keywords it should rank for within the search engine result pages.

The domain name shouldn't be repeated in the title, it is often considered as spam. Also, it should not be used the same filename as the title tag or the same filename as the domain name, it is often considered as spam.

The title should not be any longer than 70-100 characters including spaces. (Google - DMOZ)

The title should bot be any longer than 60 characters. (scrubtheweb.com)

The title should not begin with the domain name, it is often considered as spam.

The <Meta Keywords> Tag

The meta keywords tag is the least important metatags because the majority of current search engines no longer support these tags and they place little to no importance on them, but it is good to have them filled in on each page. Use the description and keywords metatags in the head of each web page and make these tags different on each web page. The search engines does not like duplicate metatags.

First of all, keep the keywords as descriptive as posibile. It should not used words that are not present in the body of the page (for example: do not enter movies in the keywords tag when the page is only about books). Redundant characters will not hurt overall results, however words after the first 300 characters rarely help in any way.

The first keyword should be the main keyword that the content is based around, this keyword generally appears within the title of the article or page content. The second keyword should be the second most important keyword that the content is based around. Then you should list the next four important keywords or variants of the main two keywords. This has the potential to help a search bot to understand what the content of each page is about.

The tag should not be any longer than 378 characters (searchenginewatch.com referring to Google).

The tag should not be any longer than 268 characters (AltaVista).

Start all keywords with capital letters. (Relevant only on alphabetical listings)

Separate keywords with the ", " (comma, space) character combination. (Most search engines use either character as the separator ).

You may use phrases as well, but it should not be used any word, not even within phrases, more than 3 times. It is often considered as spam.

The <Meta Description> Tag

This is a very important element of SEO, it allow a unique opportunity for websites to convince searchers to visit their sites and a particular page on the site. First of all, keep the description as descriptive as posibile, but the descriptions on some web pages are often a snippets of content that appear below the clickable titles of a search listing. Creating high quality meta descriptions can improve click through rates in the search results, also creating a poor description can be one of the quickest ways to get passed over by searchers within the search results.

It should not be any longer than 100 characters (Google).

It should not be any longer than 25-30 words (DMOZ).

It should not be any longer than 150 characters (scrubtheweb.com).

It should not be any longer than 200 characters (searchenginewatch.com referring to Google).

Every search engine has it's own rules to process the html tags inside the head tag. Following next are some some general rules.

The <Title> Tag

First, the title of the html page should be relatively short and describe the page content accurately. Wherever possible, try to include keywords but without distorting the true purpose of the title.

It is one of the most important elements of SEO when it is used properly. A website can increase organic search traffic for each page by using an appropriate keyword within this tag, but this is only effective though when the actual content of a page is about that specific keyword. Search engines are indexing the content of the page as the meta tags and they can easily figure out whether or not the title tag is appropriate for the content contained on a specific page. In order to get full benefit of this tag, the keyword used within it should appear in its exact form within the content of the page. This is the best way to relay to the search engines exactly what a page is about and what keywords it should rank for within the search engine result pages.

The domain name shouldn't be repeated in the title, it is often considered as spam. Also, it should not be used the same filename as the title tag or the same filename as the domain name, it is often considered as spam.

The title should not be any longer than 70-100 characters including spaces. (Google - DMOZ)

The title should bot be any longer than 60 characters. (scrubtheweb.com)

The title should not begin with the domain name, it is often considered as spam.

The <Meta Keywords> Tag

The meta keywords tag is the least important metatags because the majority of current search engines no longer support these tags and they place little to no importance on them, but it is good to have them filled in on each page. Use the description and keywords metatags in the head of each web page and make these tags different on each web page. The search engines does not like duplicate metatags.

First of all, keep the keywords as descriptive as posibile. It should not used words that are not present in the body of the page (for example: do not enter movies in the keywords tag when the page is only about books). Redundant characters will not hurt overall results, however words after the first 300 characters rarely help in any way.

The first keyword should be the main keyword that the content is based around, this keyword generally appears within the title of the article or page content. The second keyword should be the second most important keyword that the content is based around. Then you should list the next four important keywords or variants of the main two keywords. This has the potential to help a search bot to understand what the content of each page is about.

The tag should not be any longer than 378 characters (searchenginewatch.com referring to Google).

The tag should not be any longer than 268 characters (AltaVista).

Start all keywords with capital letters. (Relevant only on alphabetical listings)

Separate keywords with the ", " (comma, space) character combination. (Most search engines use either character as the separator ).

You may use phrases as well, but it should not be used any word, not even within phrases, more than 3 times. It is often considered as spam.

The <Meta Description> Tag

This is a very important element of SEO, it allow a unique opportunity for websites to convince searchers to visit their sites and a particular page on the site. First of all, keep the description as descriptive as posibile, but the descriptions on some web pages are often a snippets of content that appear below the clickable titles of a search listing. Creating high quality meta descriptions can improve click through rates in the search results, also creating a poor description can be one of the quickest ways to get passed over by searchers within the search results.

It should not be any longer than 100 characters (Google).

It should not be any longer than 25-30 words (DMOZ).

It should not be any longer than 150 characters (scrubtheweb.com).

It should not be any longer than 200 characters (searchenginewatch.com referring to Google).

The purpose of search engine optimization is to make a website as search engine friendly as possible... so it can be easily said that basic SEO is all about common sense and keeping the web page very simple. It's really not difficult, you only need to understand how search engines work. The problem with a lot of web developers is they does not consider the search engine optimization as a part of designing a site so they just ignore this part... I have some examples to give, what I've met in the last years, but they were improved in time or became offline.

Well, the exclusion of seo from web designing is wrong: why creating a great looking web site if nobody will find it? Of course, the word about it's existence will spread and you'll have some visitors in time, but usually the most visits come from the search engines. That's why, from my point of view as a web designer, seo is one of the main things to think about when creating the structure of the website.

In the beginning there are two aspects of search engines to consider: the first is how spiders work, the second is how search engines figure out what pages relate to which keywords and phrases.

The electronic spiders (known also as bots) are the tools used by the search engines to collect data about a website, they copy its content which is stored in the search engine's database. They are designed to follow links from one page to the next, to record these links, to assimilate the content of the web pages and to send other bots to gather data from the linked pages. The process goes on forever, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every week. By now the databases of the search engines measure their size in thousands of billions records.

It can easily be assumed that the spiders will find your site on their own if there are links on the web targeting it, so it is not need to submit the site to the major search engines manually or electronically. Search engines have the ability to judge the topical relationship between pages that are linked together, so the most valuable incoming links of the web come from the sites that share topical themes.

What you have to prioritize about seo is the ways to help the spiders to find your websites and to traverse it from A to Z. So you have provide easy to follow text links directed to the most important pages on the site in the navigation menu on each page, one of the links should lead to a text-based sitemap containing a text link to every page on the site. The sitemap can be the most basic page in the site (with no decorations and interactive parts for the visitors) as its purpose is more to direct spiders than help lost site visitors. As a designer you should also keep in mind that Google also accepts more advanced XML based sitemaps which can be read about in their Webmaster Help Center.

There might be parts of your site you don't want to be visited by the spiders, in this case you can restrict the free access using "robots.txt" files. The spiders will not add in the search engines databases the files you will add in the robots.txt files, but they will have to be organized in a specific format.

There are two very important parts of search engine optimization: offering the spiders access to the site and the content of the site. Having an optimized page depends of both of them, there can not be one without other. You can be the best writer in the world, but if nobody reads your work you are nobody, but if you write nonsense and everybody is able to read you but nobody is really interested you are still nobody. On the internet the search engines are supposed to provide their users with lists of pages that relate to the search terms people enter in their search box. So these search engines need to determine which thousand of billions of pages is relevant to a small number of specific words... in order to do this, they needs to know your site relates to those words and they assimilate the content of the site.

When examining a page the search engines are looking for a few elements: the url of the site, the site tile, the description meta tag (the last two elements are found in the head section of the source code), then if follows the content of the site (the spiders read the pages just the same way the Europeans read the papers: from the left to right and from top to bottom, following the columns). Every part is important and they will be treated separately later on the site.

Finally, for this article anyway, the search engines operate by funds as well: the funds are collected from selling advertisement placement, selling listings or both. They sell out the area above or in the right of the search results as advertisement space and displays only relevant results based on what the users were looking (the search is applied to the advertisments database as well). Their logic is that most people will be mislead by the placement of such links and will choose them instead of the actual results.

That search engines that operate by selling listings will not show your website within the results regardless of its relevance unless you sign up for their service.

There is always the option to index your site on the directories the search engine company buys information from. However, such directories like Yahoo.com, DMOZ.org, Business.com, Best of the Web and others are moderated based on relevance and content, thus getting listed there may take some time and efforts.

Most search engines rank your website by relevance which is measured by the threshold of keywords. Some search engines, such as Google as well, will sort even relevant sites by their popularity, measuring the page rank by the actual links leading to the site. Also, the text or ALT TAG text accompanied with these links will influence the keywords the website is shown in the listings for.

Some search engines will consider a website more and more popular when they are clicked on the results page. These include AltaVista.com .

What you must remember if you start working in this field is that there are a lots of way you can do things in seo (they vary a lot) and the possibilities and combinations are infinite. You may experiment with any campaign freely, but only with a relative knowledge of the DONTs (what you MUST NOT DO) you will be able to maintain a sustainable development plan for your website.

It’s hard to believe that a monopolist company like Google could be frightened by the new search engines (as Bing or the one Facebook is developing), or even their combination with Yahoo (especially because the Yahoo accepted that their own search engine to be replaced by Bing). But, evan so, just just a couple of months after Microsoft launched Bing, Google announced it is tweaking a new technology to search online with the code name „Caffeine”, that could change the position the companies are holding in the search results. To that companies and persons that makes good money or they are surviving according the traffic generated by Google, the new technology represent a motive of worry.

Google suggested on the company's official blog, the fact that the technology could change the results of the searches, and that could oblige the beneficiaries of the Google search engines to change the solutions to optimize the results of the search engines (SEO) to protect their good results in the top of the list.

rezultatele bune în capătul de început al listei rezultatelor.

Google officials said on August 10 that the company is seeking help testing a new-and-improved search system, codenamed “Caffeine” — complete with changes to its indexing, ranking and crawling mechanisms. Silicon Alley Insider speculates that Caffeine could be the “secret project” to which the New York Post was referring back in June when it reported that Google cofounder Sergey Brin was assembling a team of Google search experts to tweak Google’s engine in response to Bing.

„For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. We are hoping that the new technology to bring a plus in speed and precision for Google”, announced on the company blog two of project responsibles, Sitaram Iyer and Matt Cutts.

„Most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences”, are writing the two Google engineers in the blog.

Bing, the renamed Live Search and soon going to be integrated in Yahoo, included a number of user-interface changes, as well as tweaks to the underlying Microsoft search algorithm. The Caffeine test site — available for anyone starting August 10, when it is not down — doesn’t offer any kind of noticeable UI tweaks. It does, however, change the way results are ranked.

Search Engine Land did a side-by-side comparison of a search for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” using the old and new Google engines. They found the new Google infrastructure returned video and news results midway down the page. The current Google search system, however, returned news at the top, video in the middle, and images at the bottom of the page.

With Bing, Moby images are the first link. The whole Bing page feels more like a site optimized to sell users something: Moby MP3 downloads, ringtones, posters, t-shirts. With Caffeine, video links are fourth on the page. News and blog posts about Moby are a little further down. On Bing, news and blog links are nowhere to be found on the first page of results.

This is hardly a definitive test, but so far, Google’s Caffeine indexing system seems like it is meant to yield results that are more Bing-like in any way.

Last hour message from Caffeine sandbox:

„Please try your search again in a few hours.

We are upgrading elements of our data center. The Caffeine sandbox should be available for searching again in a few hours”

Useful links:

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-shows-off-next-generation-search-architecture-2009-8

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/