Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
June 24th, 2010 | 
Author: One of the key questions for a blog owner is how to “Block Spam Comments on Your Blog”. As the realisation that backlinks are the life blood of high search engine ranking spreads across the web many unscrupolous marketers are attempting to use links in spam blog comments to boost their results. This article will examine how you can respond to such issues.
Whilst considering responses it is important to take into account the balance that must be struck – on one hand comments are important to your blog and should be encouraged, on the other hand nobody wants to read a blog that is little more than a collection of spammy comments.
There are 6 possible methods of filtering out spam comments :-
1) Manual Moderation (approval) of comments – the most basic approach is that the blog owner reviews each comment and approves (or otherwise) it prior to publication. Time consuming but very effective.
2) Use of Captcha codes prior to posting – this requires a random number or word to be entered prior to a comment being submitted. Whilst this will be effective against spam comments posted by software tools it will not stop a determined manual poster. Captcha codes can be implemented via various plugins.
3) Use of blacklists – there are plugins available that will examine the source of comments and automatically bar them if they originate from known spam addresses.
4) Word based filtering – again tools are available that examine the content of the post and look for trigger words (e.g. sexual, pharmaceutical etc) and then bar the content if they are found.
5) Heuristic – there are “artificial intelligence” tools that look at user behaviour, content of post etc and “decide” if a post is spam or not.
6) Implement “no follow” attributes on your blog – whilst this does not prevent comment spam it discourages spammers as they do not get the backlinks they are looking for.
Whilst there are many approaches and tools available there is no real substitute and the overall recommendation is the combined use of the above tools but always backed up by a final manual moderation.
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Besides Google, Which Search Engines Matter? – for many people the answer seems to be a resounding none!, but is this a reasonable stance to take?, are these people missing out on a sizeable opportunity?, this article will address these issues.
Whilst Google dominates the search market (with around 68% market share) there is still a sizeable chunk of the search market (approx 32%) that falls outwith Google. The main other search players are as follows
1) Yahoo – around 16% of total search volume still goes through Yahoo.
2) MSN/Windows Live Search/Bing – although only around 10% of total searches go through MSN/Windows Live Search/Bing this amount is growing month on month.
3) AOL – around 3% of the search market
4) ASK – only around 1% of searches now go through ASK.
5) The rest (e.g. My Web, Comcast, Yellow Pages etc) – only comprise 2% of the total search market when combined.
As can be seen from the above figures it is only really MSN/Windows Live Search/Bing and Yahoo that it would appear to be worthwhile expending any effort in optimizing your site for. The rest of the engines only comprise 6% of the market and hence, whilst your site should be listed in these directories, they are not worth specifically optimising for. Perhaps the best approach for this group of engines is to use an automatic search engine submission tool.
One other directory that is worth mentioning, even though it does not appear in the list of top search providers, is DMOZ.org. DMOZ is a human edited directory (as opposed to a search engine) and provides results to many other engines and directories and therefore it is worth the effort of a manual submission.
Making a Sitemap is Important For Search Engine Placement – is this really true or are sitemaps simply a luxury you do not need to bother with ?.
In order to answer this question you must first understand how a search engine finds your web pages and how do you make this process easy for them (after all you want to get all your pages into their results so you should make this process as easy as you can !)
The process of web page discovery is carried out by “spiders” (automated software tools that search the web) during a process known as “crawling”. The spiders find new content by following links found within sites or from external sites. The following of links aspect of the process is the critical element of answering the question why a sitemap is important – if the spiders cannot find the links easily then they cannot be followed and your content will essentially become invisible to the search engines.
Having a sitemap for your site clearly signposts to the visiting spiders where all your pages are and what the link structure is between them. This facilitates the spidering process and helps to ensure that all your pages are indexed.
Without a sitemap you run the risk of some of your pages not being discovered, and it goes without saying that if a page has not even been discovered then it is impossible for it to rank well in the results !.
There are many tools available to generate (and validate) sitemaps so production and maintenance of sitemaps should not be too much of an overhead and ceratainly the production of a sitemap is an extremely worthwhile activity.
Whilst marketing your site online there are several SEO Tools to Never Leave Off Your Tool Belt – this article will explain what these tools are.
Backlink checkers – verify backlinks to your site, check what anchor text they are using and just generally ensure that your backlink campaign is on track.
Link Analyzer – anlayze your inbound and outbound links to make sure all is well, also to be used to that often over looked task – verification of internal links within the site itself.
Keyword density checker – make sur ethat your pages have the correct keyword density and that you do not look like your are “keyword stuffing” your pages just to get high rankings.
Position checker – make sure that your SEO campaigns are effective and you are climbing up those positions !
URL Submitter – a vital tool to take the leg work out of submitting your site to potentially hundreds of search engines.
Social Web tools – check that links to your site are appearing on the social network sites (Twitter, FaceBook etc)
Website Speed Test – there is no point in marketing your site if it does not respond in a timely fashion – visitors will simply not wait !
Source Code tools – CSS validator, HTML validator etc – these may seem like technical tools but poor HTML and CSS can harm your rankings (as well as delivering a poor visitor experience)
Meta Tag Generator – meta tags are important in your ranking efforts and such tools are useful to help make sure you get then right
Spider Emulator / checker – you should always make sure that your site looks OK when viewed from the perspective of a search engine spider. These tools give you a useful insight in how spiders see your site and help you correct any potential errors.
Although the question “What Are Search Engine “Spiders” and How Do They Work?” may seem a geeky one it is actually an important question for all internet marketers and one that you should have at least a basic understanding of the answer to.
Search engine spiders are automated software agents (often known as “bots”) that search the internet on a regular and controlled basis in order to discover new sites, pages and information (this process is commonly known as “crawling”)
They carry out these searches by following the hyperlinks they find within sites and pages (hence the importance of site links and backlinks – they are the signposts that the spiders follow whilst they are crawling the web).
The search engines use spiders not only to discover new sites and pages to be included in their search results but also to discover the number of links that there are for a particular site or page. The discovery of these backlinks normally constitutes an important part of how a page is ranked within the search results.
When a spider visits or crawls a site it first looks for a “robots.txt” file as this contains important instructions for visiting robots that tell them which sections of the site to crawl, how often to visit and other important information – it is therefore important that you have an up to date robots.txt file that is in spider readable form – there are tools available to check this.
As spiders look for links having a sitemap is really useful as it provides all the links in a one stop shop for the spiders to access in an easy fashion. Anything that facilitates the efficient spidering of your site is to be recommended and sitemaps certainly fall into this category. Again there are tools available to generate and validate your sitemaps.
Why would you want to encrypt html source code ? There are two main reasons for this :-
1) To protect your copyright – you may have html code or content that you do not want others to use and therefore you may want to use html encrypting to protect your intellectual property.
2) You may simply want to prevent others seeing hwo you have done your on page seo – by placing a html lock on your code this will prevent prying eyes from examining your on page seo efforts.
So to protect your source code use our free html encrypter.
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