Installing Google Webmaster Tools

First thing you need to do is create an account with Google, assuming you don’t have one already. Visit Webmaster tools website and log in. You will see an empty panel, and in the middle will be a button called “Add a site.” Click on it and type in your domain name.

After that you will be brought to a verification page. In order to verify your domain you have four options:

• Add a meta tag to your site’s home page
• Link to your Google Analytics account
• Add a DNS record to your domain’s configuration
• Upload an HTML file to your server

The last option is the easiest one and most secure. You just need to download an HTML verification file and then upload it to your root domain using FTP panel or FTP client like FileZilla. Once the file is uploaded, click on “Verify” button and you will be taken to your control panel. It will be empty for the first 24 hours, after that you will start seeing search queries that brought people to your website, some backlinks, and you can run diagnosis to see if there are any internal errors on your website. One thing I suggest you do right away is add a sitemap to Webmaster Tools. Just click on the “Site Configuration” menu in the left sidebar, then “Sitemaps,” and then “Submit Sitemap.”

How to Find 404 Pages

One thing we definitely don’t want on our website are broken pages. Imagine the scenario, a person browses a website, sees your link and clicks on it, and once the browser loads the page the page is empty, nothing there. Not a great experience and most likely not a returning user. At the same time search engines are not that fond of 404 pages as well.

To find your broken pages you need to visit the Diagnostics section and access Crawl Errors. You will be brought to a page with all the pages that can’t be accessed for various reasons returning various crawl errors. The one you need to look at is “Not Found,” which is what 404 is. On that page you will see all of the pages that return a 404 error and the pages linking to them. Now you can edit the links pointing to those pages or correct the issues with the pages themselves. The usual issue is that you moved the pages but left links pointing to the old page, so you created broken links. This way you can correct them to point to the new page.

Blocking Search Engines from Indexing Duplicate Content

The second most common issue us duplicate content. There are plenty of ways to tell the search engines to ignore duplicate content, like 301 redirects, canonical tags, and of course telling search index not to index them at all.

To avoid general duplicate content issues the first thing you should do is let Google know which domain you prefer, WWW or no WWW, example:

http://www.yourcoolwebsite.com

http://yourcoolwebsite.com

This way Google will know that a page on the WWW domain should be considered as priority and the same page on your non WWW domain will be ignored. Of course this can easily be avoided by setting a simple 301 and setting your preferred URL with your hosting company. In Webmaster tools you can set that by visiting “Site Configuration,” Settings,” and then choosing your preferred domain. Make sure you verified both WWW and non WWW domain if you want to do this.

If there are only certain pages you wish to exclude from the search engines, you can use robot.txt, but the easiest way is to exclude those using Webmaster Tools. Go to “Site Configuration,” “Crawler Access,” then “Remove URL.” On the new page you can add the URL’s that you would like to exclude from the search engines, and thus avoid duplicate content issues.

If you have an e-commerce website or any website that creates dynamic pages, than you most likely have a problem with duplicate content. You can set parameters to be ignored in Webmaster Tools. Visit “Site Configuration,” “Settings,” “Parameter handling,” and set your desired parameters. For example if you want to exclude pages containing “sessionid,” include the wanted session id as the parameter and Google will handle those pages as being the same as the original page.

Webmaster Tools can help you in many ways, removing broken pages and broken links will help your website’s usability and will help you keep a lookout on wasted link juice. Also, to maximize your content you need to remove duplicate issues, which is very easy with webmaster tools. Don’t forget to experiment and get to know Webmaster Tools and Analytics, they are the first line of attack when it comes to search engine optimization.

Zarko Zivkovic works for Dejan SEO Company as an SEO Strategist and link building team leader. You can connect with Dejan SEO and Zarko on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Web Stats Part 2: Understanding & Interpreting Your Data In Google Analytics
2. The Benefits Of Sitemaps & How To Create Them
3. Web Traffic – 10 Tools To Observe & Analyze A Website’s Popularity

A cookie is simply a piece of text stored by a user’s browser, which online applications use for statistics and personalization purposes for returning users. There are numerous ways that different websites use this data, such as stored shopping cart information, preferences, demographic data, and so on.

How they work…

Every time users go to your website they send an HTTP request (request for a URL) to pull up a page on your domain. The user’s web browser uploads all of the cookies that have been set for your domain each time they request to view a page. So, depending on how many cookies are set, the response time can vary due to the size of the HTTP request, since most users have a slower upload speed than download speed. More cookies make the HTTP request larger in size, thus, it takes longer to upload the HTTP request to your web server to retrieve their requested page.

When would you want to set a cookieless domain?

This question coincides with the way cookies work, which makes it dependent on what you intend to utilize cookies for.

Unless you want cookies set for a specific subdomain or just for your homepage, you may actually have them set incorrectly. This would cause more overhead request than necessary, slowing down a web page’s response time.

If you do not want to have cookies set for subdomains, you will have to make sure your server or application only sets cookies to “www.example.com.” Otherwise, if you set cookies for just your top-level domain “example.com,” cookies will also be set for all subdomains set in the *.example.com format.

But, if you do want to have cookies set for a specific subdomain, such as “shop.example.com,” you will have to set cookies specifically for the “shop.example.com” URL.

You can do further reading about minimizing request overhead at: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/request.html#ServeFromCookielessDomain

Can cookies be disabled cookies on browsers?

Yes they can. For example, on Internet Explorer 8, a user can go to:

Safety > Delete Browsing History > Then, select which stored files to delete (Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, History, Form Data, Passwords, and InPrivate Filtering Data)

Note:
First, close your browser, then re-open and delete the files because if you delete the files while you have a web page open, those cookies will not be deleted.

Aside from utilizing cookieless domains, what other methods do you use to reduce response latency?

Related posts:

1. HTTP Status Codes: A Guide To The Most Common Responses
2. Updating A CSS File – The Importance Of Clearing A Browser’s Cache
3. Building A Website: Common Issues

Lets take into account designing a website using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). With the main purpose of CSS being a way of separating document content from document presentation, it’s already meant to be a step taken to organize and simplify HTML coding. Now, with that in mind, why not complete the process by organizing your style sheets to help make them easy to understand, making the maintenance of your website a much easier task. But, as far as which is the best way of organizing a style sheet, it really all comes down to a matter of preference.

Here are basic guidelines to get you started:

Divide Into Specific Sections Using Flags
This helps to identify sections to get to them more quickly. Make sure to first plan out what the specific sections will be. For example:

• Global Styles – This section can define background, link color, image related things, etc.




• Typography – This section can define font size, header tags, paragraph tags, etc.




• Library Styles – This section can define classes for pages that have recurring style elements on various parts of your site.




• Templates – This section can define your main template layout.




• Individual Page Structures – This section can define classes for individual pages that do not particularly follow the uniform style of the other pages on your site.

Create A Table Of Contents
Creating a table of contents creates an easy overview of the stylesheet and adding number references to your code is very helpful for finding sections faster.

Alphabetize Your Properties
This is another way of making specific properties faster to locate.

Indent Descendant/Child Items & Related Rules
This helps to visually define page areas and how they’re related.

CSS Organizer Web Apps
Tools such as StyleNeat or ProCSSor can help to visually organize and standardize your CSS.

What other methods have you used to organize a stylesheet?

Related posts:

1. A/B Testing: A Guide To Split Testing 2 Versions Of A Full Website
2. 9 Tips to Make Your Website Load Much Faster (Part 1)
3. Updating A CSS File – The Importance Of Clearing A Browser’s Cache

Have you considered utilizing icons in your design? They’re an essential way of adding a visual reference that helps users navigate through your website faster (when paired with a descriptive title) with recognizable images that identify sections/applications.

For example, icons in cPanel:

Another bonus of utilizing icons is that you can get them FREE! There are numerous online resources for great quality icon libraries. And of course, if you want to take the extra step, you can purchase custom icons or create them yourself. So why not boost both your website’s usability and design all in one?

Here are 10 resources for free icon libraries:

Icon Finder
This is an icon search engine that allows you to search through over 140,000 icons or browse through almost 700 different icon sets.

Function’s Free Icon Set
This is a set of 128 free 48×48 pixel icons with a glossy look from Function Web Design & Development.

FreeIconsWeb
This is a database of over 20,000 free high quality icons for Windows, Mac and Linux Systems. There will only be a price for icons if used for commercial purposes.

Free Icons Download
This is another large database of high quality icons for Windows, Mac and Linux that can be used free of charge for personal and non-commercial use.

Creative Freedom’s Free Windows 7 Icons
Website and Icon design company, Creative Freedom, offers a free download of their “Shimmer” Windows 7 icon library.

The Working Group Retina Display Icon Set
This company provides a 147 piece icon set that is optimized for Retina Display. It’s available to use for both commercial and non-profit purposes.

Smashing Magazine “Coded” Icon Set
This is free icon set from Smashing Magazine features 25 high-quality icons ranging from 512×512 pixels to 32×32 pixels that was designed with web developers in mind.

Graphicpeel’s Credit Card Icon Pack
This free icon set from Graphicpeel consists of 35 miniature credit card icons that come in 32×32 pixels in PNG format.

iShift’s “SocialShift” Icon Set
This free icon set designed by Manuel Lopez for iShift consists of 246 free social networking/media icons in PNG format.

Webdesigntut+’s Kudos Icon Set
Web Design Tut+ offers this free 51 piece professional web icon set that are sized at 32×32 pixels that can be used for both personal and commercial use.

What’s your favorite icon set?

Related posts:

1. 10 Resources For Free PHP Scripts
2. Favicon.ico – How To Easily Add A Favorites Icon To Your Website
3. 5 Reasons To Validate HTML

Now, while I’m not going to side with either, I do want to clarify and emphasize that after all of the debate, it really comes down to a matter of preference.

Which is better for SEO?

The answer is…it does NOT matter. Using either WWW/no WWW versions of a website does not effect a website’s rankings because search engines do not base their ranking algorithms on that part of a URL. But, what is important is that for which ever one you choose, you need to continue to only use that format for all inbound links to your canonical URL. Otherwise, if some websites link to your WWW site, while others link to your non WWW site, then your search engine rankings will be split and not strengthen your canonical URL.

In this case, what you need to do from the get-go is create a 301 redirect from your non-canonical URL to your chosen canonical URL. This way, search engines will automatically redirect inbound links to your canonical URL, giving it the full “link juice” that it’s meant to get.

Here are 2 ways of doing a 301 redirect:

I. Through cPanel:

• Log into your cPanel account
• Under the “Domains” section, click “Redirects”
• Select the domain name in the drop down menu next to “http://(www.)?”
• In the text box to the right, type in the URL that you want to redirect
• Next to “redirects to?” enter your canonical URL
• Click “Add”

II. Through .htaccess:

• Download the .htaccess file
• Open the file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad)
• Use the following code below to redirect (replacing “domain.com” with your URL)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^www.domain.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

NOTE – For SSL Certificates:

By default, companies assign SSL’s to “exampledomain.com” without the WWW, so if you decide to include the WWW in your canonical URL, make sure to notify your SSL company about that, and remember to do so every time you do renewals.

Are you Pro or No WWW?

Related posts:

1. Subdirectories – 3 Ways To Hide Them Through CPanel
2. 3 Ways To Shorten URLs
3. Search Engine Ranking – 5 Useful SERP Trackers