Platforms, Coding, Site Building

Posted on July 7th, 2005 by Administrator

What editors have you used when just started making first sites? Personally I have started with Macromedia Dreamweaver, but very soon I made sure that it ads a lot of bugs in HTML and started learning the language itslef. Since then I’m using Allaire Homesite and PsPad editors (Now there is Home Site 5 released by Macromedia after they’ve bought Allaire, but I don’t like it too). I”m telling this not just to discuss editors we use, but to stress your attention on importance of clean HTML. because the more bugs you make in code, the more corrupted it appears in serps and title “$#ajgd^&87″ or url “..php?gophp127jags7a…” don’t looks attractive, huh? However, after several years of practice, those webmasters, who work with lots of content and have less time to edit HTML are moving to various content management systems. So do I.

I have tried a lot of them. One I was using up to last year is PhpNuke available at http://www.phpnuke.org. It is convenient, includes a lot of useful tools for site management. However, it contains a couple of bugs that are unwanted for SEO. For instance it always builds ugly-looking urls and has problems with putting correct titles. When I have worked on PhpNuke I spent a lot of time by tuning and adjusting it to fit my needs. I found plugins that replace page title with title of first article on this page, modules that made permanent urls and so on, but it took a lot of time to make it rolling for each new site I’ve made and I started looking for something more easy and covenient. That is how blogs became platforms for the majority of my sites.

After trying several blog scripts I have finally chosen two of them, which, I think are useful for building good sites. The first one I have tried is MT, which is available from http://www.movabletype.org/. Powerfull platform for creating site. Rather easy installation and management. Good layout. Try it yourself to have your own opinion of convenience.

My second choice, which I consider to be the best choice for today is WordPress. Uptimebot is currently working on this platform and I am completely satisfied with it’s functional abilities. Of course it has lesser functions that MT and much less functions than PhpNuke, but ease of five minutes installation, attractive layout and amazingly clean code make WordPress to be the best script for building text sites, which I’d recommend for everybody, moreover that google loves blogs and this additionaly attracts me. Besides, there is a WordPress plugin that allows visitors to see when GoogleBot came for the last time - you can see it in footer of our page.

The only thing I’d like to be developed by WordPress is multi-site WordPress that would allow to build several blogs using one cpy of script (as it is possible with MT). They currently have only beta of multi-site script, but it is yet half-done and I wouldn’t recommend to use it.

Wordpress is available for download from http://www.wordpress.org/. Enjoy it!

I’d also want you to share your thoughts about site platforms you are using, their advantages and disadvantages and so on. Thanks!

Sincerely yours, Max.

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Filed under: HTML and Page Coding

Link Popularity, Relevancy and Link Text

Posted on July 7th, 2005 by Administrator

I want to discuss relationship of Link Popularity, relevancy and text links. As you surely know, link popularity is counted exactly by number of links pointing certain page, but these are just basics. Method of building certain value of Link Popularity that I have already described was working on Google few years ago, but it had changed and that is the point of interest - what changes occur and how can we improve our link popularity strategies?

Certainly, when relevancy became one of the most important criteria of appreciation of each page, it has also affected Link Popularity calculation. Due to my little investigation, a page that has ten inbound links with same keyword in link text will have better link popularity than a page that has the same ten inbound links, but with different keywords inside this link.

However, there is some limit of quantity of same inbound links, and you risk to get your site filtered or banned for spamming if you cross this limit. I tried to guess what can I do in this situation and the only thought I had is to put synonims and associated words after each thenth ibound link to my sites. For instance if I’d had a site about gourmet food, I’d put 10 links with “gourmet”, ten links with “delicious” and ten links with “tasty” keywords. This will dilute keyword density, but prevent my site from loosing link popularity, because Google knows that
these keywords are synonyms.

The other way I think about is that Google considers two phrases to be same when they are identical by symbols. If you add some extra words like adding “gourmet food” to “gourmet” - you will lose relevancy of your general keyword “gourmet”, but popularity is lost because of dilusion by something meanful and I thought what will happen if I add something senseless to my keyword? For instance if I add “+” to “gourmet”, then “gourmet +” will be different to “gourmet”, but at the same time it won’t gain any additional meaning. I consider the same tactic, when choosing domain names. Google likes, when domain is corresponding site title and most frequent keywords on site, but the majority of good domains are already taken. At the same time if you buy a domain that contains extra words, it is loosing relevancy. That is why I oftenly buy domains like “gourmet1″ or “gourmet-1″ that are containing my general keyword and a meaningless symbol that won’t affect relevancy and popularity.

These are techniques I use, but I’m sure you have much interesting to tell too. Waiting for your opinions.

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Filed under: Dealing with Keywords, Google Optimization, Link Popularity FAQ