IB Spot Blog

The whole Internet can be described as an evolving body of life and some Website survive so far, but some websites have short life span. Most webmasters have this experience: the external links on their blogs or websites, over a period of time, broken due to the page expired, that is, even picture which linked from external website has failed. So when the users browse your website will encounter invalid pages, and this not only affects the performance of your site but also your search engine optimisation work.

In this article we introduce five tools which can examine website links, including desktop software, web services and WordPress plug-in.

Dead Links
Dead-links.com is a free link checking service website, user only need to provide his Website domain name on this website to automatically check all pages’ links. It also divides links into three categories: internal links, external links and not verified links. Users can purchase advanced services to check more links.

Broken Link Checker
In fact, this is a WordPress-specific plug-in which can be used to check the all articles and pictures of WordPress blog, whether it contains broken links. It also can amend link failure on the background, very convenient.

Linktiger
This is very professional web site testing services, in addition to testing site links, you can also set up a regular inspection weekly, and the test results can be sent to your email box. Currently a free account can only check 1,000 links.

Linkpatch
Different from other links, Linkpatch does not take initiative to scan all Website links. It inserts a code provided by Linkpatch in the site’s 404 pages. When Web page encounters 404 errors, it will automatic notify Linkpatch and send a warning email to website owner, so webmaster can find the failure link, and quickly amended.

In other words, Linkpatch can not fully identify the links which already have expired, but it can discover new broken links according to the traffic.

Linkpatch offers 30-day free trial; webmaster can insert Linkpatch tracking code on 404 pages. This code only appears in the 404 page and it will not delay speed of website.

Xenu
If you don’t want other Websites to detect the status of your website. This is a desktop software tool can actually stand on the user’s point of view to check their own website’s link status. Xenu is a free desktop tool to detect all the links on a particular site and produced a very detailed report. It lists all the links which are valid or invalid, or the connection time-out, etc., and support for HTTPS URLs , and even support some of the FTP and Gopher sites.

Article by Verecom - Web Design

Verecom Australia - Sydney Web Design Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design

Write good sitemap page is essential factor in assisting web crawlers to navigate a website. A Sitemap is a representation of the architecture of a website. There are two types of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to navigate the website, and the second is done in XML which are used by Goggle to gather information about the site.

Sitemap is especially important if your website:
Is new and have many links
Has dynamic web page
Has a lot of archived pages that are not linked well

There are two big advantages for building a sitemap:

Help to user to Navigation

The sitemap acts as a map of your website, if users are looking for something in particular that may not be obviously available on the home page, or on the page which they entered your site on. Also for the large website, a good sitemap is important because it can help users understand the structure of website and make users easier to find the information they need.

Example of sitemap: Verecom Website Sitemap

Search Engine Optimisation

A website needs Sitemap file written by XML for search engine like Google to explore your website and it helps to have all the pages on your site indexed (listed) by the search engines. It’s important for SEO, What happens when you build a good sitemap is that you are in fact making a single page on your website which is linked to every other page on your site.

Example of XML Sitemap: Verecom XML Sitemap

Article by IBSPOT - SEO Sydney

IBspot - SEO and Copywriting Service Search Engine Optimisation, SEO

Vic Gundotra, Google Vice President of engineering department, said in last month that “the internet has won” which expresses the future trend is to standardise website applications and its developments. Hence Google launched a website for web developers to learn how to increase the speed performance of website.

Google’s senior engineers, Urs Hoelzle and Bill Coughran noted in their blog. “In the past few years, through continuous experiment, we have found that some practices which can speed up the web page, we now organize all these teaching contents, tools and tips on our website code.google.com to share with web designers.”

The website’s teaching includes CSS optimisation, gzip compression, HTTP cache and some tricks to make web page download speed faster.

Hoelzle and Coughran pointed out that many website protocols are developed before popularise of rich internet application (RIA). And HTML 5 as an example, these protocols is used to speed up the web browser to access the websites.

“Some of its functions, such as AppCache, allow web developers to write JavaScript programs with a large number of web applications, and still running as fast as the desktop applications”

Article from Verecom - Web Design Sydney

IBspot - SEO and Copywriting Service Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Web Design

Many security experts point out that the most serious security threat is from malicious Web site, especially the one which was attacked and coded by malicious programs. And for the Blog owner, especially standalone blog build by Wordpress, should consider the security issue more seriously.

Following we introduce some good Wordpress plug-in for security and Anti-spam.

Anti spam plug-in

Akismet: prominent in the Wordpress community, our website also uses this plug-in to help block many spam messages, the result is good.

WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam: This plug-in not only can block spam but also trackback and pingback sent from spam blog site.

WP-hashcash: This plug-in intend to eradicate the spam on blog, and its principle is very simple. It puts a not easy identified JavaScript code on web page to ensure that a user open a browser page, not by program which generates a large number of automatic message.

WP ReCaptcha: This is developed by Camegie Mellon University. An authentication mechanism programmed to ensure that the robot (automatic program) can not recognise certification picture, hence to ensure that the message for real.

Math Comment Spam Protection: This is a advanced authentication mechanism, and users needs to answer the math question from a picture to ensure a real person to post message.

Security plug-in

WP Security Scan: This plug-in checks whether there are any security vulnerabilities and also recommended any up-to-date security practices to blog owner. Users will be able to produce high-strength password, scan important files and database, and hide WP version number, etc. to protect the administrator console.

WordPress Exploit Scanner: This plug-in will find all the files on the website, articles, message if there is any suspicion in the content, and also check whether the installed plug-in have any abnormal situation.

AskApache Password Protect: to provide users to choose the basic HTTP authentication algorithm to create a password, or to choose more powerful algorithms HTTP Digest authentication.

TTC WordPress Security Tool: The main function of this plug-in is to stop cross-site scripting attacks (Cross-site script, XSS).

Secure WordPress: Improve the Wordpress’s original security, such as to remove the login page error information, add new new index.html on plug-in folder, remove the pages which display management information of Wordpress.

WordPress Firewall: The WordPress plug-in use an algorithm to check the website browsing requests from internet, and can significantly block the majority of network attacks.

Article from Verecom - Web Design Sydney

IBspot - SEO and Copywriting Service blog, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, wordpress

The relevance of the keywords to the text contents of the website is one of the basic elements that affect the website ranking on search engines.

The way of understanding between robot and people are very different. For example: when human saw “candy” we will know it can be eaten and taste sweet. However search engines they can’t understand through feeling and imagination.

However search engines able to catch the relevance between words.

The term “Latent Semantic Indexing” in two years ago used to be very hot. However as time past, the term gets more blur in my mind, take a general introduction for it.

“Latent Semantic Indexing” is how we find the relevance between the words among so huge database. When two or several words appear within one article, these words consider as relevant.

For example: “Laptop” and “Computer” these two words we always use them together. These two words will be appearing in a lot of websites at the same time, search engines will be take them as relevant words. In this way search engines able to recognize and link them together such as “SEO”, “Search Engine Optimization”, “SEM” and etc

“Apple” and “Orange” these two words, they also appear in the same article, however the frequency is much lower than “Laptop” and “Computer”.

We are not sure exactly how Google and other search engines work, however The “Latent Semantic Indexing” technology can be our reference while we considering of the Search Engine Optimization.

Article from IBSPOT Pty Ltd

IBspot - SEO and Copywriting Service Copywriting, Search Engine Optimisation

During the time of writing the text contents, usually should be taken into account the effectiveness of search engine optimization, there are some general principles.

1) The text contents for the entire website focused on large numbers but different of keywords to help search engines to define the website.

2) Each paragraph of contents need to take the main keywords as target, however does require the support of other relevant terms.

3) The article must also be consistent with the reading habit of the reader and fit the logic of grammar, in another word it should not be as a paragraph generated by mixing keywords together for search engine optimisation purpose.

The last but not the least:

1) Copywriting with SEO keyword is important however it is not the most important; the most important thing is how rich the content itself.

2) Take a try and meditate about it, text contents with SEO copywriting and the text contents by mixing up key words taste very different.

IBspot - SEO and Copywriting Service Copywriting, Search Engine Optimisation