The decision to utilise a sub-domain, sub-directory or even a microsite is simply an architectural decision, but one that is often compounded with a marketing decision. In general, sub-directories are used to describe what individual pages are about while sub-domains and microsites are used to describe what an entire site is about.
Tags: bbc, domains, Google, Microsite, Search, search engines, SEO, Sky, sub-directories, sub-domains, websites, Yahoo
Google’s AdWords product helps connect you with potential customers in the right place, and at precisely the right time by placing relevant adverts on the right-hand-side of Google’s search results pages (SERPs) or through their content network, via AdSense.
Tags: adsense, advertising campaign, adverts, adwords, Analytics, Bing, Click Through Rate, Cost Per Acquisition, Cost Per Click, CPA, CPC, CTR, geo-targeting, geotargeting, Google, Google AdWords, Internet marketing, Marketing, Return on Investment, ROI, Search, search phrase, SERPs, Yahoo
Google’s addition of a page speed signal to its search rankings algorithm officially links performance with search engine marketing. The loading speed of a web page affects user psychology in a number of ways, and now it can effect its rankings as well.
Tags: Charles, Chrome, Fiddler, Firebug, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, search engine, search engine marketing, Search engine optimization, search rankings, search rankings algorithm, Smush It, web debugging, Webmaster Tools, Yahoo, YSlow, YUI Compressor
Compressing your Web components will help speed up your Website. The majority of your visitors will benefit as most all Web browsers support GZip compression. You’ll want to compress all text, which includes HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, JSON, etc.
Tags: .htaccess, Apache, Apache HTTP Server, CSS, DEFLATE, gzip, HTML, JavaScript, JSON, XML, Yahoo, ZIP
In honour [sic] of International Data Privacy Day today, 28th January 2010, Google has published their own guidlines on privacy. The timing of this is quite intriguing following the recent hacking attack, supposedly orchestrated by the Chinese authorities, on Google, Yahoo, Adobe and some 20 other major international corporations; whilst there is also the ongoing concern from many quarters about Google is too dominant in many aspects of our online lives.
Tags: Adobe, Ethics, Google, Identity management, Information privacy, law, Privacy, world wide web, Yahoo
Many questions about website architecture, crawling and indexing, and even ranking issues can be boiled down to one central issue: How easy is it for search engines to crawl your site?
Tags: Canonical, Google, Index, Information retrieval, Microsoft, Robots exclusion standard, search engine, search engine optimisation, search engines, url, URL redirection, Web archiving, web crawlers, Web search engine, webmaster, world wide web, Yahoo
Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.
Tags: Canonical, Duplicate content, Google, Microsoft, search engine, search engine optimisation, Search engine optimization, search engines, search results, SEO, Uniform Resource Identifier, url, web application, Yahoo
Before Ant, building and deploying web applications required a series of scripts or manual processes, which often led to mistakes. Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to Make but is implemented using the Java language, requires the Java platform, and is best suited to building Java projects. However, that doesn’t mean it is restricted to Java projects. I use Ant increasingly for all my web development projects as it is an integral part of Eclipse, my IDE of choice. It makes building applications and releasing them across different servers far more efficient and less problematic.
Tags: Apache Ant, automated build, best practices, build scripts, immediate processing, Java, JavaScript, local development server, similar build tool, SQL, The Definitive Guide, user acceptance testing server, web applications, web development, XML, Yahoo
Okay, so many of the points below aren’t purely my philosophy, but ideas and principles I have picked up along the way throughout my [development] career. Some relate to the UNIX philosophy, or even the Zen of Python, but wherever they’re from, they can be applied to many other domains.
Tags: Adobe, api, Asides, Design, Dev Opera, Development, Freelancing, Google, Google Code, JavaScript, Microsoft, philosophy, Python, unix, web community, work, Yahoo, zen, Zoho
The first step to increasing your site’s visibility on the top search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN is to help their respective robots crawl and index your site. To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file. Conversely and importantly, webmasters can also notify the search engines about the existence and importance of pages with a sitemap.xml file
Tags: Google, Microsoft, optimisation, sitemaps, Tools, webmasters, website, Yahoo