Thursday 25 October 2007

SEO : Search Engine Spider catcher

To check what types of the Spiders reach your website and their frequencies, you can use the php code to know the Spiders' movement built by 黑色梦中 from bloghuman.

The php code is as the followings:
function get_naps_bot()
{
$useragent = strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);

if (strpos($useragent, 'googlebot') !== false){
return 'Googlebot';
}

if (strpos($useragent, 'msnbot') !== false){
return 'MSNbot';
}

if (strpos($useragent, 'slurp') !== false){
return 'Yahoobot';
}

if (strpos($useragent, 'baiduspider') !== false){
return 'Baiduspider';
}

if (strpos($useragent, 'sohu-search') !== false){
return 'Sohubot';
}

if (strpos($useragent, 'lycos') !== false){
return 'Lycos';
}

if (strpos($useragent, 'robozilla') !== false){
return 'Robozilla';
}
return false;
}


function nowtime(){
$date=date("Y-m-d.G:i:s");
return $date;
}

$searchbot = get_naps_bot();

if ($searchbot) {
$tlc_thispage = addslashes($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
$url=$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$file="robotlog.txt";
$time=nowtime();
$data=fopen($file,"a");
fwrite($data,"Time:$time robot:$searchbot URL:$tlc_thispage\n");
fclose($data);
}


If you have interest, please free feel to go to read the original post by him (in Simplify Chinese).

Thursday 18 October 2007

SEO: "SEO Tools for Firefox"

SearchStatus can search rapidly for SEO message, including content of meta tags, whois message of the webite, content od robots.txt, keyword density, number of internal links and backlinks, other useful information.
Here is the screen shot:


If you like it, you can download from here.

Sunday 14 October 2007

SEO: "CityU Web Hacker" Turtle CS3382 - Week 6

In order to participate 2007 eXtreme Web Designer Award about SEO, i have built the web page for the keyword : "CityU Web Hacker" Turtle web page as followings:
CityU Web Hacker turtle web page
SEO steps and related SEO software:
  1. For SEO, Make the correct robots.txt to prohibit Spider to index your private folder. (SEO tools provided)
  2. For SEO, Add meta tags (includes robot, title,heading, keywords and description) within <head>, don't spam (the keyword appears more than once in same tag). (SEO tools provided)
  3. For good SEO, Include the keyword in <title>, if better at the first 3-5 words.
  4. For SEO, Use less javascript in the previous part of <body>, if long, put them in the latter part.
  5. For SEO,Visible text having the keywords appear as near the top of <body> as possible, if better it appears in the first 5-7 words. (SEO tools provided)
  6. For SEO, Make sure have alt property in <img>, title property in <a>
  7. For SEO, Add text of the web page > 250 words, better if >500words.
  8. For SEO, Make sure the keyword density is >5%, better if 8%-10% (too much will be considered as spam). (SEO tools provided)
  9. For SEO, Make the web page with valid XHTML (1.0 strict or better) , CSS, ECMAScript, etc. (SEO tools provided)
  10. For SEO, Get a static IP hosting for the website rather than dynamic website. (SEO tools provided)
    Input your website URL:


    This tool provided free by Bruce Claya

  11. For SEO, Include the keyword in URL.
  12. For SEO, Submit the URL to search engines, e.g. Yahoo,Yahoo directory, Google, dmoz, etc. (SEO tools provided)
  13. For SEO, Set sitemap file to Yahoo and Google. (SEO tools provided)
  14. For SEO, Increase the quality(high PR, highly related website point to your website) and quantity of the backlinks(links that point to your website), you can use backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool to check the backlinks. (SEO tools provided)
  15. For SEO, Make sure the Spider able to "read" your website clearly. (SEO tools provided)
  16. For SEO, Keep update the content(more text) of web page as frequently as possible.
SEO Tools:

Thursday 11 October 2007

SEO : CS3382 - Week 5

To participate in eXtreme Web Designer Award which this year's topic is "CityU Web Hacker" : turtle, i have read some articles about SEO and robots.txt .

Robots.txt
What is a robots.txt? This website has several articles about SEO and robots.txt.
Robots.txt is a text file in ASCII for declaring the web page not to be searched by the search robots (or search spider). Although not many search engine robots support the Robot meta tag, some famous search engine such as GOOGLE can completely support, and even add a comment of "archive" to limit if the GOOGLE can keep the screen shot of the web page.
e.g. <meta name="googlebot" content="index,follow,noarchive"/>

Location: /robots.txt (root directory)
Format: example from google
User-agent: robot-name (can see the Web Robots list for details)
Allow: /page/
Disallow: /page/

Meta-tag (can be 1 of 4):
<meta name="robots" content="INDEX, FOLLOW"/> , can be written as <meta name="robots" content="ALL"/>
<meta name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW"/>
<meta name="robots" content="INDEX, NOFOLLOW"/>
<meta name="robots" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"/>
Meaning:
INDEX is for declaring to index your page in search engine, while NOINDEX is not.
FOLLOW is for declaring to index the links from your page in search engine, while NOFOLLOW is not.

Exchange links
Links is very important for Internet, so many search engines always see links (mainly in-links) as important factors for indexing. Beacuase of this, many sites improve their SEO by take the convenience of exchange links. However, despite of of common of exchange links, google has penalty of this behaviour due to decrease the quality of the links.
Therefore, we should not use the method of exchange to increase the number of in-links of the website.

Other useful links for SEO:

Thursday 4 October 2007

Font and color notes

Fonts:
  • Moderns are best used with short to moderate body copy, not for extended reading;
  • Clarendon-style serif faces usually carry a very high readability;
  • Slab serif faces can be appropriately used in applications.

Color:
  • Complementary color schemes are really bad for text, good for standing out something;
  • Analogous color schemes usually match well and create serene and comfortable designs;
  • Triadic color schemes tend to be quite vibrant and should be carefully balanced - let one color dominate and use the two others for accent;
  • Split-complimentary color scheme is difficult to mess up, but has less tension than complementary color scheme.
  • Square and Tetradic color schemes offer plenty of possibilities for variation and work best if you let one color be dominant.
Color Meaning:
  • Blue
    • Calming and sedate
    • Cooling
    • Aids intuition
  • Green
    • Soothing
    • Relaxing mentally as well as physically
    • Helps alleviate depression, nervousness and anxiety
    • Offers a sense of renewal, self-control and harmony
  • ........





Tools: Many Web Design Tools
Game: Google Image Labeler