Site Smart

Registering a domain name can seem daunting especially if it is the first time you are going to be doing it. There are so many choices of registrar (company that registers and manages the domain name for you) out there that it can seem like an impossible decision.

Picking the right registrar is very important, in my opinion, only surpassed by choosing the right web host (company to host your website). Through the course of this article we’ll look at some important things to consider when registering a domain. Let’s begin.

How does domain registration work?

The registrar you choose will register the domain name you choose with the Network Information Center (NIC) or Domain Authoritiy that keeps the database record of the domain ownership and the Name Servers that maintain domain’s IP record. This means that the registrar’s servers tell the NIC who owns the domain and what name servers (servers that will point to your web host) the domain points to. Because of the communication between the registrar and the NIC there is usually a delay, upto 24 hours, in updating any changes you make to your domain name.

How much should I pay for my domain name?

Money is always an important factor in almost every decision we make in life. We don’t want to possible pay any more than absolutely necessary but when it comes to domains you don’t want to go cheap and wish you hadn’t.

There are lots of companies offering domains at ridiculously cheap prices (as low as $3 per year) while others seem to be charging upto 10 times as much (as high as $30 - $50 per year). Why? The amount a company charges, almost always, is in direct corolation to the quality of the service that goes along with that domain.

Some ways to measure the quality of service that a company provides can be measured in a few ways

• What is their uptime garuantee? Like all machines, server do go down occasionally. The frequency and duration of the downtime depend on the systems and infrastructure the registrar has in place (one guy with a couple servers in his basement or a large corporation with thousands of servers and a fulltime IT staff).
• Support. What kind of help can you expect when you have problems or your domain does go down? This is a huge factor in seperating the exceptional from the average. Most people are willing to pay more for the piece of mind that help is there if they need it.
• Control. What are you able to do with your domain? Do you have full DNS control (repoint name servers/IP addresses, point email records, setup subdomains, etc) and how easy is the control panel to use?
• Track record. How long has the company been in business and what do their customers say? Be sure to search the Internet for company reviews on independant sites to see what customers, former and current, really think of the service.

Personally I don’t choose the absolute cheapest registrar but I also don’t pick the most expensive. I usually go with a company in the $10 - $15 per year range that has been around for a while and has excellent reviews.

What extention should I choose (.com, .net, .org, etc)?

Just as there are lots of choice of companies there is also lots of choice when picking the extension of your domain.

.com is by far the most desired extension but it also can be hard to find a good name in that extension. There really isn’t any extension that is better than another when considering the standard extensions like .com, .net, .org, .info. There are newer extensions that have emerged that try to discribe the purpose of the domain like .tv (TV show) or .mobi (website for mobile devices) but these uses are not enforced.

There are, however, some extensions that you cannot register unless you meet some guidelines. Some examples are .edu. You have to be an educational organiztion or institution to be able to get a .edu domain. Also, a lot of country specific (.ca Canada) require you to be a citizen or entity within that country.

Summary

We looked at some things that you should consider when registering a domain name. Be sure to choose a reputable company with quality service not necessarily the cheapest company. Don’t spend too much time contemplating what extension to choose. Consentrate more on getting a domain that is easy for people to remember like yourname.com or a name that is a play on the extension like asp.net or scandelo.us.

This the first article in a small series covering what you need to know to optimize your website to be search engine friendly.

Why is SEO important?
Many sites rely on search engines for the majority, possibly even all, of their websites traffic. So basically, the better you optimize your website the better you’ll be ranked in search engines. The better you are ranked in search engines the more traffic you’ll get. Starting to see the picture?

There are many parts to SEO. What we’ll look at in this article is the HTML markup that makes up your website. You may not know that the HTML that you write has a big impact on the outcome of your ranking. So what’s the secret to good SEO markup? Well, it isn’t a secret at all. Search engines rank markup based on semantics. These semantics or standards are layouted out by the W3C. Each markup tag is given a specific purpose and search engines expect each tag to be used the way it was intended. Meaning, if a search engine finds a <p> paragraph tag it assumes it is filled with a paragraph of your content.

Let’s take a look at some important tags and the best ways to use them.

Title tag (<title>)
This is an important tag because it is the first piece you relavent content the search engine will see when it is crawling your site. It is also usually the title of the search result that gets returned for you page.

Many websites make the mistake of not taking advantage of this tag and only place their company name, for example, in it. There is much more you can do.

Let’s use a fictional moving company called Mac’s Movers. Let’s look at a good use of the title tag for this company.

<title>Reliable and affordable movers in the New York area - Mac's Movers - The friendly movers.</title>

See how the first part of the title wasn’t the company name or even the company slogan? The first part of the title should always be something that contains your keywords or phrases. We’ll take about keywords in a later article.

Meta tags
Meta tags like keywords and description aren’t as important as they once were. Due to keyword spam and keyword stuffing search engines usually ignore these tags. Even though they may not be important to your overall rank they still play a key part in getting the user to click your link in the search results.

Search engines will use your page’s description as the result description if it is available. This means you can customize what the user sees when your page appears in search results. This is very important because you can display content that will intise the user to click your link. If the description tag is not present on your page the search engine will display the first chunk of text it finds on your page, even if it is your navigation links. Not good! Be sure to always include meta description tags on all your pages.

Heading tags
Heading tags define the different sections of the page. There are 6 different heading tags (<h1>…<h6>), <h1> being the most important (defining the overall topic of the page). As a general rule all section titles should use heading tags. You can use any combination of heading tags (1-6) but you should limiteach page to just one <h1> tag as some search engines consider using more than one to be spamming.

Example:

<h1>How to train your dog</h1>
<p>This article is how to train your dog....</p>

<h2>Different commands</h2>
<p>Paragraph about different training commands...</p>

<h2>How to reward your dog</h2>
<p>How to reward your dog when they learn something...</p>

The above example shows that the main topic of the page is training your dog while the H2 headings break the page into different related sections.

Some final thoughts
I have explained the most important parts of writing your HTML with SEO in mind. Here are a few more thoughts I will leave you with:

Use paragraph tags <p>. This should be pretty self explainitory. Use paragraphy tags to break up you content instead of break <br> tags.

Avoid using tables as much as possible. If possible use CSS to layout your pages. This will allow you to markup the content in the order you want the search engine to read it while still being able to present it to the user in the way you want.

With this article you should have the understanding of how to get started doing basic SEO for your self.

In early 2006 Dean Edwards began a little project called Base. This was he first attempt to ease the pain of developing Object Oriented JavaScript.

I want a nice base class for JavaScript OO:

• I want to easily create classes without the MyClass.prototype cruft
• I want method overriding with intuitive access to the overridden method (like Java’s super)
• I want to avoid calling a class’ constructor function during the prototyping phase
• I want to easily add static (class) properties and methods
• I want to achieve the above without resorting to global functions to build prototype chains
• I want to achieve the above without affecting Object.prototype

About one year later Dean released the next iteration, Base2. Although Base was a fairly simple library to use there was no documentation. Other than Dean’s, very helpful, posts on his website there was nothing you could refer to in the traditional reference sense.

In August of 2007 there appeared a nice post on Dean’s site that annouced the arrival of some documentation for Base. Although it is stamped as currently incomplete (at the time of this article anyways) it is a huge boost for the library and the community that has grown around it.

One thing that, I believe, makes Base stand out, and Dean as an excellent programmer, is his commitment to standards. Base adherse to some fundamental OOP rules, which Dean has outlined in a nice reference guide for library developers.

Base has enjoyed great admiration in the JavaScript community with other libraries using it as a starting point for their library cores.

Thanks Dean for the great leadership you bring to the web development community and keep up the great work.

There are all kinds of tricks and gimmicks out there that promise to increase traffic and even Page Rank if you throw enough money at them. People spend endless amounts of money buying links on high traffic sites, high page rank sites, and combinations of both.

Is this the only way to succeed? If you’ll take the time to finish reading this article I’ll show that the answer is no.

If there are less expensive and even free ways to launch your website then why do people spend so much money?
That’s a good question. Some would answer that buying your traffic and page rank is faster. I say, not true. There are plenty of ways to get traffic and establish your site’s authority that are instant and won’t cost you a nickel.

Buying your way to the top is easier.
With this I would have to agree (although that depends on how hard you worked to get the money in the first place). If you are looking for a magic solution that requires nothing from you then this article is probably not for you. But if you are willing to put in as little as 15 minutes a day into getting traffic and linkbacks for you site (not including the time you need to spend creating content for your site, that is a whole different ball game) then I’ll show you how to succeed. I won’t even ask you to buy my ebook either (not that I have one).

Alright, let’s begin. I am going to assume you have a brand new site or blog that has some content. First off, to really succeed you need quality content. You should strive to post at least 75% original content not just a summary or copy of something someone lese has already written about.

You have your content now how do you get people to read it?
You can have the greatest website or blog in the world but if nobody ever reads it it’s not really a success, is it? So how do you get traffic to your site? We will look at 3 ways to drive people to your site.

1. Article submission
Article submission sites are great ways to get traffic from other sites and build linkbacks at the same time. Articles that you submit are free for others to repost on their own sites as long as they leave your footer intact. You can place links in your footer to link back to your site(s).

This is probably the easiest method to get traffic and linkbacks because you write the article and submit it once and then others do the work of posting it on lots of sites for you. The amount of traffic you get and the quality of the linkbacks depend on the sites that post your article. Try writing articles for popular niches to increase your return.

2. Contribute to other blogs
Most blogs allow you to leave comments and they include your url. You should find blogs on topics you like and contribute quality comments to those blogs. Hint: look for high traffic blogs in your niche or blogs that have a lot of RSS subscribers. Your link will be posted with your comment and you will get some traffic from other readers, especially if you present interesting points and comments.

However, almost all blogs include rel=”external nofollow” on that link. What does this mean? It only means something to Google, all other search engines ignore this detail and record your linkback. Google does not record these types of links as linkbacks.

Despite this fact it is still worth it for the traffic you will get and the rankings on other search engines.

3. Help people in a forum
One fact that most people don’t realize is how useful your signature is on forums. You can place a link to your site in your signature and it will get attached to every post you make giving you linkbacks.

As far as traffic goes, the same principles as commenting on blogs apply. If you are helpful and provide quality feedback other users will follow your link to your site.

Also, forums won’t add rel=”external nofollow” to your link so it is picked up by all search engine however forum threads usually don’t reach as high of a rank as blogs and articles do but every little bit counts.

Summary
We have looked at some free ways to promote your blog that don’t take up too much time. You may already read blogs and comment on forums already so there is no extra work involved for you to take advantage of these techniques.