Few things to optimize your website.

Well, this one is coming up after couple of weeks of my last post. What have been doing?

I was learning a few things about optimizing my websites. I am going to share with you some of what I have learnt.

Some of the common things that are either not given their due or ignored by website developers but important from a SEO (search engine optimization) perspective are;

1. .htaccess file: Yes, this is a very small file in your webserver residing where your index.html resides
search engines think lincsoftech.com and www.lincsoftech.com are two different sites. While, for you and me it is just the same site. The traffic to these are counted as traffic to two different sites, just think of the ranking effects it might have on your site in addition to the possibility of the search engines thinking that it might be duplicate content?

Ok, I get that! But how do I create this ".htaccess" file? I am not a techie? all this is too much for me!!! If these are your queries here is the answer.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Open this in notepad, replace domain.com with your domain and that's it. As simple as that.
Upload this using an FTP program to your webserver to public_html (most of us are hosting on linux/unix sites).

2. robots.txt

This is a small text file that again sits in the same directory where your index.html resides. Here is an example that you can use and should suffice for most of the websites unless you have specific requirements such as asking the spiders not to index some of the pages of your website.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /images/

Copy and paste this in notepad, save it as robots.txt

Upload using an FTP program such as Filezilla (it is free).

3. Sitemap.

Now, this one needs a bit of XML knowledge. You must be saying, aaw, come on. All this is too much. Well, here is an example for my site. Just replace my site name with yours and upload to your server. Make sure the file name is sitemap.xml



      xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
            http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">

  http://lincsoftech.com/
  weekly
  1.00

  http://lincsoftech.com/index.html
  weekly
  0.80

  http://lincsoftech.com/aboutus.html
  weekly
  0.80

  http://lincsoftech.com/portfolio.html
  weekly
  0.80

  http://lincsoftech.com/services.html
  weekly
  0.80

  http://lincsoftech.com/careers.html
  weekly
  0.80

  http://lincsoftech.com/resources.html
  weekly
  0.80

  http://lincsoftech.com/contact.html
  weekly
  0.80

I hope you find this useful. Please do leave your comments.

All the best,

Srinath

Have you made money online?

Dear reader, if you are reading this blog, I presume that you are into online affiliate marketing or it is possible that you have your own product which you are selling over the internet.

The question is, are you making money or have you been scammed? What are your experiences? Would appreciate your valuable inputs and comments.

Regards

Srinath

How to get a good page rank with Google?

Keep it simple and stupid - kiss principle.

1 - First and foremost, buy a domain name which is relevant to the business that you are promoting.

2. A good title for your website. Would be nice to have the main keyword in your title

3. Keywords - Many people say, the keywords meta tag is not so important for many of the search engines. But there is no harm in keeping them and search engines do look at them.

4. Content - don't copy and past from some website you looked at. The search engines are smart and they can easily recognize duplicate content. Big time risk. Write your own content and if you cannot get a good professional writer to create the content for you.

5. Keyword density - Don't over stuff keywords within the content and at the same time don't create content which has no relevance to the keywords that you are using.

6. Back links - Get some quality back links - Avoid back links from rogue sites. They will pull you down.   Don't build too many back links in a short span of time. That is asking for trouble. The back links have to grow over a period of time. Don't believe all those nonsense about getting 100s of back links in few days and et al.


7. let the search engine know what to crawl and what not to crawl - include robots.txt

8. Have a site map and make sure all the pages in your sites are internally linked and there are no broken links

9. Standard Requirements - have Privacy policy, disclaimer, terms and conditions

10. keep adding quality content on a continuous basis!

All the best.

Srinath

Off Subject: Bangalore City Corporation Elections: Usage of Technology

Technology has had some real innovations by the politicians here.

I don't know how much of SMS (short message services are used across US and Europe. In India it is a big hit from college going students, sales & marketing companies, banks, insurance companies, event managers...... the list is endless.
College students chit chat on the mobile via SMS.
Sales and marketing companies promote products via SMS.
Banks send you updates on your credit card usage, bank balances via SMS.
Insurance companies inform you when your next premium is due.
Hotels and Restaurants woo you with their speciality cuisine.
Event managers let you know what they are up to.
Politicians request you to vote for them via SMS.

Well, I am not much surprised by these. What did really surprise me was the voice message by a politician yesterday. I got a call on my mobile and now that I am building my services business, I did take the call even though I did not recognize the number. Here was a candidate in her own voice making a request to vote for her and explaining to me what all good will happen to me if I vote for her! Now that is certainly one step ahead of rest of the candidates!!

Technology is taking us places!


Srinath

GDI sends me payment

This month has been fairly hectic for me. I am on a sales drive mode promoting my IT services business. On the internet marketing front, have not had much time to do anything. Nevertheless, some of the things are on autopilot and I just received a payment from GDI last week.

For all those who want to make it in the make money online arena, this is what I have got to say, put in 4-6 months of effort building the business, focus on few areas to promote your business and the results will start coming in. One your down the line, you will have a steady income which can be termed as auto pilot income.

All the best.

Srinath

Paypal Resumes withdrawals to Bank accounts in India

Finally, after couple of months of painful times for many of the freelancers in India, we have some good news.

Now, you can withdraw funds from your PayPal account to your bank accounts.

There are some criteria that you have to meet, but that should not be a problem for most of the people who are doing business. It still will be a problem for those who would just want to send money to individuals and I don't know how that will be addressed in the near future.

You can read more about this here;

Hope this helps.

Srinath

Some news on Indian Bank Transfers from Paypal Finally

Here is what paypal sent me in an e-mail today.

Some good news but some grey areas still to be addressed.

We have been diligently working with the RBI and our business partners to resume Indian bank withdrawals for the thousands of Indian businesses who depend on PayPal to sell their goods or services in the global marketplace. Today, we are happy to announce that the RBI has allowed us to continue local bank withdrawals for settlements for exports of goods and services. We are currently making changes to comply with Indian regulations for settlements for exports of goods and services, and we anticipate that, as of Wednesday, March 3rd, customers will be able to use our bank withdrawal service. As part of the changes, you will be required to fill out a new field entitled 'Export Code' when you request a withdrawal. This information is required under the current laws of India in order to identify the nature of cross-border merchant transactions. On Monday, March 1st, we will be back in touch with specific instructions on how you can move your money into your bank account. Moving forward, the RBI has told us that PayPal needs specific approvals to allow personal remittances to India, which we currently do not have. Until we get these approvals, personal payments into India will remain suspended. However, if you are an exporter, you will continue to be able to use the PayPal service for payments of goods and services. In fact, with the changes we are making to our system, PayPal is now set to be a more powerful engine for exporters in India. With purpose codes for export transactions and FIRCs (Foreign Inward Remittance Certificates), you should now be able to get the export related benefits you seek. You can check the PayPal blog for additional updates.
www.thepaypalblog.com We thank you for your business and for your patience during the past few weeks. Sincerely, PayPal