If you have read most of my blog post, you might have noticed that give more importance to search engine optimization and conversion improvement for a website. In today’s world if you want to compete with your competitors to out rank your website you need a well knowledgeable SEO consultant to achieve the results. Gone are the days where you can achieve top ranking with simple directory submission and meta tags.

So Online Marketing involves a combination of search engine optimization website conversion improvement, social media marketing and analyzing of analytics of your website.

If you have website for your business and it needs internet marketing or if you need to start a new website and need the right kind of visibility, contact me through any of the following channels.

Email : info(at)digitallabz.com
Phone: 713-884-5102

Here are the services I offer.

Custom Search Engine Optimization

Custom Website Design

Social Media Profile Creation and Social Media Consulting

SEO consulting Services

In House SEO Training

PPC Campaign Management

Website Analytics Consulting

Website Conversion Improvement

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Content is the king and it plays a very important role in the success of a website. If you didn’t do it right you it hard to get visitors and convert them. There are some elements in website content which needs to be consistent, organized and easy for the user to skim though.

1. Clear and Descriptive Heading – As every one know that most people online just scan the text than read the entire content. So the heading or title of the page plays a major part in the content structure. What heading ( h1tag ) does is it allow the visitor to know what the content of the page is all about. So make it clear and descriptive. Also using a heading tags has SEO benefits.

2. Content above the Fold – You most important content or the content that you want your users to read should be above the fold because it where the screen cuts of the web page. The chance of the reading the content below the fold is very less. The most commonly used screen resolution these days are 1024X768, so if you call to action and most important element of your website is below the fold it might not convert very well.

3. Consistency of the Font and color – All major content element of your website like heading, sub heading and content should have similar font and color if you try to use different variation in the content style you might confuse the user and make them leave. If you have too many color in your fonts and links on the screen, it will look cheesy and low quality website, plus your marketing message will be hard to read and will send your prospects away.

4. Goal of your content – What is the point of your web page content? Do you have a goal that needs an action from the user. Every web page has its own goal weather it is an article, blog post or a product page. The content you’re writing must have a specific goal, something you want the site visitor to do. Decide whether the goal of a web page is to inform the visitor, or to persuade them to take some action, then make sure you achieve that goal.

5. Using of Emphasis and Bold – This should be used very carefully. Bolding and Emphasis a text is to attract attention to the user but overdoing this can kill your content and turn the visitors away. Also try to avoid different characters like too many exclamation Marks!!!!

6. Readability of the content – Readability make the page easy to read and inviting and pleasurable to the eye. Spacing(padding) of the text is very important usability issue of a website.
Spacing should be large and distinct enough that a reader is able to discriminate each individual word and letters. The important factors affecting readability relate to the relative proportions of horizontal to vertical space: line width, type size, and spaces between lines, words, and letters.

7. Title of Web page – A title of the web page is what the search engine visitors see first. The page title or the HTML page title should be explanatory and unique but not stuffed with keywords. Any title which a bunch of keywords doesn’t make sense to the user and would look spam.

8. Too Much Content – Don’t put too much of content in one page Online visitors don’t read too much of content they want to know who you are, what you can do for them and finally how to contact you for their requirements. If you have too much of content on your web page to find the information they need they will leave your site and go elsewhere. Also breaking up the content into bullet points like features and benefits will help the visitor to read.

9. Alignment of text – Alignment provides the structural framework of a content design. The best and the common practice is to align the content text to the left. Since the content alignment can affect the mood of the page as well as how effective it is at getting its message across.

10. Increase Text Contrast – Always stick to the high-contrast text while you adding content to a webpage. If you adding black text on a gray background it is hard to read. Research studies has shown that dark text on a plain background is fast to scan the content and imporve the reading performance than on a textured background.

The whole purpose of a content on a web page is to help the user and take an action based on that content. If you don’t follow the above said content usability issues, you might loose your visitor to elsewhere and also reduces the chances of increasing your website conversion.

If there is any other content issues you think I have missed out here please leave you comments.

Cheatsheets provide an simple and excellent way to get an overview on specific topics. These 10 list of wordpress cheatsheets provide a quick find references to wordpress users. These wordpress helpsheets collection lists of frequently wanted information for WP users. Includes information on template files, snippets for both headers and footers, and more.

For those of you love wordpress will find these cheatsheets handy while working on WP. Please leave your comments and thoughts and any other cheatsheet which I have missed out.

1. The WordPress Help Sheet from WP-candy

2. Useful Blogging cheatsheet for WordPress users from Andy Wibbels

3. WP Help Sheet with basic templates to php snippets in wordpress.

4. WordPress Cheat Sheet for Theme Tags and Plugins

5. Advanced WordPress Help Sheet from WP Candy

6.A detailed WP Cheatsheet for wordpress files

7. Quick Reference guide for wordpress template and wordpress theme development

8. WordPress SEO Cheat Sheet for Web Designers

9. Very Detailed Optimized for Search engines Cheat sheets

10. Optimization Cheat Sheet for WordPress

The .htaccess files (Hypertext Access file) is a very powerful configuration tool on Apache web server. The Apache web server has a number of configuration options that are available to the server administrator. The .htaccess is a simple ASCII text file placed in your website root directory. You can create and edit an .htaccess file using a text editor like notepad.

Here in this blog post I have come up with useful 16 tips and hacks to configure your web server.
As a configuration file .htaccess if a very powerful and a slight syntax error can result in a severe malfunction of your server. So to avoid that always try to keep a backup copies of all your files from the server before working with the .htaccess file.

1. Creating a custom error page with .htaccess on a linux apache is a very simple task. Using you a text editor like notepad you create an .htaccess files. Custom error pages give your website an professional look and catch those visitors who reach your website following a back link.

ErrorDocument 401 /error/401.php
ErrorDocument 403 /error/403.php
ErrorDocument 404 /error/404.php
ErrorDocument 500 /error/500.php

2. How to set the timezone on your server

SetEnv TZ America/Houston

3. Block IPs Using htaccess
Sometime you need to block certain IPs from accessing your entire site or directory. Its pretty simple task. All you have to do is inside the .htaccess file is put the following code.

allow from all
deny from 145.186.14.122
deny from 124.15

If you use the whole IP or a part of the IP to block and add the new ones in a new line.
When someone trying to access your site from the banned ip they will get a 403 error access forbidden message.

4. SEO Friendly 301 permanent redirects for bad/old links and moved links

Redirect 301 /d/file.html http://www.htaccesselite.com/r/file.html

5. Set the Email Address for the Server Administrator - Using this code you can specifying the default email address for the server administrator.

ServerSignature EMail
SetEnv SERVER_ADMIN default@domain.com

6. Hotlinking protection with .htaccess is very important because anyone can hot link to your images and eat up all your bandwith of your server. The following code will help you to prevent that.

Options +FollowSymlinks
# Protect Hotlinking
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?domainname.com/ [nc]
RewriteRule .*.(gif|jpg|png)$ http://domainname.com/img/hotlink_f_o.png [nc]

7. Block all requests from user agent – by creating a perfect .htaccess ban list, you can block all of unwanted user agents that will keep your server load down. Also Check out this interesting thread on webmaster world about the  228 user agents ban list.

## .htaccess Code :: BEGIN
## Block Bad Bots by user-Agent
SetEnvIfNoCase user-Agent ^FrontPage [NC,OR]
SetEnvIfNoCase user-Agent ^Java.* [NC,OR]
SetEnvIfNoCase user-Agent ^Microsoft.URL [NC,OR]
SetEnvIfNoCase user-Agent ^MSFrontPage [NC,OR]
SetEnvIfNoCase user-Agent ^Offline.Explorer [NC,OR]
SetEnvIfNoCase user-Agent ^[Ww]eb[Bb]andit [NC,OR]
SetEnvIfNoCase user-Agent ^Zeus [NC]
<Limit GET POST HEAD>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=bad_bot
</Limit>
## .htaccess Code :: END

8. Redirect everyone to different site except few IP -If you want to redirect all the visitors to a different IP. Also give access to certain  few IPs. You can use the code below

ErrorDocument 403 http://www.youdomain.com
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 124.34.48.165
Allow from 102.54.68.123

9. Don’t want to display download request – Usually when you try to download something from a web server you get a request asking whether you want to save the file or open it.
To avoid that you can use the below code on your .htaccess file.

AddType application/octet-stream .pdf
AddType application/octet-stream .zip
AddType application/octet-stream .mov

10. Change the file type – Make any file be a certain kind of file type Makes image.jpg, index.html, default.cgi all act as php

<Files test>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

11. Block access to your .htaccess file – By adding he following code to your htaccess file will prevent attempts to access your htaccess file. This extra layer of security protects your htaccess file by displaying a 403 error message on the browser.

# secure htaccess file
<Files .htaccess>
 order allow,deny
 deny from all
</Files>

12. Protect access to certain specific file on your server - this can be done by adding the below mentioned code. For example you want to block with the file name default.jpg This will prevent the viewing of this file.

# prevent access of a certain file
<files default.jpg>
 order allow,deny
 deny from all
</files>

13. Prevent access to unauthorized browsing – Protecting specific directory browsing can be done by intructing the server to serve a Forbidden and Authorization required message while anyone requests to view that particular directory. Usually if you site doesn’t have a default index page any files within that directory is accessible to the visitors. To avoid that use the following code in the .htaccess file.

# disable directory browsing
Options All -Indexes

14. Setting the default page – You can set the default page of a directory to any page you like. For example in this code the default page is set as about.html instead of index.html

# serve alternate default index page
DirectoryIndex about.html

15. Password protect your directories and files - You can create authentication for certain files and directories from being access. The code has examples of both password protection for a single file and password protection for a entire directory.

# to protect a file
<Files secure.php>
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Prompt”
AuthUserFile /home/path/.htpasswd
Require valid-user
</Files>

# password-protect a directory
resides
AuthType basic
AuthName “This directory is protected”
AuthUserFile /home/path/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
Require valid-user

16. Redirect an old domain to a new domain – Using htaccess file you can redirect a old domain name to a new domain by adding the following code into the htaccess file. Basically what it does is it will remap the old domain to the new one.

# redirect from old domain to new domain
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

As htaccess files are very powerful, even a slightest syntax error can cause sever malfunction of your server. So it is crucial to take the backup copies of everything before you try the hacks and tricks on your hypertext access files. Post your thoughts with a comment.