BinaryDay

Most of the useful sites like gmail,yahoo,orkut are banned in my office. That is what prompted me to search for a proxy site. The first proxy site that I started to use was blogged at a good proxy for gmail. However the IT department was uncharecteristically fast to shut down this proxy site as well. So I continued my search and prepared a list of gmail proxy sites.

During this reseach I realized that one can create a proxy of his own, put in some advertisement with adsense and make good amount of money. In this post I list some open source code that can e used to create a good proxy site.

HTTP/FTP Proxy in a CGI Script
A Simple Http Proxy Server
Java FTP Proxy Server

There are too many really good SEO guides written by SEO experts. However as a webmaster I found myself lost while going through many of them. So this is an attempt by a webmaster to write a SEO guide that will be better undestandable by other webmasters. (Hopefully).

What is Search Engine Optimization or SEO:

Google defines SEO as follows
Search-engine optimization means adjusting the content of your site so it ranks higher in the list of search results for a particular keyword or keyword phrase.

Shoemoney asked the same question to some of the leading experts. You can read their definitions of SEO here.

Why is SEO important?

Traffic from Search engine is free traffic. More importantly these are the users who are actively looking for buying some product. Hence they are more likely to click on an advertisement or buy a product. So you can monetize them better. Free Traffic + Better Monetization. What more can you ask for?

I want to be successful without depending on Search Engines:

Good Luck. I am not asking you to depend entirely on search engine traffic. However according to google analytics Binaryday got 62% of its traffic last month from Search engines (58% from google alone). If you think that is because binaryday is a pathetic unpopular blog then take a look at the sources of traffic for Techcrunch. Even Techcrunch depends on Google for 40% of its Traffic.

SEO is important but how do I go about it?

A good place to start your SEO activity is to go through this list of important ranking factors. According to experts the top 10 positive ranking factors are

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

There are some negative ranking factors as well. The top 10 negative ranking factors are

1. Server is OftenInaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
5. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages

Keyword Use in Title Tag and Keyword Use in Body Text

Incorporate keyword phrases While making a post
Think about terms that a searcher is more likely to use to search for your post and use them in the title of your post. You can find popular keywords using the tool here. AOL had released around 20M web queries collected from ~650k users over three months. That is a great repository for finding popular keywords.

Target longer phrases if they’re relevant Feel free to use longer titles. Google now supports 70 character long titles.Use this title tag plugin to be able to customize the titles of your pages and posts easily.

Use the keyword and some variations of the same in the body of the post. Include the important keywords inside h1 tag once, strong/bold tag once or twice and once or twice inside the post body. However take care not to overdo it else google may think that you are trying to spam.

It is a good idea to use a good quality image describing your post wherever possible. My own experience says it is comparatively easier to get some decent traffic from google image search. Make sure to keep the image on your own website and use relevant alt and title tags.

You can check how well your existing page is targeting a particular keyword using the Term Target Tool.

Write an Attractive Meta Description

I know I know, most modern search engines have stopped using meta description as a factor for ranking search results. Then what is it doing here? Well meta description will NOT help you improve your ranking in the SERP. However given a search ranking directly, it will help you improve your click through rate. Higher click through rate means higher traffic.

This is because google uses the meta description to create the search excerpt. See the example below. The underlined text is coming from the meta description of Mywalkin

Golden rule for writing a rocking meta description tag. Think like you are creating a 2 line advertisement for the post. Write complete sentences and try to limit your meta description tag to less than 150 characters.

Here is a wordpress plugin for you to add custom meta description tags to your posts.

A site or blog downtime is every webmaster’s / blogger’s biggest nightmare. Now we do not need to keep checking your site to know if it is working. Set up an alert on www.pingdom.com. It will let you know if your site goes down. I am already in love with this site. Try it out for yourself.

This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 startup school at Stanford by Ycombinator.

Nice and inspiring lessons if you are serious for starting a startup.

A really successful wordpress blog can consume a lot of server power as each page needs to be dynamically created for each user. Now you can remove the need for doing so by using WP Super Cache plugin.

This plugin generates static html files from the dynamic WordPress blog. Once the file is generated your webserver will serve the static html file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Advantages of WP Super Cache

1. It saves server power. If your blog has become popular and you are yet to move to a dedicated server, then you should use this plugin.
2. It will speed up your wordpress blog. That in turn makes the user experience of the blog readers much better. Also a faster blog/website is liked by most search engines, including Google.
3. Static html pages are better than dynamic ones from SEO point of view

Many first time bloggers start out on blogger.com blog. As the blog becomes older, you may decide to go for a new layout for various reasons including better monetization. Here is a step by step guide on how to change the template for a blogger blog.

Log into your Blogger account

go to the dashboard at the upper right corner.

Click on “Template” link

Click “Pick New” Tab

Select a template of your choice and click on “üse this template” link

Select the template of your choice, and click the “Use This Template” button.

Hitwise has released the latest numbers for the search engine market. Google reaches an all time high with 67.25% market share. Microsoft and yahoo continue their downward movement. Ask.com was the only other major search engine to gain market share.

Domain Mar.-08 Feb.-08 Mar.-07
www.google.com 67.25% 66.44% 64.13%
search.yahoo.com 20.29% 20.59% 21.26%
search.msn.com 6.65% 6.95% 9.01%
www.ask.com 4.09% 4.16% 3.48%

The traffic data for video sites showed that youtube dominates the video makrte completely with 73% market share. If you add 4% market share enjoyed by google video then google has a 77% market share in video.

All of us know that incoming link can bring a lot of traffic. However has it ever occured to you that outgoing links can bring substantial traffic?

I had written a post about release of wordpress 2.5. I started getting an unusually high number of visitors on that post. (Unusual by the standard of this blog ) Most of the traffic was coming from the trackback link on the wordpress blog.

To test the theory I wrote another article about yahoo microsoft story with several links to techcrunch articles. The post has got more than 100 visiors from trackback alone.

So always make sure to link to the sources from which you are picking facts and ideas for your post. It is the right thing to do and additionally it will help you get some additional traffic as well.

If you have a good internet idea and you will like to get it funded then http://www.seedfund.in/ is a great place to try your luck. Unlike most of the other funds that do not look at any proposal less than a million dollar, seedfund aims to invest Rs. 1 to 5 crores in a startup company. It comes with a great team that comprises of Pravin Gandhi and Bharati Jacob came from Infinity Venture and Mahesh Murthy from Passionfund.

They are located in Mumbai and Bangalore and will like to work with companies situated closer to these places. They’re looking mostly at internet or media or mobile or telecom or retail or consumer-facing plays – and also for things that aren’t yet “sectors”.

Their existing portfolio consists of carwale, agencyfaq, redbus.in etc. Since they intend to invest in 15-20 companies, we can safely assume that they shall be funding another 10-15 companies soon.

Finf out more details here

There is just too much of importance given to getting new traffic. Most of the webmasters seem to miss the importance of one of the most critical aspects of growth of a website. Retaining your users and making them repeat users. I have just created an excel spreadsheet to prove the point.

If you play with the spreadsheet a little, you will see that if your website manages to convert 50% of the traffic, then in 3 years you will get less than 1 lakh users. However if you manage to retain 100% of visitors then you shall get more than 7 lakh users. 100% may be a bit unrealistic. However even if you manage to retain only 75% of your users then your site would have recieved close to 3 lakh users.

I hope the data below would manage to convince you that retaining the visitors is the single most important requirement for the growth of a website/blog.