Tildemark blogs

What is RSS?

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:30:44 +0800

What is RSS?
RSS is a document format for reading frequently updated websites in the internet. Similar to other document format like the MS Word documents or the PDF documents, the RSS also needs an interpreter called the "RSS Reader" as the MS Word Application for your MS Word documents and acrobat reader for your PDF documents. Each RSS document is called a "feed" or commonly as RSS Feed. RSS feeds are seen with the icon having an orange background with arcs usually found on the side bar of a blog.

How can RSS feed help me?
RSS are designed to help us read frequently updated websites in just one neat and simple application called the "RSS Reader". I use these programs at home to read my favorite blogs or forum and at work to read the messages from my projects. With this, i do not need to go to each of the websites i often visit just to check for any update but instead the RSS Reader does this for me. RSS Readers really made my life more easier as RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication

How do i get RSS?
You will need an RSS Reader, there are lots of applications that enables you to read RSS documents. Personally, I use the Google Reader but you might prefer some other applications. Lets just use it because it the only reader use for now. If you have a Google account then you can use it to read RSS feeds from there. Just click on the "add subscription" link and paste in your RSS feed. Now on the blogs that you read look for the RSS Logo, copy and paste the URL to your favorite RSS Reader in my case its Google Reader. Some feeds are marked private meaning you will need a password before we could read the contents. Some readers accepts authentication, at the office is use Sharp Reader Software.

How do I know the link I got is RSS?
The RSS reader is written in plain text, if you will try to open an RSS document with a text editor, you can actually read it but you might have a little more time understanding because of the way its written. The format the RSS document is written is called XML. XML is like an older brother of the other common technical word called HTML. XML and HTML are not the topic here so lets just ignore them for now. You will know its RSS because every RSS feed has this somewhere at the beginning of the document: and it has an orange icon with a arcs in it. You can try using Tildemark Blogs RSS feed to use is as a sample or maybe subscribe to it.

writing accessibility CSS code for the color blind

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:58:21 +0800

Not being able to see the differences between colors is a bit trouble some. Imagine yourself looking at the traffic light and not seeing and red color. These people will see yellowish brown color instead of the red color. Red-green color blind is also called Protanopia, people that are less sensitive to red light and Deuteranopia for people who are less sensitive to the green light. Some study determined that about 10% of the male population are color blind. I am happy I do not belong to those 10%.

That is why link urls should stay underlined to help people with color blindness see it immediately. since we are not able to adjust CSS being used on the website we browse, we will just instead use our own CSS page by specifying it on our browser. if you are color blind, this page will help you a lot. If you are not color blind, i don't recommend you using it because it would be weird.

First lets create our own CSS file and specify it via our browser settings later.


* {
  color: #000 !important;
  background: #fff !important;
}

a {
  text-decoration: underline !important;
  color: #fff !important;
  background: #000 !important;
}

the !important specifier must be present on your CSS codes to tell the browser its important and must override the other CSS codes.

Using Internet Explorer navigate to

Tools -> Internet Options
Click on the Accessibility button
Place a check on the 'Format documents using my style sheet' option
Browse to the location where you saved your CSS file above.
then click OK

If you are using Firefox go to your profile folder and edit your userCrome.css file of your userContent.css file. just copy-paste the CSS code above to the bottom portion of the file.

Keyword competition tool called Stomper Ranker

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:03:55 +0800

Stompernet just released a firefox extension that displays the rank of a site on the top 3 search engines namely, Google, Yahoo and Live. I'm a fan of the StomperNet videos myself and i believe this tool is a good addition to most seo professionals. Stomper Ranker tool allows you to easily see your competitors in ranks in a graphical view based on the search keyword we use. The green represents Google, Red is Yahoo and Blue is Live. Just hover your mouse pointer to each dot to see which site is currently performing well on the ranks. The line denotes the same site url.

You may download the Stomper Ranker extension at the StomperNet site.

Removing google public service ads on adsense

Thu, 01 May 2008 10:22:01 +0800

You usually get this when you first added your adsense codes to your site. Its alright to get this during this time as adsense wasn't able to get a cache of your keywords yet. It may take some time to get revenue generating ads on your site specially if your content has less meaningful keywords in it. According to the google help center, it would take approximately 48 hours to remove the Gulf Hurricane Relief ad on your site. If its been there for weeks then your copy might have some problems in it.

Editing robots.txt
There are several ways to remove the PSA from appearing on your site, but the most efficient way is to change your content. First things first, your robots.txt might have been configured to disallow adsense crawlers from visiting your site. If you are able to edit your robots.txt file, you may add the following code below:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

Avoid iFrames or Frames
If you have placed your adsense code in an iFrame then the crawler will have no way of getting relevant keywords thus displaying in the Public Service Ads. Google crawlers will have a hard time figuring out which content to get for the ads inside frames so its best not to place your ads in a separate frame or simply avoid using frames on your site just to be safe.

Choose your content wisely
Content is the most important factor in determining the adsense ads that is displayed on your website. the more content you the greater chances of getting a relevant ad. Make sure you have enough content for the crawler to read. Also, the google crawler can't read images, audio files, flash content, java applets or anything except plain text. If you have a small amount of content and you have set your ads to display only images then this might be the reason for displaying only PSA ads. Try changing your adsense codes to display text and images ads.

Negative Keywords
Avoid negative keywords, this includes anything that is related to d%ath, sickness, p%rnography, dr%gs, etc. At anytime avoid mentioning these words on all of your content, but opps there you go i have just listed them here anyway.

Avoid automatic refresh
If yous page contains the HTML auto refresh code, it might also be the reason why your site is displaying public service ads. Remove the meta refresh code from your page and observe if the PSA ads have been removed. The meta refresh code looks like this one below, remove them:

Adsense ad in a login page
Placing ads on a page that requires user access does not allow the google crawler to visit the page to get the relevant keywords therefore displaying public service ads instead. Avoid placing adsense code behind a login page.

Avoid Session Ids on URLs
Adsense also relies heavily on the URL to display relevant ads. Having a session id on the url confuses the crawler to ad a relevant keyword because your URL keeps on changing. You may use the input type hidden HTML attribute instead of placing the session id in the urls

Unsupported localization
If you site is displaying other language aside from English then this might be the reason why its displaying public service ads. Here's a list of country currently supported by adsense.
Arabic
Bulgarian
Chinese (simplified)
Chinese (traditional)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish

Google ads in video thru video overlay

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:22:09 +0800

Imagine yourself watching your favorite star wars movie, didn't it get into your mind on where you could buy those double edge light sabers? you would even beg for a fake replica, just to get one. What if while watching the movie, you could click on the light saber which brings you to its shopping cart! Isn't that cool? no, its uber cool!

Although it's not exactly whats happening right now but eventually the road is going that way. As what i have remembered it was just last month when i saw it at overlay.tv. Imagine the number of potential customers coming from the movie industry. This is a whole new market opened for us.

What is a Video Overlay? It is supposed to be placing a full screen video into a display or a window. When it came, most people added educational information via texts to the video that is currently being watched at the bottom portion on the display. I don't know who's the genius that came up with the idea of adding ads to the video. Whats even clever is that it allows us to click on the product itself inside the running video (of course the video pauses when you hover your mouse over). Video overlay is different from the ones we used to see at youtube, this time it allows us to click within the video itself.

Anyway its a new method of monetizing my blogs and an additional revenue, I'm currently studying on how can i implement it with my sites. Currently adsense is offering two ad formats namely the InVideo overlay and the Text Overlay. You might want to read google video advertising solutions first to know more on how you can implement it yourself. You can then apply for its beta release and start adding in into your sites.

Search Engine Stop Words

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:13:17 +0800

Search engines ignore these keywords because they are common in most articles, may also slow down the search process and they does not contribute to relevance. These stop words contains conjunctions, prepositions, and articles.

In contrary, when we are optimizing for a keyword that contains any of the stop words(e.g. IT, one, two etc), it would then become troublesome for the seo department. So, it is best to choose the right keywords to optimize for your website beforehand.

a
able
about
above
abroad
according
accordingly
across
actually
ad

Top Searched Keywords

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 16:17:26 +0800

Google lists their mosts searched keywords at the Zeitgeist website. You can also search for top keywords by country.

Yahoo also has its own version but it looks like a blog rather than a list, they call it Yahoo Buzz.

Lycos also has its own list here.

ZDNet has an interesting list of keywords here, so much for those top celebrities..

If you can afford WordTracker, its much better if we search from there. However, they also have a list of top searched keywords online.

We could also search for most searched keywords at Ask.com from here.

SEO Challenge

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 23:54:14 +0800

Here's a website with an seo challenge service. It lets you compare websites with something i do not know.? I tried www.google.com and www.yahoo.com and somehow i do not know why google lost over to yahoo not to mention the annoying captcha.

i am suspecting its the number of backlinks to the site, that what makes yahoo.com the winner. anyway, they should have described it at least...

Google hints

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:51:26 +0800

I thought it was just a hearsay until i saw it at the neopets website. Just keep on refreshing the page until the google ad displays. Take a look at the source code and you will see the google_hint option on google ad script. it looked something like this:

google_hints = "microsoft instant messenger pizza hut virgin mobile doughnut disney world fruit snacks";

Definitely its going to help you display targeted ads to your site specially if its not displaying any relevant ads. The only problem i could see here is that it might be abused just like what happened to the meta keywords which was called keyword stuffing. The main reason why the search engines are nowadays ignoring them. However, you will need to contact google before you can use the code. I dont really know the process and i haven't tested it yet. Total number of characters on google_hints should not exceed by 1024 characters.

Opt out from DMOZ description

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 17:46:43 +0800

Most description from SERPs generated from top search engines came from Open Directory Project (ODP) and not from the actual site description. Now, most of the site owners do not like this to happen since most of the descriptions there are outdated or maybe incorrect.

Google now supports META NOODP while MSN gives out their support for the opt out from DMOZ months ago. After adding this code your site header allow 1 day to 3 weeks to see results depending on how often is your site gets crawled.

Tell all robots not to use site description from DMOZ:

Also works for attribute combination:

We could specifically direct Googlebot not to use DMOZ descriptions by:

Or MSN by:

Note:
SERPs - Search Engine Result Page

Adsense Section Targeting

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:33:56 +0800

Right keywords on your site displays the right ads. With section targeting, you could redirect google bot to which portion of your site that has more relevant content, most probably a paragraph with your main keyword. This would greatly lessen the PSAs displayed on your site. Although google bot automatically targets your sites keyword, there are some poritions on your site you might want to put some weight on.

Here are some guidelines:

You can have more than one section in a page.

The section should have a significant amount of content.

Changes will be reflected in at least 1-2 weeks.

To emphasize a page section:



{text content here}

You can also mark contents to be of less significant by adding ignore



{ignored text here}

Notes:
PSAs - Public Service Ads