SEO News and SEO Tips from SEO Blog Expert

Suggestion 1: for WordPress Site

Google Rating Stars

Google Rating Stars are simply ratings on your website that are shown in search results. There are WordPress plugins that will make ratings widgets appear on your posts and pages and allow  users to rate or vote on your content.  This shows engagement on your site, and if you’re lucky, those ratings will get picked up by Google and other search engines.

Why should you care if stars show up in Google results?

Ratings that show up on Google will very likely increase your Click-Thru Rate (or CTR) within search results.  The stars that show up in the SERPs take up an extra line of space for your website and draw attention to the eye.  Which of the two results below are you more likely to click?

Even if you only have one rating, it still makes an impact.   And a higher CTR means more visitors to your website and is seen as a positive sign to the search engines to help raise your search engine rank.

What program can I use to show rating stars in Google?

To display stars like the ones at the bottom of this post, I use the GD Star Rating plugin. I personally have setup the plugin to only show star ratings and exclude thumbs and comment ratings.  After installing, if you want to see how your ratings should appear in search results try out Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

The cool thing about GD Stars is the results are often picked up by Google.  Unfortunately, it has entirely too many settings.  So if you want to setup stars like mine, here are the settings I use (below are the only screens where I have changed the defaults):

What if GD Stars does not work with W3 Cache?

I’ve installed GD Stars on two blogs and found it conflicts with W3 Cache (a caching plugin) on one blog even though the settings are identical.  On the blog where it doesn’t work, when a post loads, the GD Stars rating widget shows “loading…” indefinitely and never displays.  Note: if you are logged in to WordPress, the rating widget will appear fine to you but your visitors will see the error, so ask a friend to test for you.

I got around this by taking the following steps.  Please note that changing your caching settings incorrectly is an easy way to screw up your blog, so I must provide a disclaimer that I hold no responsibility should things go horribly wrong while you are tinkering with settings.

1. In W3 Cache, on the General Settings tab, Minify section, change Minify mode from Auto to Manual.
   
2. Then go to the Minify tab and the Advanced section.  Add /wp-content/plugins/gd-star-rating to Never minify the following pages.
   

Suggestion 1: for general Site

By now you are sure to have come across search results on Google which have a star rating review under the main link. This is an increasingly popular trick using rich snippets which people are using to draw extra attention to their listings.

Rich snippets are a system which allow the user to include extra information into their content which is readable by web bots, being one of the first steps being made towards creating a semantic web. Google have been accepting rich snippet information in three different formats; microdata, microformats and RDFa, however recently they have announced that they will be focusing on supporting the schema.org format, a standard set by Bing and Yahoo as well as Google, to avoid fragmentation of standards across different search engines.

Schema

Schema.org offers a library of syntax for you to add to your content, providing context for Google bots when indexing content. There is a wide range of syntax to choose from so you can be more specific about what topics your content is relevant to. It also absorbs the markups used in the old microdata, microformats and RDFa formats, so existing rich snippet data shouldn’t be affected at this point.

Product Reviews

The star system that you would have seen in the SERPs is typically down to Microdata being inserted into the content. Product rich snippets allow for a “review” tag to be used to generate the star rating. There are several pluggins for content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Joomla which make implementing rich snippet reviews far quicker and smoother, also allowing users to submit their own reviews. The number of reviews recorded will also be displayed, so similar search results which have similar or slightly lower star rating to other results and ratings around it are more likely to gain clicks due to the authority of having so many extra reviews, gaining the users trust more than the other results.

Snippet Spam

Google have recently updated their algorithm to penalise websites which have included their own fake rich snippet reviews. Through embedding rich snippets (usually using Microdata) into the website’s code it was easy to game the Google bots into thinking they were genuine reviews, however without a system that allows users to include their own ratings and reviews it is nothing more than spam, being treated as such with a long slide down the SERPs. You can now report pages you suspect are using fake reviews at Google’s own report spam in rich snippets page.

Check your Listings

To encourage people to start adding this extra data to their content Google have launched a rich snippet testing tool, so you can see exactly what is found by the Google bots and how it will be displayed in search listings.

So it looks like including rich snippets into your content would be a good move and adopting Schema early has the potential to pay dividends; just don’t try to game the system otherwise you may wind up paying the hefty Google penalty of search obscurity.

Below is Code:

<!--Rated Code Starts-->
<div typeof="v:Review-aggregate" xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#" style="display:none;">
    <b>
  <span property="v:itemreviewed" style="display:none;"></span>
 </b>
   <span rel="v:rating" style="display:none;">
    <span typeof="v:Rating" style="display:none;">
     <b>
      <span property="v:average" style="display:none;">10</span>
      <span property="v:best" style="display:none;">10</span>
     </b>
    </span>
   </span>
   <b>
    <span property="v:votes" style="display:none;">99</span>
   </b>.
    <!-- <div id="voteindspan2"><img src="/img/1x1.gif" id="voteind2" height="10" width="100"></div> -->
    <b><span property="v:count" style="display:none;">99</span></b>.
</div>
<!--Rated Code Ends-->

You may have been working on a website, or reading an article about web development, and heard about the .htaccess file, but wondered what it was, or what, if anything, you can do with it. This tutorial will tell you the basics about .htaccess, and show you a few ways you can use it on your website.

Before we go any farther, let’s explain what the .htaccess file is. htaccess is short for Hypertext Access, and is a configuration file used by Apache-based web servers that controls the directory that it “lives” in–as well as all the subdirectories underneath that directory.

Many times, if you have installed a Content Management System (CMS), such as Drupal, Joomla or WordPress, you likely encountered the .htaccess file. You may not have even had to edit it, but it was among the files that you uploaded to your web server. BTW, that’s its name, .htaccess–it begins with a period, and ends with “htaccess.” If you edit it, you need to make sure that it stays that way, and doesn’t end up with a .txt or .html extension.

Also note that some web hosts do not allow you to edit the .htaccess file–but even on most of those hosts, you can create your own .htaccess file and upload it to specific directories, and as discussed above, it will control those directories and subdirectories below it.

Some of the features of the .htaccess file include the ability to password protect folders, ban users or allow users using IP addresses, stop directory listings, redirect users to another page or directory automatically, create and use custom error pages, change the way files with certain extensions are utilized, or even use a different file as the index file by specifying the file extension or specific file.

Custom Error Pages for Better SEO

One use of the .htaccess file is to redirect users to a custom error page depending on the specific web server error they encounter. By using a custom error page, you can present them with a list of your site’s top articles, a sitemap with links to the various areas of your site, and it can include your site’s navigation system. It can also feature a FAQ, so folks who are looking for information on your site, but can’t find it, are able to narrow down the location of that information on your site without leaving, going back to the search engine, and more than likely not returning to your site.

It’s not difficult to use the .htaccess file to redirect users to a custom error page–but to do it you’ll need to know the proper error code. The most common ones you’ll use are:

• 400 – Bad request
• 401 – Authorization Required
• 403 – Forbidden
• 404 – File Not Found
• 500 – Internal Server Error

To use .htaccess with these codes, first you’ll need to open up your favorite text editor, create a new document, and in that document, specify the error message that you’ll be redirecting like this:

ErrorDocument 404 /filenotfound.html

If you wanted to redirect users for another error, such as 500, Internal Server Error, you would do it like this (and so on):

ErrorDocument 500 /servererror.html

Then you’d just save the .htaccess file (remembering to check that it is saved just like that, without some additional extension), and upload it to your web host’s root directory (or whatever directory you are wanting to use it in).

Using a Different File as the Index File

By adding another “command” to the .htaccess file, you can use a different file as the main index file that folks see when they come to your site. In other words, when folks visit www.yoursite.com, usually they are presented with www.yoursite.com/index.html or www.yoursite.com/index.php–but often you have created a special page that you want to use as your site’s main page–and it isn’t any of the traditional pages. Or you may want to take advantage of the latest version of PHP…there are many reasons for needing to use a different file as the index file. Here’s how you would do it, with each type of file being next in line, if the others are not in the directory.

DirectoryIndex index.php3 index.php pictures.pl index.html default.htm

For instance, if there was no file named index.php3 in your directory, then the server would look for a file called index.php. If that file wasn’t present, it would look for one called pictures.pl, and so on. In our next article, we’ll look at other types of redirection, password protection and we’ll show you how to allow or deny users with specific IP addresses from accessing your site.

By Scott Clark

Windows 7 fixed many of Vista’s ills, but it also introduced a few of its own.

There’s a lot to love about the Windows 7 operating system: it’s fast, it looks great, and it has some cool features–like Jump Lists for quickly opening recently used files, Homegroup for sharing files between computers, and Aero Snap to help you quickly organize your open desktop windows.

Windows 7 is addresses some of the problems that plagued its predecessor, Windows Vista, such as the Universal Access Control security system, the constant stream of notifications, and the lack of device drivers for printers and other peripherals.

Microsoft hasn’t solved all of those issues–in fact, getting Windows 7 drivers for some printers continues to be a struggle–but so far Windows 7 is a vast improvement over Vista, despite their underlying similarities.

That said, Windows 7 has downsides of its own. Some of the problems involve minor inefficiencies that grow annoying over time; others truly degrade the user experience through lack of functionality, poor organization, or an overabundance of choice. Here are the problem children of Windows 7–the faulty features I found in the Home Premium version of Microsoft’s latest OS.

When Clicking Isn’t Switching

If you’re looking for a good reason never to use Internet Explorer 8 in Windows 7, try this: Open multiple tabs in IE 8, and open a Microsoft Word document. Then click the IE icon in the taskbar, and…nothing happens. Instead of switching over to Internet Explorer as you’d expect it to, Windows 7 greets you with miniature pop-ups for every tab you’ve opened in IE and asks you to choose the one you’d like to go to.

Windows 7’s Aero Peek offers some helpful features, but also makes switching between programs with multiple windows harder to do quickly.This feature, called Aero Peek, is actually a nice idea, since you get to choose the tab you want to see. But we’ve been trained for years to expect to switch to a new program when we click on its icon in the taskbar, so why change the behavior now? In Windows 7, many Microsoft-made programs (including Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer 8, and Windows Live Messenger) use this feature. But since you can also activate Aero Peek by hovering over a taskbar icon instead of clicking it, a better solution for Windows 7 would be, hover to peek but click to switch.

The Automatic Switch

Thanks to another Aero Peek function, when you move your pointer over any of the small pop-ups, you suddenly find yourself in the new program–except that you aren’t really there. When you mouse over a pop-up, the corresponding application fills the screen, but when you move the pointer to go to the app the app disappears. The purpose of this feature is to enable you to quickly navigate to another program like IE, refer to something in the browser, and then jump back to where you were. But suppose that you’re in Microsoft Word and you jump over to IE 8 to check out a news item on CNN. As you read the article, you decide to click an accompanying video–but the moment you move your mouse, you’re back in Microsoft Word. That’s not helpful; it’s frustrating.

Windows 7 behaves similarly when you hover over ‘All programs’ in the Start Menu. Hover too long over ‘All programs’, and Windows 7 will switch to your full programs list instead of remaining in the primary Start Menu. Unfortunately, this little trick takes just under 2 seconds to pull off, which is too slow to be useful but just fast enough to be annoying.

Article Submission Sites

Mike Manos, an influential figure in data center design and construction, has resigned from wholesale data center provider Digital Realty Trust after less than a year at the company, Digital Realty said on Friday.

Digital Realty designs, builds and manages large data centers for third parties, including collocation providers and hosting companies. It is one of the biggest providers of such services worldwide.

The company hired Manos last April as senior vice president of technical services, where he oversaw design, construction and technical operations for Digital Realty’s data centers worldwide. Before that, he ran Microsoft’s Data Center Services division.

Manos said via e-mail that he planned to announce his next move on Sunday. “The next chapter of my career brings me back in closer alignment with what I did for Microsoft,” he wrote.

“I remain firm in my endorsement of Digital Realty Trust and hope that my involvement has helped to move the company forward,” he was quoted as saying in a statement from Digital Realty.

Digital Realty said, “We understand that this was a difficult, personal decision for him and we wish him the very best in his future endeavors.”

Manos has been a champion of containerized data centers like those being used on a large scale at Microsoft’s new data center in Chicago. Containerized data centers pack servers and other compute gear into shipping containers, and they can help companies boost energy efficiency or delay the need to construct new data centers.

Manos is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences on energy efficiency and other data center topics. He is also a proponent of building data centers in a more modular, standardized way, where mechanical and electrical components are designed and can then be reused in a “cookie-cutter” fashion.

Digital Realty said Dave Caron, senior vice president for portfolio management, will oversee technical operations, and Jim Smith, chief technology officer, will oversee design and construction on an interim basis, both effective Feb. 1.

If Amazon stakes its future on Kindle hardware instead of cross-platform e-book sales, it’s in for a world of hurt from Apple’s iPad.

Apple’s upcoming iPad includes the iBooks app, which combines e-book reader software with an iTunes-like service for selling books. I was somewhat surprised by iBooks. I had just assumed that Apple was going to let existing e-book distributors like Amazon.com and FictionWise install apps on the iPad and sell books that way. But I should not have been surprised. Why wouldn’t Apple want to have its own e-book store?

The iPad is likely to suck the oxygen from e-book hardware sales. Given a choice between an e-book reader and a device that does e-books and dozens of other things, consumers will likely choose the more useful device.

Novelist Charles Stross thinks the Kindle is in trouble.

“And this thing is going to slaughter the Kindle and most of the other ebook readers on the market, even without Apple coming up with a better business model for the publishers. With Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster and HarperCollins on board, they’ve just about aced the main US trade publishers — remains to be seen how smaller outfits plug into the platform, but at this point Amazon have a struggle on their hands. As iBook reads ePub format files it may be possible to add free content to it. Maybe.”

Whether this is a win or loss for Amazon depends on how Amazon plays it from here out. The Amazon Kindle software already runs on the iPhone, and it will therefore run on the iPad. With the introduction of the iPad, the market for e-books is going to explode.

If Amazon stakes its future on the Kindle hardware, it’s in for a world of hurt. But if it builds a business on cross-platform e-book sales, then Amazon will prosper.

Not everyone agrees that the iPad will be fatal to the Kindle. Brad Stone of the New York Times argues that the iPad is not a Kindle-killer:

“The Kindle is for book lovers, and the iPad is not.

“Sure, the Kindle’s potential market may have shrunk today, since the two-books-a-year folks will now opt for the more versatile iPad.

“But the Kindle (and other devices with E Ink screens) will continue to be the best device for lovers of long-form reading, period. (And they do love it; check the Kindle forums for the passion of Kindle owners.) The iPad’s backlit screen, higher price and more limited battery all make it a poorer choice for curling up with a novel.

“Also, there’s the distraction factor. When you read a book, you just don’t want to have e-mail, Twitter and the ESPN Web site beckoning from the browser. The absence of those services on the Kindle — sure, it’s also a flaw — actually make it better for focused leisure reading.”

I’m a book-lover, and I disagree with Stone. I don’t think there are enough people who agree with him to sustain e-book reader sales.

And there’s one way the iPad is great for writers, readers and publishers: The iBooks store will provide an e-book alternative to Amazon’s growing monopoly.

As an added bonus feature, iBooks supports the ePub standard for e-books. Macworld’s Dan Frakes explains the significance of ePub support:

“Adopted by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) as an open-standards-based format for digital books, ePub allows publishers to create books in a single format for distribution to various e-book resellers and for use on any device that supports ePub. With more and more publishers and hardware vendors adopting the ePub standard, this news means it will be easier for publishers—big and small—to make their e-books available for the iPad and other e-readers.

“(Questions still remain, however: Will Apple apply FairPlay copy protection to books you purchase through the iBookstore? Will you be able to import unprotected ePub documents into the iBooks app? We’ll be working on the answers to these questions going forward.)”

Google will phase out support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 Web browser starting in March, the company said Friday.

“Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites,” Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, wrote in a blog post Friday.

The announcement comes more than two weeks after Google reported that its servers had been the target of attacks originating in China. Those attacks targeted a vulnerability in IE 6, for which Microsoft has since issued a fix.

Support for IE6 in Google Docs and Google Sites will end March 1, Sheth said in the post. At that point, IE6 users who try to access Docs or Sites may find that “key functionality” won’t work properly, he said.

Sheth suggested that customers upgrade to Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome 4.0 or Safari 3.0, or more recent versions of those browsers.

According to StatCounter, IE6 has 18 percent market share among browsers.

Google has apologized to a Chinese authors’ group over its scanning of books by local writers into an online search system, moving to defuse copyright concerns around the project in China.

The Chinese Writers Association posted a copy of the Google statement on its Web site on Sunday. On the same day Erik Hartmann, an Asia-Pacific representative of Google Books, delivered the apology in a news program aired by China’s state broadcaster.

China is one of several countries, including the U.S. and France, where Google’s digital library program has faced legal challenges. The apology comes after the Chinese group demanded that Google compensate local authors whose works the U.S. search giant scanned without their approval.

Google is scanning hundreds of thousands of books, often without prior permission from their rights holders, so they can be searched and previewed on the Google Books service.

Google acknowledged in the statement that it had scanned books by Chinese writers and said the company would no longer do so without local authors’ permission. It also said it hopes to reach a general agreement over resolving the tensions by March and to sign a final agreement in the second quarter.

“Due to different starting notions and different understandings of the copyright law systems in China and the U.S., our behavior has caused discontent among Chinese writers,” the statement said. “Our communication with Chinese authors has not been good enough. Google is willing to apologize to Chinese authors for this behavior.”

Google has held talks with a local copyright protection group over the book service. One Chinese author, Shanghai-based Mian Mian, has brought a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google for scanning her novel Acid Lover and showing portions of it online.

A Google spokeswoman said Google Books complies with U.S. and Chinese law and that the company only shows snippets of copyright books for which it does not have permission from rights holders. Authors and publishers can choose to exclude their works from the service, she said.

Gmail was out this morning…again. The outage affected only a small percentage of Gmail users, but in the wake of Tuesday’s Google News outage the lack of reliability from Google isn’t helping justify the business case for embracing the cloud.

The cloud is all the rage. Vendors of all shapes and sizes are in a race to move as many products and services as possible to the cloud – providing managed services and software-as-a-service rather than traditional, locally-installed, software applications.

There are many major players investing in moving customers to the cloud. Amazon has a cloud computing offering and recently bolstered it with a more secure, segregated private cloud service. Microsoft provides hosted online productivity services and recently rolled out the technical preview of Office Web Apps, delivering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote from the cloud.

Google is arguably the primary champion of cloud computing. The Web is what Google does. Google has a virtually endless list of products and services that are all delivered via the Web from the cloud.

Google is not content with dominating Web search or search engine advertising. It has an ongoing crusade to deliver business productivity from the Web. Google is taking on Microsoft head-to-head across a range of markets in an effort to wrest control from the desktop and move the computing experience to the Web.

That crusade has had relative success. Many users and businesses have found that Google Docs can fill their office productivity needs. Gmail can fulfill their e-mail needs. Google Calendar provides scheduling. Google Talk delivers instant messaging. Basically, Google has enough tools and services to fulfill virtually all of the productivity and communications needs for an organization…from the Web.

The problem is that Google has experienced repeated issues with service outages. Here are just a few of the headline-making outages:

· September 24, 2009: Gmail outage

· September 22, 2009: Google News outage

· September 1, 2009: Gmail outage

· May 14, 2009: Google network outage

· May 18, 2009: Google News outage

· March 9, 2009: Gmail outage

· August 7, 2008: Gmail and Google Apps outage

These repeated outages damage the credibility of the cloud. Enterprises that are considering the pros and cons of moving office productivity or communications to the cloud have reason to be concerned when the poster child of cloud computing can’t provide reliable availability.

The cloud offers many potential advantages for customers, but one of the biggest factors driving apprehension and impeding adoption is availability. Customers are reluctant to offload productivity and communication to the cloud if the possibility exists for the cloud to disappear. Productivity and communication are mission-critical aspects for businesses and reliable availability is not negotiable.

David Coursey summed it up nicely, stating “Rather than adding features that add only questionable value to our lives, such as Sidewiki and Fast Flip news, maybe Google needs to stop, take a deep breath, and focus on quality and reliability for products many of us use every day? ”

Google can help improve the reputation of the cloud and further its own agenda to make desktop applications obsolete and move everything to the Web by ensuring that the products and services it provides are as reliable as they are functional.