ifwebstudio blog

After more than three and a half years of no new projects, finally next site in my planned DB series – WallpapersDB – Desktop Wallpapers is ready to meet the world. As its name may suggest, this one is meant to help you in your efforts to beautify your computer screens.

Like with my previous avatars site(actually like with all sites I built in last years), this one is built around PHP/MySQL technology. I used my new favourite two column CSS layout with 310 pixels wide right column which can hold medium rectangle ad and plenty of info. For thumbnail generation and other image manipulation I used powerful Imagemagick. I find it easier to use and results are very good. All image manipulations are cached on server to speed up whole process.

Like with all sites these days; you can register, comment, upload, share and do all kind of neat stuff new web offers. You can browse wallpapers by category or native resolution. Thumbnails are big and when you choose wallpaper, script will generate image optimized for your screen size.

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I spent last few weeks working on my latest project – Avatars Database or shorter AvatarsDB. As you probably guessed correctly, purpose of this site is distribute highest quality avatars optimized for use as forum signatures, in instant messengers (as buddy icons) and even on web sites.

When I started with development, my main goal was to create a web site with very simple design and fast executing scripts. Of course, I decided to have PHP and MySQL at backend since these technologies have proven to be fastest and easiest to maintain (at least in my experience). I created a custom CMS for this project with very simple, but powerful, admin interface which allows me to create and edit new categories, edit category descriptions (images without text is not very good SEO) and batch upload new content.

Since this project uses single PHP page to generate all content pages, it would be very difficult for me to rank in search engines (yea, imagine thousands of crappy pages that look like index.php?id=234&cat_id=33). To solve this issue, I decided to use Apache mod_rewrite module to rewrite all URL which now look like this http://www.avatarsdb.com/art/hr-giger/ (very neat, don’t you think?). No need to mention that every page has it’s own title, heading text, description text and keywords.

In the next few days, I’m planning to add several more features like internal counter, which will count number of visits to each particular avatar (this data will be used to generate most popular avatars list), editor picks, and color picker which will allow my visitors to test how their selected image looks against different backgrounds. I’m open for suggestions, so if you have some time, I would like to hear your opinion.

Site is hosted on Dreamhost shared hosting. They offer incredible 1000 GB of bandwidth use per month, which allows me to expand my business and offer a few services to my visitors like remotely hosted avatars.

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The oldest and the most popular online translation tool “Babel Fish” is now active on Yahoo! (http://babelfish.yahoo.com/). It allows you to translate across 38 different language pairs such as English -> Chinese, Korean->English, English -> Russian and much more. Main difference between Yahoo! and AltaVista version of this tool is two additional languages (Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese) and integration with other Yahoo! services (Search and Toolbar). Make sure you give it a try.

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I spent last five years researching how to improve my site’s search engine positions without interfering with experience of my visitors. Perhaps I haven’t figured out what should I do, but now I definitely know what techniques to avoid

The first and most important thing to keep in mind when you start thinking about ways to optimize your pages is that you’re building pages for your visitors, not search engines. Techniques described bellow will interfere with your users experience and (in most cases) will result in disappearance of you sites from SERP’s.

Bad navigation

Your website must have clean and simple navigation. This way you ensure that Googlebot is able to crawl your entire site. Navigation links should be located near the top of the pages since this makes it easy for your visitors and Googlebot to navigate through your site. Best bet for navigation is use of text links, as this increases word count and keyword density, as well as giving description of destination page to Googlebot. Googlebot is also able to follow image links and from recently Flash navigation links. If you use image links make sure you add some description in ALT attribute of image tag to describe your link.

Keyword stuffing in image ALT text

Some webmaster and optimizers still believe that inserting dozens of keywords or keyphrases in image ALT text will improve their search engine rankings. Well, this is wrong since search engines are able to detect this technique and they now almost completely ignore ALT text.

This is definitely one of the ugliest SEO techniques. You may ask, “Why is this so bad when only search engines are able to see this text?”. Just imagine how people with disabilities feel when their screen readers stumble reading dozens or even hundreds of keywords describing your image. In addition, your site will look very ugly in text-only browser like Lynx.

On the other hand, few very well chosen words to describe your images will improve your user’s experience and may even slightly improve your search engine rankings.

JavaScript links

Googlebot is not able (currently) to follow JavaScript links. People often use these type of links for fancy navigation. If you use them just make sure you have alternative navigation using HTML links.

Hidden text

Googlebot and other robots learned to recognize this method several years ago. So if you don’t want to be identified as spammer and banned from SERP’s, don’t use this method. Like with keyword stuffing in image ALT tags, this technique will create nightmare for users with disabilities who use screen readers.

Hidden links

Number of incoming links to certain page has direct effect to Google PageRank (PR). However, if those are hidden that may produce similar results as with hidden text.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a search engine optimization method where you serve highly optimized page version to robots and a regular page to your visitors. Official Google policy is that cloaked pages are not allowed in their index. However, there are many websites that use cloaking with great success. So if you like to risk getting banned from SERP’s you may use this method, just make sure you do it properly.

Guest book spamming and FFA pages

Adding your link to hundreds of guest books will not help you with your PR, since it appears that Google is able to detect them and ignores outgoing links completely. This way you’ll save yourself many hours of useless work. When PR was initially introduced, many SEO companies were offering to “submit your site to zillion FFA pages for free” and hopefully increase your PR. I don’t remember that this used to work at time and it certainly doesn’t work now. If you find any of these, avoid them.

Sessions

Google is not able to accept session cookies and will try avoiding URL based sessions. Also, you should use fewer parameters in you dynamic URLs and avoid use “id” parameter as Googlebot may think that is session ID.

General rule for all serch engines

When you’re planning to use some technique and you believe that it looks spammy, then it probably is spammy

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