Wasimasif's Blog » SEO

Generating Google sitemap for site

wasimasif — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:33:26 +0000

Create a Google site map for a large or medium site can require a lot of efforts. I had same problem to create a site map having more than 1000 index able pages of different types. Luckly I found a nice tool which can crawl site and generate site map automatically. The software can generate site map in Google and Yahoo! format.

There are some online site map generators but I did not find as good as this one. Few features that I found very valuable are, one ability to exclude pages by extension and second it can exclude URLs based on robots.txt. Third is it can show duplicate content and remove these pages from site map.

The software is called GSiteCrawler and can be found at gsitecrawler.com.

Importance of page load time for SEO

wasimasif — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:23:17 +0000

SEO experts are expecting Google to give more importance to page load times in search ranking. This simply means faster site will have more weight in search results. Google is already measuring average page load time, through its toolbar. Google started measuring page load time in early August 09 (at least for sites I monitor).

Before this webmasters and owners just had to worry about crawler speed now they have an other area to cover. Managing good crawler speed is relatively easy to gain, as it only includes delivery of html. On other hand page load includes delivery of html, images, css, js etc and order in which these are provided.

There is a lot of stuff available to improve site performance on server and on client browser in Web Performance Optimization.

Google Caffeine is coming

wasimasif — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:07:37 +0000

Google’s search based on new technology will be rolled out in early 2010. Google caffeine will be first rolled out on one data center. Developer preview of caffeine is now removed so you can’t perform any testing on it anymore. According to google caffeine is technology to improve indexing infrastructure and performance.

what Google search parameters do?

wasimasif — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 07:44:27 +0000

Some one forwarded an worth sharing post, explaining different parameters used in google search. Here what parameters are being used in Google search and what they do.

Parameter	Description (Value)
Search modifiers
q / as_q	the search query
as_epq	matches exact phrase, same as searchphrase surrounded by quotes in searchbox
as_oq	with at least one of the search terms, same as searchterms combined with OR in searchbox
as_eq	without these searchterms, same as searchterm prefixed with – in the searchbox
qdr / as_qdr	Date restriction, show results up to either 3 months old, 6 months old, or 1 year old
as_occt	(3m \| 6m \| y)
as_filetype	query term occurs in (any \| title \| body \| url \| links)
as_ft	specify filetype (pdf \| ps \| dwf \| kml \| kmz \| xls \| ppt \| doc \| rtf \| swf)
sitesearch	exclude or include solely files with filetype given in as_filetype (e \| i)
as_sitesearch	the same as site: (URL with or without http://)
as_dt	same as sitesearch, but shows site:URL in the search box, can be used together with as_dt
as_rq	(URL with or without http://)
as_lq	together with as_sitesearch shows you results from URL, or from all except that URL (i (only
hl	this URL)\| e (except this URL))
lr	find sites related to URL, same as related: in the search box (URL)
ie	find sites linking to URL, same as link: in the search box (URL)
oe	specifies the interface language
safe	language restrict ()
filter	input encoding
Result modifiers	output encoding ()
num	safe search filtering (active (default)\| off)
newwindow	0
pws	number of results (<0..100>)
adtest	open results in new window (1)
Buttons	disable personalized web search (0)
btnG	allows testing of ads without registering an impression, url’s are not clickable (on)
btnI	normal search from webinterface
Localization (taken from: bluetent.typepad.com)	I’m feeling lucky search (I%27m+Feeling+Lucky)
gl	country, for instance “US” ()
gll	latitude&longitude, (,)
gr	region, for instance GB-ENG ()
gcs	city, to use this gr must be set to the same value ()
gpc	postal code, only works if gl is set to “US” ()
gm	US designated metropolitan areas ()

SEO URLs addon for CRE Loaded

wasimasif — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 07:25:55 +0000

SEO url is a commercial addon for converting links to SEO Friendly format. Almost every cre loaded site requests to have seo friendly urls. In CRE loaded 6.4 pro the addon has become built in feature.

Over the time using this addons I realized a major issue regarding SEO. As you may know issue of duplicate content is major concern for every seo expert. The seo urls addon helps generating duplicate content , yes its true.

Consider a product posted in two or more categories, there will two different SEO friendly URLs which will be pointing to same content. For example

http://**/Main-cat-one-subcat-one/c1_21/p1/my-product/product_info.html http://**/Other-main-cat-other-sub-cat/c2_30/p1/my-product/product_info.html

the two above urls point to same product same content. These links are generated from listing pages.

Even if there are no product listed in multiple categories still different pages like “specials” page can generate duplicate link for same product.

Due to this addon more urls are generated from “Buy Now” links which are like http://**/Main-cat-one-subcat-one/c1_21/p1/my-product/index.html?action=buy_now. These duplicate links are just killing for seo as search engine consider them separate links and expect different content.

How to fix: These issues and some more are fixable and have been fixed for many sites. If you like to get them fixed for your site then contact or post a commit.

Excluding traffic stats from specific countries in Google Analytics

wasimasif — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:33:20 +0000

Google Analytics (GA) provides comprehensive web traffic stats and being used by a huge number of websites. For many small and medium size sites traffic other then specific countries is not very useful. For example while calculating conversion ratio you may not want to include traffic from all parts of the world if you are only targeting one or few countries. It is a tough ask to manually exclude non targeted traffic stats from such reports.

Google Analytics provide option to exclude traffic stats based on the region or country of visitor. In this post I will show how to exclude traffic stats using this feature.

To start login to your GA account and click “Edit” link on profile in which you want to exclude traffic stats. You will see a section “Filters Applied to Profile” on next page. This will show any existing filter you already have setup on website profile. Click on “+ Add Filter” link to add exclude filter for countries. On this screen choose “Custom filter” in filter type field,the screen should look like image below.

Here you can provide name of the filter as you like, i have used “Exclude Countries” for this example filter. Now you all have to do is to put country names you want to exclude separated with | sign, and enclose it with ( ) in Filter Pattern field. For example if you want to exclude traffic stats from China, Australia and India the filter pattern will be (China|Australia|India) . And that’s all, now save this filter by clicking “Save Changes” button. The screen should look similar to screen below. If you only want to exclude specific county then the pattern will be simply the name of the country.

Note: This will only exclude stats from all GA reports, it will not block any visitors to visit your website.