Posted on May 09, 2009 by Atif
Filed Under Webmasters
Social media traffic is a boom in today’s internet. Most of the bloggers rely on social media traffic since it is the best source to get a couple of hundreds to thousands of visitors on your blog within a day. Well despite the potential to get a quick hits to your blog in the quickest time, relying completely on social media traffic is a big FAIL in terms of achieving any long term traffic goals or internet marketing. Why ?? The reasons are but not limited to..
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Unreliable Traffic
There is a good amount of traffic that may be lead to your blog through social media webistes liek Digg and StumbleUpon. But is it reliable? Till when will you be getting the same amount of traffic? Next Week? Next Month? is it possible that every post you write reach the front page of Digg or StumbleUpon
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Short Term Traffic
Social media traffic is against the clock. It exists for a very short period. One might see thousands of visitors at one instant of time and then there would be no traffic at all.
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Lots of Efforts
Well you need to do a lot of hard work to get traffic from social media websites. Creating a network of friends with same interests out of a pool of users is a big task. You need to be active on all the social networks. When people (mostly friends) gives you a hit on a social media website means that they are looking for the same from you. You always need to write new and fresh content that can be submitted
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High Bounce Rate
Visitors from social media websites have a relatively high bounce rate. Almost 75% of the visitors just bounce back from your website within 3 seconds. its worth not having those visitors so that you can save your server’s resources and bandwidth.
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Unresponsive Visitors
Even if the visitor stays back to your blog and reads your article. The next thing they do is don’t look for further articles on your blog. The can simply click the “Stumble” button and move next. This means that they have no interest in your other posts and you may get no clicks on your ads as well. A real time example is that my CTR of visitors from search engines is around 1~4% where as the CTR from social media traffic is approximate 0.08%
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Server Unreliability
This would be a great issue if you are running your blog on a shared hosting. Which most of us do. Social media traffic comes in clumps. Coming onto a front page of Digg also called as “Digg Effect” means you can expect atleast 20,000 visitors in a couple of hours. Since the resources alloted to each website on a shared host is very limited (usually 200Mhz CPU and 32MB RAM), most shared hosts will shut down you blog for a while if you receive such a kind of traffic. If you are looking for a reliable webhost for your blog then check out WPWebHost
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Marketing on Social Media is a Big NO NO
In terms of ROI advertising on social media is a BIG FAIL. Advertising on social media traffic is usually on a pay per impression basis, even if its on a pay per click basis, at a 75% bounce rate it is a bad idea to advertise on a social media website.
Posted on May 09, 2009 by Atif
Filed Under Webmasters
If your traffic is mainly a social media traffic then you must probably take care of the loading time of your blog. This is particularly because the visitors from social media websites doesn’t land to your websites seeking for some content unlike the visitors from classic Search Engines.
Hence the only ways of impressing them to stay back on your website are a faster website, appealing designs and impressive content or articles. I have listed out 8 important ways how I made my blog load faster. If you know any more, please feel free to comment at the end.
Optimize Images – This is the most crucial thing that sucks bandwidth. Before uploading and embedding a image, make sure you optimize it for the web so that it takes less bandwidth.- DO NOT Scale Images – I have seen a lot of blogs where bloggers upload large images and simple scale them to small sizes. This won’t affect the image loading time. Because the browser will have to download a big image and scale it. Rather than that, you should take care to resize the image and upload it.
- CSS Sprites – CSS Sprites are a great way of improving the loading speed of your pages. One of the problem you may face is how to use them, If you are great in CSS then you don’t need to worry.
- Less Ads and 3rd Party Widgets – pages cluttered with ads will naturally load slow due to several connections to be made to other 3rd party websites for loading ads.
- Ads from different Networks – if you are looking to run ads from different simultaneously then this is really a bad idea. The consequence is similar to the one above. Running multiple networks means connecting to multiple domains, which means multiple DNS queries have to be made. This can drastically increase the loading time.
- Javascript at the END – always put the Javascript codes just before closing the </body> tag. This will load the page before loading javascript hence the user will be able to see atleast some content before laoding the page completely.
- Use Less FLASH – I advocate you to use no flasha t all unless it is necessary. including flash components can forcefully suffer your blog’s load time.
- GZIP Componenets – This is a technique use by Apache. Whenever a page is about to be loaded, the server check if browser is able to accept content in GZIp mode i.e. archived mode. Archiving html can reduce the amount of data to be transferred by zipping it however this may put up some load on your server’s CPU. So use this carefully.
- Use a CDN – Well if you can spare 2-5$ each month then you should probably be using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). here is the wikipedia’s definition of a CDN. Using a CDn ca cost you much less when comp-ared to using a Dedicated Hosting Server.
CDN is a system of computers networked together across the Internet that cooperate transparently to deliver content to end users, most often for the purpose of improving performance, scalability, and cost efficiency
If all above doesn't work then use a faster host. I recommend WPWebHost for hosting your blogs.
Posted on April 13, 2009 by Atif
Filed Under Webmasters
For newbies out there 404 Error Page is the page that is returned when no page at a specific URL does not exists. Hence customizing the 404 Error Page can put a great effect in convincing visitors to stay on your website.
So lets start how to deal with the 404 Errors and creating custom 404 page for your website
Setting Up a 404 Page
To set up a 404 page, only 2 things need to be done
- Modifying the .htaccess file
Elaborating on this step all you need to do is create a file (incase you dont have it already in you root directory) and name it as “.htaccess” meaning that there is no filename and the extension is htaccess. Now write this in the file and upload it in your root directory
ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html
- Creating an html Error Page
Coming to the html part now create a html document, its not limited to html document you can create a php document too ad make sure it resides in your root directory with the name as given in the .htaccess document. For instance we took the name notfound.html so you need to make sure a file named notfound.html exists in your root directory.
Thats all… now you have set up now have a try and you should see that you are being redirected to the error page on 404 error.
Well I’m feeling quite sleepy today will write out more about this topic tomorrow. Sure to come… Some Cool 404 Pages, Custom 404 Pages for Wordpress Powered Blogs ad the most prominent of all Monetizing 404 Pages
Keep viewing…
Posted on April 08, 2009 by Atif
Filed Under Webmasters
Got a great website or blog that you want to launch? Or is it already launched? The site looks and feels good but have you cross checked these essential points ?
- Titles and Meta
The first and the foremost, the TITLE and the META DATA is the most important element for SEO. Keep the titles and description on each page unique. This is what Google Indexes from your website.
- Sitemap
A sitemap is a great thing to have both in the aspect of SEO and better User Interactivity. Adding sitemap.xml to your root directory helps search engines locate and index each page from your website that is not already linked.
- Proper Functionality
Does each of your pages work properly. The contact us page, the archives, the search functions and shopping baskets?
- Cross Browser Rendering
The most important part for the designer, does you website looks the same in all the major browsers? I try to optimize my website for Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9, Safari and Google Chrome.
- Unbroken Links
Trust me at times they dont work. I sometimes forget to add the http:// and sometimes forget to update the links. Another good practise is to use “title” attribute.
- Proper navigation
Are all of your website’s pages linked to each other internally ? Does the user finds it easier to get to any page of your website he wants ? Things like search box and breadcrumbs properly placed can help us a lot
- RSS
The old days of bookmarking are gone. Users now stay updated with RSS Feeds. You can use PHP Scripts or third party apps to create RSS Feeds of your content on the fly.
- Analytics
Analytics is important tool for analyzing your traffic, where do they come from, what page do they see, where do they go, what browser do they use are some simple questions that can easily be answered using analytics. I recommend Google Analytics
- Optimization
Last but not the least, website optimization is the most important factor to make users stay on your website. People dont like slow websites. So I say use less graphics and better stratagies like css sprites etc. I urge you to have a look at Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site
Please note that this tutorial required GD Library to be intalled on your web server. Please consult your web host.
I am writing this tutorial just for fun though I dont appreciate these kinds of things. But for those who have relatively low number of subscribers (like I have right now on this , only 4 subscribers) this is a good technique to help you get some subscribers.
Create a new file with any name, In this tutorial I have used feedcounter.php then add the following code to the file and save it.
<?php
//Send a generated image to the browser
create_image();
exit();
function create_image(){
//Create the image resource
$image = imagecreatefromgif('feedcount-static.gif');
//We are making brown color
$brown = ImageColorAllocate($image, 68, 68, 68);
//Check for the get parameters
if (isset($_GET['count']) && is_numeric($_GET['count']))
$feedcount = $_GET['count'];
else
$feedcount = 21;
// Some Alignment Calculations
$bbox = imagettfbbox(7.5, 0,'verdana.ttf', $feedcount);
$xcorr = 0 + $bbox[2]; $xcorr = 36 - $xcorr;
//Add the number in brown color to the image
imagettftext($image,7.5,0,$xcorr,13,$brown,'verdana.ttf',$feedcount);
//Tell the browser what kind of file is come in
header("Content-Type: image/gif");
imagegif($image);
//Free up resources
ImageDestroy($image);}?>
Upload the verdana.ttf font file in the same directory where our php file is. Then open the URL of the php file. use ?count=[number] parameter to put any number of reader. Save the image and use it for your blog.
Incase you dont have GD Library installed on your web server you can use the one I have created. Just change the number and get the image that you want here
FakeBurner – Fake your feedburner counter
Whether you design an interface for your desktop application or you create a website layout, icons play one of the the most essential part of design. So I sat down the past hour to collect some resources for free icons. If I had sat down collected for one more hour I would have doubled this list, but I think its enough for today to bring you 75+ websites that includes galleries, icon packs and other collections of icons. I mean FREE ICONS !!Icon Archive
Iconpot
Deviant Art
http://www.iconfinder.net/
FamFamfam
Axialis
IconDrawer