Microsoft has made its VS Code development tool available in the browser, reducing the need to install the app.
VS Code is a popular programming IDE for Windows, macOS and Linux. The environment supports several different languages out of the box, and has the ability to support even more via extensions.
Although a lightweight version, VS Code for the Web is still a powerful environment that can be useful when a developer needs to work on a project without their usual setup. The web-based version is also an excellent option for developers who want to work on their iPad, which is not supported with the native version.
With the availability of vscode.dev, we begin to finally realize our original vision of building a development tool that can run fully serverless in the browser.
While many webmasters focus on acquiring more external links, it’s easy to forget that internal link building is still a great way to boost the rankings of other pages within your website. Internal links can be an untapped goldmine and the best part is you have complete control over their implementation.
So you have a website, and you’re getting traffic – but the sales aren’t rolling in. Or maybe they are, but they’re not setting the world on fire.
All too often websites are built with little or no consideration given to their usability. And this is often the critical difference between good and great websites.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term:
“Usability is the extent to which a website can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use. In other words, good usability implies that users can easily use a website and by doing so, reach their goals quickly and without getting lost or confused.”
For an existing website, the first steps to improving usability are of course assessing the current levels of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of users.
To help you with this process, here are essential website usability tools to start the process.
Clicktale allows you to visualize your visitors activity and get an overview of complete browsing sessions. It also watches behaviour analytics, which include click heatmaps, mouse move heat maps, and web analytics. These can help improve usability and conversion rates.
CrazyEgg enhances your sites usability by keeping a track of pages i.e. it can watch over your website and have an overview of heat maps to track the clicks. It can also track the advanced activities such as top fifteen referrals, browser and search terms.
Feng GUI simulates human vision during the first 5 seconds of exposure to visuals, and creates heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at. Feng-GUI Dashboard offers designers and advertisers, a pre-testing service that measures the performance of your design, before it airs, by analyzing levels of attention, brand effectiveness and placement, as well as breaking down the flow of attention.
Fivesecondtest helps you fine tune your landing pages and calls to action by analyzing the most prominent elements of your design. By finding out what a person recalls about your design in just 5 seconds you can ensure that your message is being communicated as effectively as possible.
Google Website Optimizer allows you to set up different versions of your web content and then it random displays the versions to different visitors. This form of multivariate testing help you establish which versions are most user friendly and lead to higher conversions.
Loop 11 is a solution for consultants, designers and web managers to get the metrics and optimize a website’s potential. It has an easy process to create a professional usability test, accumulate responses and source them via a social media and finally analyze the data through the usability metrics.
Usabilla integrates usability tests in your daily work-flow and helps you continuously improve your web site’s user-experience and conversions with high quality design feedback.
User Testing is a way of getting data on your visitors’ browsing patterns — data that isn’t biased or subjective; data which shows the real activity from people using your website.
UserTesting provides on demand user testing. Post your website usability test requirements on their website and get direct feedback from real users via participant videos of activities completed. With a large database of users, you can target exactly who completes your tests.
Of course there’s plenty of other tools out there which can help you improve your website’s usability. The key is to get started with the process. Whether you invest in one of the tools above or just start looking at some of the basics through Google analytics – once you’ve started testing, you can start improving.
This tutorial will show you anything and everything about the Adobe Photoshop Pen Tool. It is a complete guide to the tool.
The Pen Tool can be a hard and frustrating thing to learn. In this tutorial I will teach you about the pen tool and how to use it. Hopefully once you are done you will be able to use the Pen Tool.
Having been in the web development life cycle for many years, I have learned the reality of trying to stick to HTML/XHTML best coding practices, which include being as much W3C compliant as possible, but in the real world, not all web browsers are created equal, that we can only wish!
It is still most beneficial as a programmer to follow a standard flow of key decision choices, that is to keep future modifications and improvements easier and leads to quicker maintenance of your current website’s needs. It can also be easier for people new to your project or site to get acquainted with how its setup in both the front-end and back-end aspects of it.
While being able to have a nice shiny W3C compliant badge, may be cool, it surely does not mean that your site is going to just simply look the exact same in the currently most used web browsers by your visitors, let alone any really older or non-common web browsers.
In fact, having such a badge, and forgetting to check the compliance results from W3C’s online tools, may lead to a negative effect, where the visitor clicks on it, and because you didn’t confirm every page is complaint, one single html, xhtml or css level error will display a nasty non-compliance screen.
That is something you want to avoid, as it makes your site seem as if it was poorly put together, which is most likely not the case at all. As you can see above, even big name sites, do not follow compliance, and may even have hundreds of erroneous reports from online compliance validation tools, while their website looks and functions without any issue.
The best recommendations I have for people is to keep your code as clean and human readable as possible, along with attempting to follow standards as much as you can, and if you need to utilize some non standard, or non compliance code, its fine, go ahead.
Truly, as long as your website fully functions properly for your audiences needs, you are actually ahead of the curve. A lot of sites still to this day have things that do not work in Firefox or Chrome, and only work properly in Internet Explorer, sometimes even specific older version of it.
Another thing to consider is switching your document type, as typically I utilize XHTML with Transitional, meaning some “older” style HTML is allowed, such a table-specific items, this may allow what you were trying to accomplish and might put you that much closer to compliance validation.
Also keep in mind to always cross browser test not just in each web browser, but also in many different (most commonly used/recent) versions, and on different computers, as things like font sizes and generic style sheet rules may surprise you on a certain combination of browser, version and operating system.
Bonus Tip: Different sites will attract different user types, meaning even further potential browser support that you must maintain, you should utilize tools like Google Analytic’s to identify which browsers your visitors are using.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply. Thanks!
301 redirects are essential when you’re redesigning your website and don’t want to lose the search engine traffic that you currently enjoy.
The unfortunate thing about a 301 redirect is that it sounds so extremely geeky and off-putting to the average business owner that they’re scared away. That’s too bad, because it is a critical tool in search engine optimization. So, to that end, I’m going to attempt explain the benefits of 301s in the least geeky way possible.
Search Engines and Trust
There are a lot of variables in why one site ranks higher than another site at Google and other search engines. One is how long the site (and a given page) has been in existence, and another is how many incoming links a page has. All things being equal (which they never are), older pages rank higher than newer pages and pages with more inbound links rank higher than ones with fewer inbound links.
Breaking that Trust
Often, when rebuilding a site, you end up changing the URLs–or addresses–of your web pages. Maybe it’s because you’re reorganizing your site, or maybe it’s because you’re redeveloping your site on a content management system like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla. In either case, the new URLs don’t have the trust that the old URLs do, even if a lot of the content is the same.
It’s like moving to a new town. You may have been the greatest manager/plumber/accountant in your old town, but that doesn’t mean anything in the new town. You haven’t changed; you still have an excellent bedside manner or mad sales skills, but you’re starting from scratch in this new town.
When you take your established content, uproot it and replant it somewhere else on your site, you are resetting the clock on when that content was created and breaking all of the inbound links that pointed to it.
Reestablishing that Trust
There are many ways to tell the search engines that you’ve moved your content, but the most search engine friendly way is the 301 redirect. By setting up 301 redirects for your content, you show search engines where your content has moved from, and your inbound links will now direct to your new pages.
How you setup your 301s may depend on the type of host you have. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s time to talk to your web developer and get them involved.
If you want your web developer to create redirects for you, I recommend writing up a guide for him or her to show where the old pages should be redirected. Here’s a guide for you to use, where the first item is the old page and the second item is where you want the traffic to flow:
301 redirects are also great when you are changing from one domain to another (never a great idea, but sometimes a necessary evil.) Even with a 301 redirect, you should expect a dip during a major overhaul of your website. However, my own experience has been that the numbers get back to normal in about a month or three and then you see increases after that.
Duplicate content is like a virus. When a virus enters your system, it begins to replicate itself until it is ready to be released and cause all kinds of nasty havoc within your body. On the web, a little duplicate content isn’t a huge problem, but the more it replicates itself, the bigger the problem you’re going to have. Too much duplicate content and your website will come down with some serious health issues.
I’m going to break this into three parts. In this post, I’ll discuss the problems that are caused with duplicate content. In Part II, I’ll address the causes of duplicate content, and in Part III, I’ll discuss some duplicate content elimination solutions.
Duplicate Content Causes Problems. Duh!
Google and other search engines like to tell us that they have the duplicate content issue all figured out. And, in the cases where they don’t, they provide a couple of band-aid solutions for you to use (we’ll get to these later). While there may be no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty”, there are certainly filters in place in the search engine algorithms that devalue content that is considered duplicate, and make your site as a whole less valuable in the eyes of the search engines.
If you trust the search engines to handle your site properly, and don’t mind having important pages filtered out of the search results, then go ahead and move on to another story… you got nothing to worry about.
Too many pages to index
Theoretically, there is no limit to the number of pages on your site that the search engines can add to their index. In practice, though, if they find too much “junk”, they’ll stop spidering pages and move on to the next site. They may come back and keep grabbing content they missed, but likely at a much slower pace than they otherwise would.
Duplicate content, in practice, creates “junk” pages. Not that they may not have value, but compared to the one or two or dozen other pages on your site or throughout the web that also contain the same content, there really isn’t anything unique there for the search engines to care about. It’s up to the engines to decide which pages are the unnecessary pages and which is the original source or most valuable page to include in the search results.
The rest is just clutter that the search engines would rather not have.
Slows search engine spidering
With so many duplicate pages to sort through, the search engines tire easily. Instead of indexing hundreds of pages of unique content, they are left sifting through thousands of pages of some original content and a whole lot of duplicate crap. Yeah, you’d tire too!
Once the engines get a whiff that a site is overrun with dupes, the spidering process will often be reduced to a slow crawl. Why rush? There are plenty of original sites out there they can be gathering information on. Maybe they’ll find a few good nuggets or two on your site, but it can wait, as long as they are finding gold mines elsewhere.
Splits valuable link juice
When there is more than one page (URL) on your site that carries the same content as another there becomes an issue of which page gets the links. In practice, whichever URL the visitor lands on and bookmarks, or passes on via social media, is the page that gets the link value. But, each visitor may land on a different URL with that same content.
If 10 people visit your site, 5 land on and choose to link to one URL, while the other 5 land on and choose to link to the other (both being the same content), instead of having one page that has 10 great links, you have 2 pages each with half the linking value. Now imagine you have 5 duplicate pages and the same scenario happens. Instead of 10 links going to a single page, you may end up with 2 links going to each of the 5 duplicate versions.
So, for each duplicate page on your site, you are cutting the link value that any one of the pages could achieve. When it comes to rankings, this matters. In our second scenario, all it takes, essentially, is a similarly optimized page with 3 links to outrank your page with only 2. Not really fair, because the same content really has 10 links, but it’s your own damn fault for splitting up your link juice like that.
Inaccessible pages
We talked above about how duplicate content slows spidering leaving, some content out of the search engine’s index. Leaving duplicate content aside for a moment, let’s consider the page URLs themselves. We’ve all seen those URLs that are so long and complicated that you couldn’t type one out if it was dictated to you. While not all of these URLs are problematic, some of them certainly can be. Not to mention URLs that are simply undecipherable as being unique pages.
We’ll talk more about these URLs in part 3, but for now, let’s just consider what it means when a URL cannot be spidered by the search engines. Well, simply put, if the search engines can’t spider it, then it won’t get indexed. The browser may pull open a page the visitors can see, but the search engines get nothin’. And when you multiply that nothin’ the search engines get with the nothin’ they’ll show in the results (don’t forget to carry the nothin’), you get a whole lot of nothin’ going on.
Pages inaccessible to the search engines means those pages can’t act as landing pages in the search results. That’s OK, if it’s a useless page, but not if it’s something of value that you want to be driving traffic to.
There are a lot of problems caused by duplicate content and bad URL development. These problems may be minor or cataclysmic, depending on the site. Either way, small problem or large, it’s probably a good idea to figure out the cause of your duplicate content problems so you can begin to implement solutions that will pave the way for better search engine rankings.
Is your unoptimized website bleeding money due to a slow average page load time? This guide will show you how to optimize your .htaccess (apache) file to implement speed improvements.
Just a one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions, and 40% of users abandon shopping carts that takes more than 3 seconds to load, according to KissMetrics. With more users making purchase decisions on mobile devices each year, page load optimization won’t patiently wait on your back burner any longer without affecting your bottom line.
Fortunately, there are several effective tactics to speed up your website without even touching your main website code. Even if you have little experience with .htaccess or server modification, this detailed guide will give you the tools and knowledge to take a bite out of your page load.
What is .htaccess?
Glad you asked. An .htaccess file allows you to modify Apache web server configuration settings without modifying the main configuration file – in other words, you can customize the way the server behaves while keeping the core settings intact, much like using a child theme in WordPress. Most webhosts allow clients to use .htaccess files, but if you’re not sure, check with your host.
How Do You Use .htaccess? Simply open any text editor and create a new file called .htaccess. Could it really be that simple? Well, yes and no. Most likely, your computer will perceive the .htaccess file as an operating-system file and hide it from view. To see the file, you’ll need to follow a guide like this one from SitePoint to show hidden files. Once you have that taken care of, you’re ready to move on!
Some considerations before you start: When editing .htaccess files, minor mistakes in syntax can break your site. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to back up any existing .htaccess files (if applicable) before you begin editing. If necessary, you can comment out an existing line by using the # symbol at the beginning.
Some of the common ways an .htaccess file can get broken:
Bad syntax – in other words, improperly formatting the code.
If you make .htaccess edits through cPanel, they can conflict with changes you made by hand.
With the proper precautions and a reliable source to copy and paste code from, there’s no reason not to take advantage of .htaccess to improve your site.
7 Tricks for Improving Site Speed with .htaccess
On to the good part: how can we harness the power of .htaccess to improve page load time? Try one (or all!) of these 7 tried-and-true customizations:
Turn on content caching Google recommends caching all static (permanent) resources – including Javascript, CSS, media files, images, and more. Caching saves these resources to the user’s local memory so files don’t need to be downloaded for repeat visits. This modification alone can significantly reduce page load time – not to mention bandwidth usage.
While some servers will cache a few static resources by default, it’s best to explicitly tell your server to cache all of them. More importantly, the default expiration period for cached entities is one hour, while Google recommends a minimum of one month, and even up to one year (but no more than that).
To ensure the server is caching all static resources and for the maximum time recommended by Google, we’ll be using mod_expires. Open .htaccess and paste the following inside:
# Set up caching on static resources for 1 year based on Google recommendations <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On <FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav|js|css|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$"> ExpiresDefault A29030400 </FilesMatch> </IfModule>
You see whether it’s working by viewing the headers for a file on your server. Using Chrome, open the developer tool and go to the Network tab. Reload your page and click on a css file. Make sure you see the expires date in the response headers:
Compress output with gzip This .htaccess modification compresses the size of the resources as they’re being downloaded to the user’s browser, thereby increasing page load. By default, it won’t compress anything below 500 bytes — which is a good thing, because compression below that size can ironically increase load time.
To utilize this mod, copy and paste the code below into your .htaccess file:
Turn off directory indexing This mod hits two birds with one stone, improving speed and privacy.
By default, any visitor can actually look inside any directory that doesn’t have an index file (index.html, index.php, etc.) in it. That means configuration files and other sensitive data could potentially be up for grabs to malicious users.
Unless you want to add a blank index.html file to every folder on your website (and trust future developers to do the same), take the easy road and modify your .htaccess file instead. In the process, you’ll be saving a bit of server resources – especially if you have very large directories. To turn off directory indexing, open your .htaccess file and add:
#Disable Directory Indexes Options -Indexes
Prevent hotlinking Have you ever had the option to display an image from another website via URL? That’s called hotlinking, and it actually eats up bandwidth on the host’s server. Thankfully, it’s possible to prevent other domains from hotlinking to your website. To ensure nobody is using your precious bandwidth, add this script to your .htaccess file:
#Prevent Hot Linking RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC] RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [NC,F,L]
Force files to download instead of open in browser If your site serves a lot of media files, speed is a top priority. If it’s practical for your users to download files to their hard drives once rather than stream repeatedly from your website, this mod will save your bandwidth:
#Force certain types of files to download instead of load in browser #Only include filetypes that you want to download automatically AddType application/octet-stream .csv AddType application/octet-stream .xls AddType application/octet-stream .doc AddType application/octet-stream .avi AddType application/octet-stream .mpg AddType application/octet-stream .mov AddType application/octet-stream .pdf
Deny bad bots Your public website is constantly being crawled and scraped by bots. Some of these bots are essential – they index your site so it will show in search results. However, there are plenty of bots that aren’t so friendly. Spam bots and scrapers might be bogging down your server, using up bandwidth and resources.. We can block bots based on the user-agent they provide.
The script below denies some bad bots, but isn’t exhaustive. Look to AskApache for resources to help identify more bad bots to block, and use our script as a template if you prefer to add more:
You can test to see that it’s working by changing your user-agent in Google Chrome. In the developer tools, go to Settings->Overrides->Useragent. Setting your Useragent to one of the blocked bots, then visit your site. You should get a 403 denied error.
Deny malicious IPs Nothing slows down a site quite like a server attack. If you know the IP address of a user who is trying to break into or abuse your website, you can deny a specific IP, IP blocks, or domains with .htaccess:
#Deny Malicious IPs order allow,deny
#deny single IP deny from 1.1.1.1
#deny IP block deny from 1.1.1.
allow from all
Putting It All Together
Eager to use every tool possible to speed up your site in .htaccess? We put everything together for you here:
#Block Bad Bots – This is a small list. You can add bots to it. RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebBandit [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^2icommerce [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Accoona [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ActiveTouristBot [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^addressendeutshland RewriteRule ^.* – [F,L] </IfModule>
# Set up caching on static resources for 1 year based on Google recommendations <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On <FilesMatch “\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav|js|css|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$”> ExpiresDefault A29030400 </FilesMatch> </IfModule>
Following the Google’s Panda slap, now Bing reasserts it’s stand for quality content as well.
When we think of quality content, Google Search is our the first automated response. However, to reinstate it’s position, Bing’s, Duane Forrester’s blog gives webmasters some tips and tricks to creating quality content to ensure that both the users and the search engines respond to your website.
Unlike Google, that has left webmasters across the globe in murky waters of Reconsider Request, Bing seems to provide us with rather quick and easy to follow pointers that will easily make their crawler conclude that your website has quality content.
Following are the steps Bing suggests you avoid whilst producing content:
“Duplicate content” – don’t use articles or content that appear in other places. Produce your own unique content.
Thin content – don’t produce pages with little relevant content on them – go deep when producing content – think “authority” when building your pages. Ask yourself if this page of content would be considered an authority on the topic.
All text/All images – work to find a balance here, including images to help explain the content, or using text to fill in details about images on the page. Remember that text held inside an image isn’t readable by the crawlers.
Being lonely – enable ways for visitors to share your content through social media.
Translation tools – rarely does a machine translation tool leave you with content that reads properly and that actually captures the original sentiment. Avoid simply using a tool to translate content from one language to the next and posting that content online.
Skipping proofreading – when you are finished producing content, take the time to check for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and for the overall flow when reading. Does it sound like you’re repeating words too frequently? Remove them. Don’t be afraid to rewrite the content, either.
Long videos – If you produce video content, keep it easily consumable. Even a short 3 – 4 minute video can be packed with useful content, so running a video out to 20 minutes is poor form in most instances. It increases download times and leads to visitor dissatisfaction at having to wait for the video to load. Plus, if you are adding a transcription of your video, even a short video can produce a lengthy transcription.
Excessively long pages – if your content runs long, move it to a second page. Readers need a break, so be careful here to balance the length of your pages. Make sure your pagination solution doesn’t cause other issues for your search optimization efforts, though.
Content for content’s sake – if you are producing content, be sure its valuable. Don’t just add text to every page to create a deeper page. Be sure the text, images or videos are all relevant to the content of the page.”
When looking to optimize your website this comprehensive list of ‘don’t’ seems like a good place to start from. However, some skeptics may question the reason behind Bing emphasis on quality at this juncture; is this guide any early indication towards Bing’s version of Google like Panda update? Hmmm…
Sitemaps are an ingredient that completes a website’s SEO package. They are certainly still relevant, since they ensure content is not overlooked by web crawlers and reduce the resource burden on search engines. Sitemaps are a way to “spoon feed” search engines your content to ensure better crawling. Let’s look at how this is done.
XML Format
The sitemap file is what search engines look for. The elements available to an XML sitemap are defined by the sitemap protocol and include urlset, url, loc, lastmod, changefreq, and priority. An example DOM looks like:
http://example.com/
2006-11-18
daily
0.8
Sitemaps have a 10 MB size limit and cannot have more than 50,000 links, but you can use more than one file for the sitemap. A sitemap that consists of multiple files is called a sitemap index. Sitemap index files have a similar, but different format:
There are all kinds of sitemaps, ones for web pages, ones tailored to sites with videos and other media, mobile, geo data, and more. As long as it is within the cost-benefit for achieving better SEO, take the time to become familiar with the different types of sitemaps and make one that best fits your website’s architecture.
Location
Sitemaps can be named anything, but convention is that a sitemap will be named ‘sitemap.xml’ and is placed in the root of the site, so http://example.com/sitemap.xml. If multiple files are needed they can be named ‘sitemap1.xml’ and ‘sitemap2.xml’. Sitemap files can also be compressed, such as ‘sitemap.gz’. One can also have sitemaps in sub directories or submit them for multiple domains, but the cases for needing such are very limited.
Submission
Sitemaps are recognized by search engines in three ways:
First, sitemaps can be specified in the robots.txt as follows: Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml
The robots.txt file is then placed in the root of the domain, http://example.com/robots.txt, and when crawlers read the file they will find the sitemap and use it to improve their understanding of the website’s layout.
Second, search engines can be notified through “ping” requests, such as: http://searchengine.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fsitemap.xml
These “ping” requests are a standard way search engines allow websites to notify them of updated content. Obviously, the domain (i.e. “searchengine.com”) will be replaced with say “google.com”.
Lastly, every major search engine has a submission tool for notifying the engine that a website’s sitemap has changed. Here are four major search engines and their submission URLs:
Google – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=
The ping requests do not respond with any information besides whether or not the request was received. The submission URLs will respond with information about the sitemap, such as any errors it found.
If your website uses WordPress or the like, there are great plugins such as Google XML Sitemaps which will do all this heavy work for you: creating sitemaps and notifying search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask. There are also tools for creating sitemaps such as the XML-Sitemaps.com tool or Google’s Webmaster Tools.
As we’ve said before, making sitemaps “shouldn’t take precedence over good internal linking, inbound link acquisition, a proper title structure, or content that makes your site a resource and not just a list of pages.” However, taking just a little bit of time with a good tool will help you complete your SEO package with a sitemap. Take this tutorial and make your site known!
