DNUnderground » Website Development http://www.dnunderground.com The Best Domaining Blog on the Web Mon, 27 Jun 2011 17:48:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 Great Use of the .ME Extension http://www.dnunderground.com/03/08/great-use-of-the-me-extension/ http://www.dnunderground.com/03/08/great-use-of-the-me-extension/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:17:39 +0000 Sam Silverman http://www.dnunderground.com/?p=686 I’m not a fan of any ccTLD’s, nor do I like extensions as common as .net or .info. I’m for the most part a .com guy. The one extension that I have expressed a minimal amount of interest in is the .me extension. I think the .me extension is great for people looking to create their own, personal website. My reason being that .me’s generally don’t rank well in Google’s U.S. or U.K. listings. In fact, the only place they do tend to rank well is in Google.me.

After logging into Facebook, I saw a link posted by a friend of mine leading to a website with a .me extension. She isn’t in the domaining industry, and it’s not everyday that I see someone outside the domaining industry surfing websites that aren’t based on a gTLD. Being curious as I was, I decided to click on the link. The link led me to her profile on FormSpring.me. The website had an interesting concept, but that is besides the point.

The thought that somebody not in the domaining industry could’ve found a website on a ccTLD was still bothering me because I just couldn’t imagine it to be possible. This is when I decided to check out the website’s Compete rankings. The website was formed in November of 2009, and over the few months of its operation, it has grown to have approximately 2,000,000 visitors in a single month.

This is a website that is clearly seeing success with the .me extension and is making great use of it. I’m also shocked to see such a rapid growth in a website as simple as FormSpring.me. Feel free to submit your comments on the FormSpring.me website or (preferrably) the .me extension.

]]> http://www.dnunderground.com/03/08/great-use-of-the-me-extension/feed/ 3 Outsourcing: The Newest Internet Scandal http://www.dnunderground.com/01/31/outsourcing-the-newest-internet-scandal/ http://www.dnunderground.com/01/31/outsourcing-the-newest-internet-scandal/#comments Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:00:12 +0000 Sam Silverman http://www.dnunderground.com/?p=617 There’s no doubt that outsourcing is hurting U.S. website developers. People are turning to others in countries like India or Malaysia to create applications and websites for them. They have much lower living costs, thus allowing them to provide their services at prices that are dirt cheap. But when a concept or idea gains popularity as quickly as outsourcing is, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate whether outsourcing is the best option for you.

Whenever I meet a client on the forums, about 2 of every 5 people have a story about being ditched and stolen from by previous developers and designers that they outsourced to. Many of these programmers and designers agree to do work, take your money and run. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re in a foreign country. You can’t legally put them through the U.S. court system, as you would be able to with a U.S. developer. The point I’m trying to make is that U.S. developers are simply more reliable than foreign developers because of their location and common knowledge of the law.

I’m a big believer in the idea that you get what you pay for. What I’ve found with foreign programmers in particular is they do a horrible job in general. Sometimes, this is because they don’t understand what you want (due to English not being their native language). But often, it’s because they take such a large number of jobs that they need to program websites quickly. As a website developer, I know that programming websites is probably the most important part of the website development process. The quality of the programming determines the functionality of the website. If a programmer doesn’t take his time, a website won’t function well. And when you’re racing to get a website programmed like foreign developers do in order to get in as many jobs as they can, you’re not going to get quality programming.

Before I end, I’d like to address one of the main reasons I wrote this article. I want to warn you when using foreign developers by advising you to choose your developer wisely. Don’t get me wrong, there are some legitimate foreign developers out there. But the popularity of scams in the outsourcing industry in regards to website development has increased dramatically. While I do have a bias writing this article because I am a U.S. website developer, I’m writing what I’m seeing and hearing from clients everyday. I look forward to your comments.

]]> http://www.dnunderground.com/01/31/outsourcing-the-newest-internet-scandal/feed/ 11 An Introduction to Meta Tags: Part III http://www.dnunderground.com/01/13/an-introduction-to-meta-tags-part-iii/ http://www.dnunderground.com/01/13/an-introduction-to-meta-tags-part-iii/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:22:20 +0000 Sam Silverman http://www.dnunderground.com/?p=569 Have you ever wanted to keep search engine crawlers from crawling certain pages, or just a single page on your website? Well thanks to robot tags, it’s as easy as heating up leftovers. Robot tags allow you to specify to search engine crawlers that you do not want a page, or pages on your website indexed by search engines.

Similar to implementing other types of meta tags, as discussed in Part II of this article, you won’t break the bank to do it.

Begin by deciding for what pages you’ll be implementing the robots tag. You could implement it on a single page, or you can implement it on a series of pages. Whatever you decide, go to the file or page that will allow you to edit the coding for the page of pages you want to implement the robots tag on.

Once you’re in the file or page, scroll down and find coding that begins with <head> or <head + (a few words that don’t make much sense to you)> and ends in </head>.

Now that you’ve found that piece of coding, you’ll want to copy and paste the following below the beginning (the <head> part) of the strip of coding you just found.

<title>Edit this with the page title</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Don’t be fooled into thinking you need to do the opposite of this to actually get your page indexed. That’s just a myth that believe it or not, people actually fall for. My biggest recommendation if you are trying to get indexed is to read Part I and Part II of this article.

Getting back to the point, this tag should work with all major and most minor search engines. If you got lost during this tutorial, there are plugins that will help you implement robot tags. I haven’t used these plugins, so I couldn’t stand by them, but they are out there. Doing a quick search, I found this one on the WordPress website, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta.

I have found that doing things manually always works, so why waist your time playing with plugins, when dealing with something that is so easy to do. If you have any questions, feel free to comment them below, and I, or other people familiar with robot tags, would be happy to answer them.

]]> http://www.dnunderground.com/01/13/an-introduction-to-meta-tags-part-iii/feed/ 0 An Introduction to Meta Tags: Part II http://www.dnunderground.com/01/12/559/ http://www.dnunderground.com/01/12/559/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:27:08 +0000 Sam Silverman http://www.dnunderground.com/?p=559 An Introduction to Meta Tags: Part II

Implementing meta tags is not as hard as one would think, and it’s definitely not anything that one needs to dive into their piggybank for. This article will not only provide you with not only the coding you’ll need to copy and paste into your current website’s coding, but the instructions to do it as well.

Within your administrative panel, find the editor that will allow you to edit your website’s coding. This could be a file saved on your computer. If you’re using WordPress, simply click ‘Appearance’ > ‘Editor’.

Once you’re in your editor, find the file that’s generally labeled “Header”. After clicking on the “Header” file, scroll down and find coding that begins with <head> or <head + (a few words that don’t make much sense to you)> and ends in </head>.

Now we’ve gotten to the point where we can start implementing our tags. If you don’t see a title tag, what you’re going to want to do is copy and paste the following, right under the piece of coding you originally found saying <head>:

<title>Edit this to the title or name of your website</title>

Example: <title>DNUnderground</title>

Generally, if you’re using WordPress, they’ll give you the option to title the site. But if you missed that step when setting up your website, or are having trouble doing it within your administrative panel, then doing it this way (manually) will work well for you.

Next, lets move onto implementing your description tag. With your description tag, you’ll want to describe your website, using full words and full sentences. This is a really important tag to include because it’s one of the steps helps search engines crawlers figure out what your website is all about. Copy and paste the following coding below the piece of coding you just put in (the <title></title>):

<meta name=”description” content=”Edit this with a brief description of what your website is about.”>

Example: <meta name=”keywords” content=”The hottest blog for the domaining industry, with lessons on how to make money through domaining, and online in general.”>

Last but not least, there’s the keywords tag! This is what I would say is the most important meta tag to include within your website because you can use a lot of describing words to tell search engine crawlers what your website’s about, similar to the description tag you just included. The difference with this tag is you can say a lot more in a much simpler fashion. Copy and paste the following coding below the piece of coding you just put in (the <meta name….>):

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Type words here that describe your website, separated by commas”>

Example: <meta name=”keywords” content=”domaining, domain, domain names, domains, domain blog, make money online, online income”>

I recommend including all of these types of meta tags in your website coding if they haven’t already been included, as they have been proven to help improve your search engine ranking. Stay tuned for Part III of this article, where I can show you how to use meta tags to block robots from crawling your website, or particular pages within your website. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to submit a comment below.

]]> http://www.dnunderground.com/01/12/559/feed/ 2 An Introduction to Meta Tags: Part I http://www.dnunderground.com/01/11/an-introduction-to-meta-tags-part-i/ http://www.dnunderground.com/01/11/an-introduction-to-meta-tags-part-i/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:53:15 +0000 Sam Silverman http://www.dnunderground.com/?p=555 Meta tags are generally keywords or descriptions that you can manually input into the <head> area of your website. There are three types of meta tags, title tags, description tags, and keyword tags. The great thing about keyword and description tags is that they are invisible to the viewer, unlike the title tag, which many of us are already familiar with. The main difference between the title tag and the keyword and description tags is that the keyword and description tags contain descriptive words, phrases or pieces of information that your human visitors do not need to see and be bothered with.

While meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to get your website ranking better in search engines, it has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to get crawlers to index you for keywords you could have only dreamed of being indexed for in a high up position. Meta tags allow you to easily communicate with search engine crawlers by describing what your blog is all about.

When placing keyword tags into your website’s coding, don’t go nuts with the keywords. It’s a commonly believed myth that the more keywords you have under your keyword tags, the better. If you have too many keyword tags, search engine crawlers will simply get overwhelmed, and potentially ignore many of your more targeted keywords.

Now that you understand that you’ll need to be limited in the number of keyword tags that you use, I want to remind you of a saying you probably have heard at some point between your high school career and where you are now, keep it simple stupid (commonly referred to as K.I.S.S.). Don’t use long, descriptive, big words when describing your website with your keyword tags. Just use basic one-word or two-word describing words or nouns that you think somebody might search for in a search engine and would be targeted towards your website.

I’ll be taking you deeper into the DNUnderground coding and showing you how to create these meta tags in Part II of this article tomorrow, but for now, I want to use my keyword tags as an example. Some of my keywords include, “domain”, “domain name”, “domainer”, “domain blog”, and “marketing”. My recommendation is to limit yourself to about 40 words (maximum), and pick general phrases as I did. But make sure your general phrases are really well-targeted towards your blog. I know if someone types in a phrase like “domain blog”, the content on my website will please them. In other words, don’t stretch your horizons too far when coming up with these keywords.

Part II of this article will be written and published tomorrow, so make sure to check back. It will show you how to actually implement meta tags into your website coding and will go more in depth in regards to the difference between the title, description, and keyword meta tags. For now, feel free to comment with any questions.

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