Jon highlights the tips:

• Have a nice navigation
• Use appealing graphics (but use animations sparingly)
• Highlight your contact info
• Use correct color combinations
• Use divs, not tables!
• Use XML and CSS (on a separate sheet)
• Include doctype in your HTML
• Check compatibility with all browsers
• Add titles to anchor and image tags
• Don’t use deprecated tags (<b>, <i>)

There is a Dns Server that gets your request for a web page first.

It takes the urladdress.com and resolves it to an ip address like 132.70.433.34

Basically, that IP address is where your files, pictures, and good stuff is located, we call it the web server.

The way it should work is if the server with your files is down the dns server will just send your visitors to another server.

But that doesn’t happen. With most hosts (all that I know of,) your users just get a “Page Not Found” screen, which is very unprofessional. What you can do with services such as DNSMadeEasy is set up a failover server (with a spare server such as a regular $8/month hosting account,) and when your primary server goes down, the traffic is sent to the failover server.

With static pages that’s very easy to do with redundancy, but it’s more difficult with database driven sites like blogs (and in Mark’s case, an Ad Server.)

Regardless, why do no webhosts offer complete fail-over coverage with a remote or outsourced server? They could offer excellent (or ever 100%) uptime, and they wouldn’t be exaggerating. Yes, you can do it yourself, but customers shouldn’t have to go through the hassle of setting up a fail-over solution – that should be the job of the web host. Who wouldn’t mind paying a couple extra dollars a month for that service?

If I’m mistaken, please let me know, but I don’t know of any regular web host to offer this as a standard feature.

The speculation as to why the sites were “dinged” is all over the board, and we don’t know that it’s for the above reasons. However, this point still remains:

One of Google’s main problems is that they’re artificially manipulating results. This is ridiculous. For example, let’s say you’re looking for JohnChow.com but are for some reason searching on Google. If you type in “John Chow” the first result is some lame review of JohnChow.com, not the actual website. You won’t even find it on the first few pages! Are you freaking kidding me? If somebody is searching for John Chow, they obviously want the John Chow home page, and Google doesn’t give it to them. Google used to rant on about how the user experience is #1, but that is clearly just bullshit to make themselves sound better. Artificially manipulating results like this degrades the user experience, and it’s all because they want to whine about paid links? I used to be a raving Google fan, but not nearly as much anymore.

Google has pissed off most of the blogosphere by dropping PageRank of many of the blogs on the internet. Some say it’s because they were selling links, some say they were network inter-linking, and there were plenty of other guesses, but the truth is, nobody knows for sure. Regardless, PageRank has all but completely lost it’s value.

What are we to do? I say we stop conforming to what Google tells us to do and take a first step by removing all ‘nofollow’ tags from our links. This was Google’s method of scaring us by telling us we had to add this tag to all paid links and all comments, and all sites not vouched for, blahblahblah. Screw it. Removing this tag could alter Google’s search results in a negative way, perhaps reminding Google not to bite the hand that feeds them (webmasters.)

Is Google on a decline? Perhaps, I’ve noticed their search results are nowhere close to as good as they used to be, and Yahoo and MSN have really gained some market share in search.

If Google keeps this crap up, they’re going to kill themselves, plain and simple. Webmasters keep them afloat. Stabbing us in the back like this is going to do nothing but piss us off. Maybe I should stop using AdSense completely. I’ve already started using Yahoo search more, and for the first time, it’s more accurate than Google. Maybe it’s all some sort of master plan? Who knows, but I do know that Google sucks at communication and customer relations. Just let us know what’s going on! What’s so difficult about that?

Once you want to move up, they have more packages available, all the way up to a “Business Hosting” package with 10 Gigs of disk space and 1TB of bandwidth. Where MySite.com really shines though is it’s beginner packages, for folks just getting into hosting their own site.

They offer free hosting, but it only has 50MB of disk, and 1GB of bandwidth, and comes with ads on the site. Fine for people hosting a few Britney Spears pictures for their friends, but I suggest at least forking over the measly $3.95/month for the Starter Hosting, which has 1GB of storage and 10GB of bandwidth, with no ads, and still includes the $25 in AdWords credits. That is unless you’re planning to start a blog, in which case the Wordpress Blog hosting is for you; a great place to start, especially if you’re on a low budget and don’t have the revenue to start big.

MySite.com offers some decent hosting solutions for beginning webmasters, and seems to help along the way, letting the user bypass a lot of the technical aspects of hosting. And I bet they get a lot of unintentional links back just from their domain. I normally use “example.com/…” but I know some people who use other “dummy” domains like this one.

Check out their Hosting Comparison page to see which package you’d like to start with.

Sponsored by MySite Hosting

Sparky has some extra features included:

• Related Links: Find sites that are similar to the one you are currently visiting.
• Traffic Trend: A sparkline showing the traffic trend from the last four months.
• Reach Meter: An indicator that shows the site’s Reach.
• Traffic Rank: Shows the current site’s Alexa Traffic Rank.

Hopefully this evens out the playing field a little bit and starts to bring in more accurate results from Alexa, but I won’t be comfortable until all browsers are supported, including Opera and Safari. Even better, advertising companies should stop relying on a clearly inaccurate rating system.

I might download the toolbar to be sure my results are actually recorded, but for now I’ll stick to Search Status due to it’s incredibly useful features.

By the way, Sparky requires Firefox 2.0+ to run, so if you haven’t upgraded to FireFox 2.0 yet for whatever reason, be sure to do so before installing Sparky.

Download Sparky for FireFox

Of course the big yellow slice is actually a bit larger.

On a related note, read my recent post: A Note To Internet Explorer Users

My traffic dropped drastically, almost immediately. I get a lot of organic (search engine) traffic for that blog, and the drop in visitors quickly killed my AdSense and YPN earnings. This was about a week ago, and Google still hasn’t come back to visit the new robots.txt and index my posts again. This little mistake cost me over $300/month, if it continues.

Fortunately, AdSense is not my only source of income for that site. By using multiple monetization techniques, I keep receiving money, even if my PPC networks like AdSense isn’t bringing me anything. Specifically monthly-paid text links and pay per post type techniques. This is all temporary of course, because without the traffic, the text link price will dwindle down, and so forth. But the point is I’m able to handle a sudden loss in traffic this way, as long as the problem is corrected.

Moral of the story: You’ve heard it before, but don’t keep all your eggs in one basket when monetizing your website.

“Sitemap: http://egonitron.com/sitemap.xml”

Without the quotes, obviously. Take a look at my robots.txt file to see how it’s done. Make sure you add a blank line after this line before you start the rest of the instructions.

Haven’t created a sitemap yet? If you use Wordpress, go download and install the Google Sitemaps Plugin. Otherwise, take a look at Google’s list of third-party sitemap generators.

We all know how inaccurate Alexa can be, but how can we fight back? First, we all need to download the Search Status plugin, but is that really enough?

There’s been talk around the blogosphere recently about ways to increase your Alexa ranking, and one of those ways is to create an Alexa redirect URL for your website. This is about as easy as it gets:

http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.egonitron.com

Just replace my website with yours, and use that URL when commenting on others blogs, submitting your blog to directories, and using it anywhere someone might click on it. Another great way to get people going through that link is to use it as your “Home” link on your blog. Any time someone clicks on your Home link to get to the root of your site, you get some traffic coming through Alexa.

I haven’t implemented this hack on this blog yet, but I’ve noticed an increase in Alexa rank for another blog that I use it on.

Disclaimer: Keep in mind if you submit this URL to directories and Alexa changes the redirect method, you’re stuck with a broken link, as most directories don’t let you change your submitted URLs.

This isn’t necessarily Google’s fault, but by default, Wordpress automatically adds “nofollow” tags to all comment and author links when anybody leaves a comment. This was done to reduce the benefits to comment spammers, but this also stops rewarding legitimate contributers. Plugins such as Akismet and Bad Behavior have all but completely stopped comment spamming for bloggers, so there isn’t as much risk if you leave off the nofollow tag.

I’ve decided to install the Dofollow Wordpress Plugin on this blog (and AutomoBlog.net,) because I believe that if someone takes the time out of their day to comment on one of my posts, then they deserve to be rewarded for it by a link back to their site. Obviously if this is going to be abused I’ll have to remove it, but i don’t see any problems in the near future.

Any thoughts?

Your site was ranked by how many people are using the Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and visit your site. This data was compared to every other site and then given a ranking (a rank of 300,000 meant that your site is the 300,000th most visited site on the internet.) That sucks for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it didn’t count Firefox, Safari, or any other browsers. How fair is that to someone that writes a Mac Blog? Not very, that’s how. Most people that would visit their site are using Safari. You get the point…

Anyway, a great new(ish) Firefox and Mozilla extension is available called SearchStatus. When you install it, it displays the Google and Alexa rankings for each site you visit, and it also reports visits back to Alexa. Hopefully this helps even-out the playing field a little bit, although it only works in FireFox and Mozilla; Safari and other browsers are not supported yet.

As you can see, it also has many useful tools available for webmasters. I personally use it a lot more than I thought I would. Being able to check backlinks, highlight the dreadful “nofollow” links, check whois data and keyword density has proved to be invaluable. The point is, I highly recommend that people use this awesome Firefox extension, and if you aren’t already using Firefox, then shame on you

Even if you are still using Internet Explorer, be sure to go to the Alexa Toolbar download page and install the toolbar. Hopefully this will help get more accurate Alexa results.

If you don’t already, I want to recommend all of my readers to get:

SearchStatus

and

Tomorrow is the second annual CSS Naked Day. Remove your CSS and see how well your website falls back on it’s code. The idea of course is to promote proper web standards. Don’t have a properly coded site? I don’t recommend participating. You can check to see how your site will look tomorrow by installing the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox.

Wanna participate? Make sure to use the sign up form. If you’re using Wordpress just install the CSS Naked Day plugin and it will automatically disable your CSS on the 5th. Otherwise, go to the official Naked Day page and follow the instructions there.

You better bet I’m doing it; I’m confident my page will still look good. Be sure to come back and check!