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Htaccess Magic: 4 Tips for a Better Website

Congratulations! You have a website! Now that you have one, you also have the responsibility of taking care of one. Website optimization is not always easy, but it can be with basic knowledge of how they work. One tool you can use to optimize your website is an .htaccess file.

Web servers that use Apache HTTP Server to publish websites have an override feature that allows web hosting users, even ones with shared hosting accounts, to change some web server settings on a local level. If the host has the AllowOverride setting enabled on the web server, the user can use .htaccess files to enable any desired Apache directives. The following are four directive types that can bring a little magic to your website.

1. Custom error docs

When a user mistypes a URL to a page on your site or visits one for a page that no longer exists, one of two things will happen. Either the user will end up at a plain white page with the words “404 Error. File Not Found” or at an error page created by your web host, promoting their services. Neither is good for your services or your site.

By creating custom error documents, you can let users know they did actually make it to your site but might have made a wrong turn. You can also use it to suggest a better starting point for them to navigate through your site.

To create custom error docs, the first step is easy. Make normal HTML files for each error you want to include. You can find a list of Apache error codes on the web.

The next step is to create a file called .htaccess and place it in the root directory of your website – the directory that holds your HTML files. In the .htaccess file, place the error code redirects:

ErrorDocument 500 http://your-domain.tld/docs/500error.html
ErrorDocument 404 http://your-domain.tld/docs/404error.html
ErrorDocument 403 http://your-domain.tld/docs/403error.html
ErrorDocument 401 /local/path/401error.html

As you see, you can use a local path or full URL to each error HTML file that you have created.

2. Rewrite rules

You can use rewrite rules for a wide variety of purposes, the most common purpose is for search engine optimization. Dynamic web apps use very long URLs, and you can use Apache’s mod_rewrite engine to make them shorter. If you are running a content management system like WordPress or Joomla, it will likely add the correct rewrite rules to your .htaccess file for you. If, however, you are creating your own web app, you should also create some rewrite rules.

Rewrite rules follow a simple pattern:

RewriteRule Pattern Substitution [Flag]

For example, a simple rewrite rule is:

RewriteRule ^killer-whales.html$ orcas.html

In this example, people who access the page “killer-whales.html” will be redirected to the actual page: “orcas.html”. Apache also offers many more rewrite options you can try to make your site easier to access.

3. Restrict access

Htaccess files can also have security benefits. One example is that you can restrict access to a particular file or directory. For example, to deny access to a single IP address, you would enter:

Order Allow,Deny
Deny from 155.55.555.5.
Allow from all

Anyone attempting to access your site from that IP address will be denied. More information about mod_access is available in the Apache documentation.

4. Allow or Prevent Directory Browsing

When an index file is not present in a directory, Apache will display the contents of the directory. Many file repositories will use something like this by default to make it easy for people to browse the files. If, however, you do not want people to browse the files in a directory, you can easily disable browsing.

Options All -Indexes

On the other hand, if your web host has disabled browsing but you want it enabled, you do so with this directive:

Options All +Indexes

Taking Control

The whole point of .htaccess is to give the user some limited control over the server without affecting the other users who share it. This is only possible if your web host has enabled the “AllowOverride” setting in the web server’s configuration. The best hosting providers usually do, but even if yours does not, you may be able to convince them to make special arrangements for you. It will make your website better and make your job as web administrator easier.

Guest Author Tavis J. Hampton is the author of the upcoming book KDE for the Graphical User. You can find more of his writing at TavisOnline.com.

Leadership Skills for Women in Tech

[Note: This article was written for BlogHer and refers to that. It was originally posted on BlogHer.]

This is the tale of how two women – one from an engineering background and one from a restaurant background – came together to create a new business that helps women in male-dominated professions advance.

Katie Snapp and Carol Wight are two entrepreneurs who aim to help women nurture their leadership skills so that they can advance in their careers. They don’t aim at women in tech in particular, but women in male-dominated tech careers are certainly prime candidates for their career advancement tips.

In fact, that’s how I discovered Katie Snapp and Carol Wight. They were speaking on female leadership skills at a women in tech event.

I was impressed with how these business entrepreneurs cover all the bases with their business, Skirt Strategies. They do all the consulting and speaking work you’d expect from leadership trainers, but they do more than that. They’ve written a book of leadership tips: the second edition was just released. It’s called Skirt Strategies and is an unusual format. Each tip (there are 249) is centered on a page surrounded by white space. They encourage you to write in the area around the tip with new ideas, comments, and whatever else might motivate you.

Their web site offers both free and members-only tips including newsletters and videos. They are so adept with the videos they create that I asked them if they’d answer my interview questions in video format. I sent them some questions, and ask Paula Gregorowicz, BlogHer’s Section Editor for Careers, to contribute some questions as well. Our questions were about their backgrounds, how they got their business going, what they considered “success” for themselves, and for one big tip to give to the women of BlogHer who wanted to move into stronger leadership roles.

Here’s their video, just for BlogHer.

To get the most out of their leadership training with workbooks and weekly skills development exercises, you need to become a paid member. But you can sample what they do before you join. They have quite a few free video tips on YouTube, where they are called betterleadership, including this one, which is an example of the video tips you can subscribe to on the web site. You can also watch their blog, where you’ll find articles such as Natural Skills – how do I know which I have.

I was hooked on Katie and Carol when I realized how they use technology in so many ways to run a business that supports interpersonal skill development for women in all fields, but particularly in STEM fields. They must follow their own advice!

Guest Post: Meta Descriptions

What search engines and sites like Facebook actually do with meta description information.

The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag may not affect your page’s ranking in the search engines, but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO and social media marketing campaigns.

What Is the Meta Description Tag?

It’s a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> </Head> section of a web page. It is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag (if you use one), although the order is not important.

The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:

If you’re using a content management system (CMS), look for a field to fill out that’s called Meta Description, or possibly just “Description.”

Many years ago, the information contained in a Meta description could slightly help a page rank highly for the words that were contained within it. Today, neither Google, Bing, nor Yahoo! use it as a ranking signal.

In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases in your Meta description tag or not, the position of your page in the search engine results will not be affected. So in terms of rankings, you could easily leave it out altogether.

But should you?

There are 3 important ways that Meta descriptions are being used today that make them an important part of your SEO and overall online marketing strategy:

They can be used as the description (or part of the description) of your page if it shows up in the search results.
They are often used as part of the descriptive information for your pages when Google shows “extended sitelinks” for your site.
They are often used as the default description in social media marketing links such as Facebook and Google+.

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

1. Meta Descriptions in the Search Results

People often think that whatever they put in their Meta description tag will be the default description that the search engines use under the clickable link to their site in the search results. While this is sometimes true, it’s not always the case.

Currently, if you’re searching for a site by its URL (for example www.highrankings.com) Google tends to use the first 20 to 25 words of your Meta description as the default description in the search engine result pages (SERP). However, if you have a listing at DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP) and are not using the “noodp” tag, they may default to that description instead. (Do a search at Google for www.amazon.com to see an example.)

Bing and Yahoo!, on the other hand, don’t always default to the Meta description tag for URL searches. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. A search for www.highrankings.com at Bing or Yahoo! shows content from my home page as the description rather than the contents of my Meta description tag.

Of course, real people aren’t typically searching for a site by URL, so what the search engines show for those types of search queries is not as important as a true keyword search. So don’t get hung up on what you see when you search for your site by its URL or if you’re doing a “site:command” search to see how they’re indexing your pages.

Instead, go to your favorite web analytics program and find the keyword phrases that are currently bringing you the most traffic. Then see what your description looks like at Google when you type in those keywords.

And surprise! What you’ll find is that your search results description will be different for every search query! You may see any combination of the following used:

Your entire Meta description tag text as the complete description (typically if it’s highly relevant and contains no more than 25 words).
A full sentence pulled from your Meta description tag, but not the entire Meta description (if it contains more than one sentence).
Text from one part of your Meta description mashed together with text from another part of it (if it’s more than 25 words long).
Some text from your Meta description mashed together with some text from the page.
Some text from your page mashed together from some other text from your page (nothing from the Meta description).

Some of the circumstances that cause Google to not use text from your Meta description may include:

The information in the Meta description tag was not specific to the page it was on.
The search query used some words that were not in the Meta description, but those words (or some of them) were used in the page content. This includes words that Google considers somewhat synonymous, such as “copy” and “copywriting” or “SEO” and “search engine optimization.”

But even the above are not hard and fast rules. Google doesn’t always use all or part of the Meta description even when the exact search phrase was contained within it – especially if the search query is also contained within the content of the page. Suffice it to say that there are no hard and fast rules for when Google will show it and when they won’t.

My recommendation is to always use keywords on any pages where you get search engine visitors (or hope to get them). Make them very specific to the page they’re on by describing what someone will find when they click through to the page from the search results, while also using variations of your targeted keywords.

Because Google will show only show around 20 to 25 words as your description, many SEOs recommend that you limit this tag to a certain number of characters. In reality, however, you’re not limited to any specific number. Your Meta description tag can be as long as you want it to be because Google will pull out the relevant parts of it and make their own snippet anyway.

For instance, if you’re optimizing a page for 3 different keyword phrases, you could write a 3-sentence Meta description tag, with each sentence focusing on a different phrase. You could probably even insert more than 3 phrases in those sentences if you’re a good wordsmith. The idea, however, is not to stuff this tag full of keywords, but to write each sentence to be a compelling marketing statement – a statement that naturally uses the keywords people might be typing into Google to find your site.

2. Meta Descriptions and Extended Sitelinks

These days, Google often uses the first few words from your Meta description tag when they create the “extended sitelinks” for your website. But this too is not set in stone and is highly keyword dependent. You’ll see different sitelinks and different descriptions showing up depending on the words a searcher used at Google.

As an example, if you do a search for “High Rankings” at Google, you’ll see my sitelinks for that search query.

At this moment, Google is showing my home page as the top result with 6 inner pages beneath:

Forum home page: Description is from DMOZ/ODP. This page has the generic Meta description that is on every page of the forum.
Link building forum home page: Description is content pulled from the page that uses the words “High Rankings” in it.
SEO articles page: First part of Meta description.
Newsletter home page: First part of Meta description.
SEO/SEM resources page: First part of Meta description.
SEO classes page: First part of Meta description.

For the most part, they’re using the first part of the Meta description as the sitelink snippet, but not always. You may have noticed that I optimized those Meta description sitelink snippets that are showing by front loading them so that the first 5-7 words or so are a short description of what the page is all about.

But here’s the rub. Do a Google search for “Jill Whalen SEO.” You should still see sitelinks, and you’ll even see some of the same ones as with the previous query, but some of the descriptions are different:

While the forum home page shows in both, this time Google has pulled text from the page rather than using the DMOZ/ODP description. This is likely because this search query had the word “SEO” in it while the other one didn’t. The SEO articles page also shows up here, and it is using the same Meta description snippet as the High Rankings query. The other sitelinks are different from before, with 3 out of 4 using the Meta description.

As you can see, while you do have some control over your sitelink descriptions via your Meta description tag, Google might not always use them (just as Google does with their regular search results). Your best chance of having them show is to use, close to the beginning of your description tags, the words that you know pull up sitelinks. Also, be as descriptive as possible within the first 5 to 7 words.

3. Meta Descriptions and Social Media Marketing

Ever wonder why some Facebook links have great descriptions and others don’t seem to make any sense? It’s because some site owners have taken the time to write a summary of the article and place it into their Meta description tag, and some have not. If your article has a Meta description, Facebook and Google+ will default to that when you share a link on your profile or “Page.” If there’s no Meta description, you’ll usually see the first sentence or so from the page being used as the default.

While anyone can edit the description that Facebook defaults to, most people don’t. And at this time on Google+ you can’t even edit the default description. You can either leave it as is or delete it all together. Let’s face it — most of the time the first sentence of an article is not a good description of the rest of it. It’s not supposed to be, because that’s not what a first sentence is for!

Therefore, I strongly advise you to always write a compelling 1- or 2-sentence description for all of your articles and blog content that may be shared via social media, and place it into your Meta description tag. This will give you a big jump on your competitors who haven’t figured this out yet, making your social media content much more clickable because people will know what the article is actually about before they click on it.

Overall, the Meta description tag gives you a little bit more control over what people might see before they click over to your site. The more compelling it is, the more clickthroughs you should see. If your Meta description tags can help with that, then it’s certainly worth the few minutes of time it takes to create interesting, keyword-rich tags that sum up what users will find when they arrive!

Guest Author Jill Whalen is CEO and Founder of High Rankings. This article was originally published on her site, and in the High Rankings Newsletter.

Themeefy looks great for instructors

Themeefy looks great for instructors (and students who have to do a presentation). Read more about it at Digital Inspiration, where you can look at Amit’s sample about Steve Jobs.

Here’s an example from the Themeefy site. It’s free. Sign up with a Twitter or Facebook login.

Redbox now renting games

Redbox has testing the idea of video game rentals for several months and concluded that it’s a go. Soon almost all the Redbox kiosks will include popular video games for rental.

The price for a video game will be $2 per day. There should be between 22 and 28 video game titles to choose from in a kiosk, still leaving space for about 200 movies, according to Redbox presses play on video games rentals across its kiosks.

Image Credit: Valeria Everett

Gamasutra reports that games will be available for console devices such as Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but not for handheld devices.

While the company did experiment with handheld games during earlier market tests, it opted to ignore systems like the Nintendo DS and 3DS when it expanded the program.

New releases of games will be available with a week of launch. If you’re a Redbox user, you know you can walk up to a kiosk and grab whatever looks good, but you can also go online to check availability of titles and reserve titles. That will apply to video games as well.

Renting vs. Buying

I just bought a video game for a family member and it cost me $54. It would take 27 days of rentals to reach that price. Renting looks pretty good.

I see two issues in the renting vs. buying question. If you rent a game for just a day or two, you can decide whether to take the high dollar plunge and buy a copy. Buying a copy of the game makes sense when you know it will engage the gamers in the house for an extended period before they reach mastery level and have squeezed every moment of fun out of the game.

Is this great news for your household? Will you be taking advantage of the chance to rent a video game for $2 a day?

Cross-posted at BlogHer.

Tips For Choosing A Search Friendly Domain Name

domain names

One thing that many people do not think about when they choose a domain name is whether it is search engine friendly. However, if you are starting a business then you will need to ensure that your website is easy enough to find. After all, the easier the site is to find the more potential customers you are likely to receive.

The good news is, there is very rarely a terribly bad domain name. Some may be a little more search friendly than others, but even if you have chosen a more difficult one then it isn’t the end of the world. There are things that you can do to improve how easy it is to find. Most people opt for a brand-specific domain name. However, you could also choose a keyword driven domain name instead.

Choosing a Keyword Driven Domain Name

Ideally you want to choose an exact-match domain name. This means that a URL has a character for character match of a certain keyword. These types of domain names are pushed high up the search engine rankings. In order to produce an exact match domain name you will need to follow particular criteria. These include:

No Hyphens
Have a .Com .Net or .Org Domain Extension
Identical Spelling and Word Order

You will find that extensions which feature do-com are far more popular than others. They are considered to be more credible and if you plan on selling the website it will have more value than other extensions too. If you use extensions such as .US, .Info or .Edu then they will not always produce high SEO results.

When you are creating a domain name you should try to avoid Hyphens. A domain name which features a hyphen is not an exact match domain name. If you find that the domain name that you want is taken then there are ways to make it unique without placing an hyphen between the words. For example, if your exact match domain name would have been Redial.Com, you could add words such as “Top” or “Best” to increase its popularity and to make it unique.

You will also need to make sure that the spelling of the domain name matches the keyword. For example, it should have the same spelling and be in the same order as the keyword that you are targeting. HairdressingTools.com for example will target Hairdressing Tools. If you were to choose a domain name such as HairdresingTools.com then the spelling error would affect your search engine ranking.

Finding the Best Keywords

One of the best tricks that you can use to get a good exact match domain name is to search for relevant keywords. You can do this through Google Keywords. Use the keywords that you want to target. Once you have typed those keywords in you will be able to see which ones have a .org, .com or a .net extension. Next you should download all of the keywords into a Excel document. Under the keyword tool you should find the word “Download”. Select all from the list and an Excel spreadsheet will open.

Once you have the keywords you can use the most popular ones in a bulk domain search tool. This will tell you which keywords you should use for your domain that is currently not already taken.

Overall creating an exact match domain name can be frustrating but it will help you to improve your search rankings. It is important to make your site as easy as possible to find. Why not follow the above advice and create an exact-match domain name now?

This guest post is by Lior who is an advisor to an applicant tracking software company and also works with an MA in Israel program.

Store your music in the cloud and stream it from any computer.

My granddaughter’s hard drive had to be replaced. When she opened up iTunes on the new hard drive, she was dismayed to discover that her music wasn’t already there. I remember saying to her, “Your music isn’t in the cloud. It’s only on your hard drive.”

Things are changing. The grandkid’s music can be in the cloud now.

Amazon announced Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player today. Cloud Drive is described as “your personal disk drive in the sky.” They are offering 5 GB of online storage free. You can store anything, including files uploaded from your computer, and access it from any computer.

Cloud Player will play music you have stored on your Cloud Drive. It can be listened to from any computer or with a free Android phone app.

If you make a new MP3 purchase from Amazon right now, they’ll increase your Cloud Drive storage to 20 GB free for one year. (It’s hard to find the price for the storage upgrade without actually signing up for it. If you know what it is, would you let me know?) More importantly, any MP3 purchase you make from Amazon is stored free and doesn’t count against your storage quota.

Amazon jumped into the music in the cloud arena first, but Google and Apple are both working on a similar product. They are going to have to come up with some sweet deals to top 20GB of free storage plus free storage of any purchases.

Suzanne Kantra at Techlicious commented in Amazon Cloud Drive & Cloud Player Streaming Music Service that

Until now, I’ve been pretty impressed with the way Apple’s iTunes lets me keep my music synced between my iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and a few computers. Today, with the introduction of Amazon’s Cloud Player streaming music service and Cloud Drive file storage service, iTunes seems a little antiquated.

Instead of plugging all your devices into one computer to keep them synced, which iTunes requires, Amazon Cloud Player, in conjunction with Cloud Drive, keeps your music stored on its servers, so it’s available to any computer or Android device that has an Internet connection.

iTunes may not feel antiquated for long. We’ll have to see what Apple comes up with to compete in this market.

Suzanne at Techlicious explains how it works.

Here’s how it works. First you download and install the Amazon MP3 Uploader program. It scours your computer for all of your music—including music you’ve purchased through iTunes—and lets you choose what you’d like to store in your Cloud Drive. You can choose by playlist or individual songs and all files are stored at their original bit rate. If you go to Cloud Drive directly, you’ll see folders for documents, music, pictures and videos, so you can use Cloud Drive as your online backup service. It also means video is next on Amazon’s list for its Cloud Player.

Free backup space for all your music, including music from iTunes. Good heavens, what’s not to like?

What do you think? Are you going to give it a try?

[Ed.: This post appeared on BlogHer in a slightly different form.]