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There are a lot of tools out there to help you see how well you are doing via the search engines out there, but few do it as completely as RankBuzz. This online tool not only gives you your Google PageRank, but also provides your Alexa rank, thumbnail, whois information, index pages, social links, on site information and even how much your web site is worth.
Each section of the web page review will also give you advice or feedback on how well you are doing. For example, blog.lunarpages.com has a Google PageRank of 6 – so they told me:
Your pagerank is going great! But we’re sure there is some room for improvement. Why not try and get some higher pagerank backlinks?
So as you can see, it does a good job at trying to help you too.
This is definitely a nice site to keep bookmarked, so that you can keep tabs on how well (or not so well) your domain is doing out there on the Web. You can check it out at RankBuzz.com.
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The gadget team over at Google have made it really easy to grab any number of tools they have featured there and display them on your web site. At the time of writing this, they have over 175,000 little boxes of information to share with your own visitors.
To get started with adding your own, first visit the Google Gadgets page. You can either try searching for the one that fits your needs, or browse through the various categories.
For example, if we wanted to add Bejeweled to our web page, you could visit this link, and then click the “Add to your webpage” button. You can then select the title for the box, the width and height, and then the border for it. Once you are happy with your edits, hit the button labeled “Get the Code” to get the right code to use.
Copy the code from that web site, and paste it into your web site. You are done! Now you have a very cool gadget that could add form and functionality to your web site’s overall experience for a user.
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Did you notice we added a new translation button to the Lunarpages web hosting wiki yesterday? Now our wonderful international audience can gain access to all the wonderful tips, tutorials and information the wiki has to offer.
How can you add this same functionality to your own web site? The magic starts on the Google Translate page. Make sure you navigate to the “Tools” tab, and select the language your web page is in.
Next, select the languages you want to offer translation to. Since Lunarpages has happy hosting customer all around the world, I selected the “All Languages” option. Now, all you have to do is copy and paste the code from the Google Translate web site onto your own web site.
Now anybody will be able to quickly translate your pages to their own native tongue, opening up a whole new international audience to your web site. For another alternative, in button form – also check out, ConveyThis.com.
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Adding a Cascading Style Sheet to your current web site layout and save you time and make your web site look a lot more professional in the process. Cascading Style Sheets, or sometimes referred to as CSS, is a style sheet language used to describe how a web page should be formatted.
For example, if you wanted to make some text on a web page look bold, you might use this snippet of HTML code:
<strong>this will be some bold text!</strong>
Which seems simple enough. However, what if you want to chance the color, font, and how this text is shown in that spot across all of your web pages? Well then your HTML in your pages becomes a rambling mess. That is where Cascading Style Sheets come in handy.
Cascading Style Sheets allow you to, in a much more organized way, sort out how your web site design looks in a totally separate file, or chunk of code in between the head tags. For example, let say you wanted the title of your page to be bold, green, and a different font style than the rest of the page. In your HTML code, you would use something like this:
<p class="mycooltitle">this is my page title</p>
That tells the browser that everything within this paragraph or <p></p> tags will follow the design setup class I have defined as “mycooltitle”. Now, in between the head tags (<head> </head>) I want you to add this:
<style type="text/css">
.mycooltitle {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-weight: bold;
color: #336633;
}
</style>
This CSS code tells the web browser to apply these design settings to the class marked, “mycooltitle”. It does three things. It says it will use the Verdana font, the font will be bolded, and it will be colored green (#336633 is the HTML color code for a shade of green).
That is how you apply Cascading Style Sheets to your web design and layout of your own web pages. One of the major benefits of using CSS is that it helps to separate your web site code with your design. This way, you can change one aspect very easily in the CSS file (when or if you start to master external style sheets). I’ll save that lesson for another day.
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 Tell me, which of these would be easier to do? Carry ten pieces of luggage with you on your trip, or put everything into one piece of luggage? The second, of course. The same thing could be said for CSS files in your web site’s code.
The use of multiple external CSS files, can slowdown the loading of a web page. Instead of telling it, “OK, load this file now” you are telling the browser, “load this file. Done? OK, now load this one, and this one and this one”. The general rule of thumb when it comes to web design is to try to use three (or less) external CSS style sheets.
Here are some rules of thumb for combining your CSS files in production from the Google Code site:
- Partition the CSS into 2 files each: one CSS file containing the minimal code needed to render the page at startup; and one CSS file containing the code that isn’t needed until the page load has completed.
- Serve CSS of a rarely visited component in its own file. Serve the file only when that component is requested by a user.
- For CSS that shouldn’t be cached, consider inlining it.
- Don’t use the CSS
@import rule from a CSS file. If possible, inline the imported CSS content in the main CSS file, or load the imported CSS from the main HTML document instead.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that you should make sure in your head tags, the link to the CSS files should go before any links to any scripts. To put it in a way that everybody can understand – when your browser loads a page, it takes its time with JavaScript, because JavaScript can alter how the page looks, or the content inside the web page. So, you should always call for your .css files before you call for the JavaScript files in your web page’s head code.
I hope this helps as a pretty good guide to shave some of the loading time from your web pages. We might be talking about milliseconds here a lot of the time, but when it comes to delivering the fastest loading pages, every second does count, in true web site optimization.
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Want to make your web page a little more accessible to Twitter users? You might look to add the re-tweeter from TweetMeme to your own web site layout. You (or your fans) can promote your web site using the TweetMeme button. It is a simple and easy way to integrate Twitter onto your blog and web site.
You have two different badges to choose from:
Once you pick the one you like most, you need to figure out how to get it working on your own web site, right? Check out this article for more help on getting that done:
They also have a WordPress plugin to install, which will automatically put the button on all your pages. Overall, I would say that this is a very stylish way to get people to re-tweet (aka share) your stories and posts from your web site to their own Twitter followers. Speaking of Twitter, be sure to follow @lunarpages for tons of web hosting fun.
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In October of 2008, Google announced a new feature known as SearchWiki. SearchWiki allows anyone with a Google account to change the order of search results and make notes about each result in Google.
Once logged into a Google account, you’ll notice that the search results have two small icons next to the listings that can be used to promote or remove a result. By promoting a result, you can bring the site above other results on the page.
You can learn more about the SearchWiki by watching the Google SearchWiki team’s video.
Now, this is hardly news to many of you out there. We covered Google’s Promote Feature in early December.
What is interesting though, is the idea that Google’s index of results will be swayed by user input on the SearchWiki. On Google’s Official Blog announcement for SearchWiki,it mentions that: “The changes you make only affect your own searches.” While this is true directly, it’s not hard to imagine that Google will collectively use user input to influence search results and page ranking.
Currently websites are listed in order on Google’s web page according to their super-duper secretive algorithm. Those in the search engine optimization industry have been trying to figure out this algorithm for very obvious reasons. If you can cheat the search engines and get a website listed on the front page for certain keywords, than you are able to get more traffic to your site, which generally equates to more revenue for web site owners and businesses.
Microsoft’s search engine, although behind both Google and Yahoo, has something similar setup known as U Rank. Microsoft is also researching a system known as BrowseRank – which measures page importance by the number of visits made to a page and the time spent on each page by a user.
I predict that Google will, in fact, use information gained by SearchWiki to calculate how web sites are ranked in the future. It’s easy to see how showing users web sites listed in order ranked by other users, with similar browsing habits and interests, would be beneficial. Overall, by taking in user feedback, Google should be able to provide more relevant information to its users.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the search engine optimization industry, who has built itself around tricks and techniques to rank websites higher in the search engines.
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