To Validate or not to validate – The importance of W3C validation to an affective SEO campaign.
There has been some debate on whether W3C validation is a necessary evil when it comes to optimizing a site. The answer is not easy to dig up as one may think as few people actually know what madness goes on behind Google’s ranking algorithm. When poking around about the topic, I seems that Google places very little or no weight on W3C validation. I tend to think that the answer is to use common sense, , when common sense is available of course. For anyone not familiar with the validator, it is located here.
Understand validation
It’s important to understand what the validator is actually doing and what type of code it’s checking. There are links on the validator page which go into detail on what validation means. It’s important to also understand that the validator only checks for proper syntax. There is no check for how smart or stupid your actual layout is*. For example you may choose to use the ‘h1′ tag 30 times in your small index page. How is Google supposed to determine the importance of a headline if everything is a headline.
Cost to benefit
When taking on a new project, especially when it is an existing site, you have to look at what the benefits will be of spending making sure code validates. If it’s a small site, it may be worthwhile for you to go through and create a list of all the missing tags, misplaced paragraph tags or whatever the problem may be. However, if your customer forks over an existing mammoth 800 page website this could be quite an extensive list. Think of how much time it would take to go through the validator for all their pages. It may only be worthwhile to check if a portion of their pages validate and make a note of it in your report. If the customer chooses to ignore it, at least you gave it the good ‘ol college try. And if the customer says to fix all 800 pages, well than you have some job security..
Does it really matter?
Somewhat. Some users can argue that validation is a standard and that pages will load faster, and Google will be able to crawl with more ease, web browsers will play nicely and more. The truth is that page load speed has many more variables than validation. Google’s crawlers are able to overcome messy code. And we all know some web browsers bite their thumb at standards.
When programming a site from the ground up, it doesn’t hurt to program and validate as you go. I have just recently started stressing validation for all my customer projects. I have not done too much work redoing existing code though. Heck even nobletech.net is currently far from validating. It all comes down to that good old cost benefit ratio, and right now I just don’t have the time. And let’s face it, even if you don’t know if Google factors W3C validation into the site ranking does it really hurt when starting from scratch?
When, taking on an existing problem, it boils down to common sense. From their you can decide on based on the budget whether validation really makes sense
How to factor it into your program – Create your own ranking
One of the best practices I have started doing when proposing to optimize a site is to create my own ranking of important steps to take. This document starts of with a generic checklist and ends up being unique to every customer. Some practices for SEO are uber important and some practices are well…. Not so uber important. W3C ranks near the bottom of my list, by the way.
Make sure to come to every project with this list. Than based on what the customer has or does not have, and what the customer wants to do, you publish your report from this list. You can even itemize it with explanations and hours, you get the picture. This gives the customer an idea of what needs to happen, how important the step is and how long it takes. It’s a great value added service. Given the budget you may only be able to make only the top two changes. The important thing is that the customer sees the big picture.
W3C – Keep listening to the people
Google PageRank keeps changing so you should always keep learning. One of the very few people I follow religiously is Google’s Matt Cutts. This is a great video of Matt explaining some of the most basic concepts of SEO. Matt touches on the 200 some points that Google Caffeine uses to rank sites, including site speed, and site freshness. At the very end of the video Matt speaks to W3C validation.
*It would be nice if someone wrote code to check for human stupidity. This could go a long way!
Search Engine Optimization – Starting from the basics
Search engine optimization is not really a mythical magic formula requiring a bronzed kettle, some bubbly potions and a set of frog legs. But it certainly does feel like it. You don’t need to be a wizard to optimize your site, but you do need to educate yourself and start the process early, even before building your website. The truth is SEO is just a process that is rigorous in nature and requires concentration. Once done correctly, SEO can introduce a great influx of traffic and boost profits significantly.
Over the years I have been learning the best ways to optimize sites, and there is quite a bit to learn. There is no better time to start on SEO, than before one line of code is laid down. That is not to say that you can’t go back later. You certainly can… And most definitely will. SEO is an on-going fluid process that you’re stuck with if you really want to enhance traffic. You’re kind of the hamster in the wheel.
To get started you need to identify out where your business fits and how people will search for it. Write down the words and word phrases that you suspect people will use to find your product or service. Be careful to include phrases and not just words. These days with so much competition phrases tend to give you a better bang for the search than words. Write them all down, don’t worry about the number of keywords. Too many is good at this point. Eventually you’ll weed through your keywords and select only the ones that will perform the best for your business. This will take months of combing through analyzable statistics. After time, a few hundred cola’s and probably a couple of pounds gained you’ll increase your traffic and ranking.
Now don’t get trigger happy and put these keywords into the meta keyword and expect instance success. In fact we are hardly concerned about the meta keyword section. Google had learned not to trust this field. As it turns out people sometimes lie… Go figure.
After you have a good base of keywords on some scratch paper, you’ll want to search out your competition. If you know a handful of competing companies that’s good. If not, than search for your product or service. You may be pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised at what you find. The best way to really get to your competition is to take the top ten keywords you think will work. Search them all in Google. Than write the the top five results in the SERP (search engine results page). Welcome, your new competition list has arrived. Study it and learn to hate your newly found enemy!
So what do you have from all this work. Possibly a lot of keywords, phrases and a good list of links as your competition. We will narrow both lists down in the future, for now it will be very advantageous to see what keywords your competition is using. Take a look at the meta information on their site. You can do this by right clicking on a static portion of their site and selecting ‘View Source’ in most modern browsers. In the top section of your competitions company you’ll find a meta keyword section. Write down any keywords that may apply and you could use.
Five Ways to Make Your Computing Green
Reducing your power consumption when using your computer is rather trivial. Excuses are for the weak. There is really no excuse when you consider most of these solutions you can do in a few minutes. It helps put some pennies in your pocket which you can use to buy ice cream to reward yourself for being so thoughtful of the environment.
When it comes to going green on your desktop/laptop, it is really the power of numbers. One person in his or her home will not see that great of an impact on the electricity bill nor will they create a big impact on their environment. However, many people incorporating the same solution will help tremendously. Many organizations including the University I work for have done the very same things to cut costs and ‘go green’. There are many tools available to the organization nowadays which allow administrators to shut off workstations and respectively power them on. And the tools are more flexible then ever, allowing administrators to power on workstations on time basis, wake-on-LAN solutions and so on. But for the one person in their home, here are a couple steps you can take to do your piece.
1 Before the Purchase
If you haven’t already purchased a computer, that’s a good thing. Do some research on desktop computers and energy consumption. The best place to start is Energy Star. Read about what it takes for a product to get an Energy Star label and then look for products that hold their label in their database. Select ‘Products’ -> ‘Find an Energy Start product’ -> ‘Computers’. Also if you have a manufacturer in mind, they may have a ‘go green’ page available on their site. It’s best to Google your manufacturers name and the phrase ‘go green’ or ‘environment’. Doing so with Apple for example gets you their go green page as the top hit. Doing so with Dell, gets you this result.
2 Buy a Laptop
Laptops “traditionally” use less power than desktops, even low power desktops. For example my work laptop has a 65 W AC Adapter. The problem with laptops is that they have a rather high inefficiency when power is transferred from AC to DC into the battery. Keeping that in mind, most manufacturers have setup sites or guides that will help you in keeping your battery as healthy as possible. For example Apple has several sites depending on device. You can find the notebook ones here or here. If you need a small notebook for casual internet browsing, well then consider a Netbook. If you don’t mind using the smaller interface and keyboard, this will get you the ultimate in power savings.
3 The KISS Concept.
Keep it simple stupid (KISS). Shutdown your computer when you are not using it. Yes, this is simple, but idle computers no matter what their settings still use some power. In fact, if your computer is connected to a power bar, and that power bar holds nothing else that needs to be on, just turn off the hole power bar after the shutdown. Some computers (mostly servers) have LOM modules or remote access cards which still take up power, even when the machine is shutdown. Now if this is a server, than of course you wouldn’t want to shut it down, if not however, just turn off the bar. Some desktops may also have wake-on-LAN mis-configured and enabled when the owner does not even want it or know about it. Wake-on-LAN still draws a small amount of power. In addition, having it enabled is a security risk as a magic packet sent to the box can possibly bring it online.
4 Become More of a Geek
You don’t have to become a geek, just absorb some geek attributes. A couple minutes on Google will give you information on how to tune your computer settings in most any operating system. I run Windows, Apple OSX, Linux and FreeBSD at my house. Yes, I know, the nerd or geek comments are fitting here. But the point is, all of them have configurable attributes to reduce the amount of power the box consumes. Let’s take Windows XP for example, as it is still a very popular operating system. Right clicking on the desktop and selecting ‘properties’ -> ‘Screen Saver’ -> ‘Power’ gets you to the place you want to be. You can configure power scheme’s and cycle through them as you see fit. If you’re on a laptop, you’ll get power options for when you are using wall power or the battery. Most computers are not configured to hibernate by default, rather just go into standby. Hibernation is the setting you really want to enable after long idle time. Your computer will be slower to come up, but it will save you energy.
5 Monitor Your Monitor
This is another simple step that goes along with #3. But most people forget about the monitor. It usually has settings of it’s own, and many have Energy Star ratings. So before you buy, research. And after you buy, configure. Most of the above points can be applied to the monitor as well.
Those are the top five easy steps. You can incorporate these into your life or at least take them into account. If you have time before you buy a laptop, you may want to wait for MIT to come out with power charging in seconds 
Than again, you’ll probably have to pay and arm and a leg to buy one of the first generation devices if they come out. I welcome and suggestions and comments to add to the arsenal. As always please check out our ‘Go Green’ hosting operations located at Noble Technology. Remember 25% of our profit goes directly to charity.
Sharing the profit
So we are working on a new program to drum up new business:
When you refer a friend or business to us for development work, we will pay you 10% from the profit of the initial referral job. Once we get our share of the dough in the bank of course. In case you failed math class here’s the break down.
A typical project of $1000 profit would equal the following:
$250 for charity!
$100 for you!
$650 for our Noble empire!
We plan on launching this within a week, spread the word!
Tunnel and secure Twitter browsing in 5 minutes
There are many reasons one may want to hide his or her ‘tweeting’ . A public wireless network my be a reason. You may get a kick out of being devious or deceptive at work. Or maybe you think the blackhelicopters are out to get you and you feel it necessary to launch a vigorous campaign to hide all your traces. Whatever the reason may be, sending and reading tweets can disguised from the network with an SSH tunnel in under 5 minutes.
I do a good majority of my daily tasks on a Ubuntu Linux desktop located at my house. This serves as my command center if you will, and I can house most of my data, and installed programs on this computer. As long as I have Internet access I can make a secure SSH connection to this desktop and away we go. You can use a Linux/UNIX box anywhere as long as you have access to it via command line. I have decided to use Ubuntu due to it’s vast support of various software and large community. FreeBSD used to be my first choice, but I’ve strayed away since and use FreeBSD mostly on my servers.
CLI vs. GUI
Let’s set some expectations. I use the command line for a good majority of tasks. So if you’re in search of pretty, this may not be your top solution. There is an easy way to view Twitter with a GUI application tunneled from a remote location but it’s not as fast as doodling on the command line. Tunneling the GUI is trivial, and I’ll cover it some other time.
Setting Twitter Command-Line Client
Lucky for us, there exists a Perl command line Twitter client that is very easy to use. It is written by Gabriel Cain and is available for download on Launchpad. The program is simple and only has two files, twitter.pl and Twitter.pm. Download both files to your desktop station or SCP them over. Then SSH to your workstation if you haven’t already done so
ssh stenchmaster.nobletech.netHow it works is, twitter.pl is a the program which executes the commands and Twitter.pm is the ‘Twitter’ object used by twitter.pl. Put twitter.pl in your system executables path and put Twitter.pm in Perl’s search path. Simple as that. So here’s how to do it.
Twitter Command-Line Client needs Perl version 5.8 or greater to run. So first make sure your Perl version is up to snuff.
#perl -v This is perl, v5.10.1 (*) built for i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi
Next we need to mv Twitter.pm into the proper location. Where is the proper location you may wonder. The best way to find out is to ask perl.
#perl -e 'print @INC' /etc/perl/usr/local/lib/perl/5.10.1/usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1/usr/lib/perl5/usr/share/perl5/usr/lib/perl/5.10/usr/share/perl/5.10/usr/local/lib/site_perl.cstr
The same needs to be done with twitter.pl, except it needs to go in the system executable path. The best way to find out this information is to ask the system.
#echo $PATH /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
As you can see both commands dump out a list of directories where Perl looks for libraries and Linux looks for executable commands as you type them in the shell. Now we can move them to one of these locations. Also, in order to execute them we have to make sure the permissions and owners are correct.
#sudo mv twitter.pl /usr/local/bin #sudo mv Twitter.pm /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1 #sudo chown cstrzelc /usr/local/bin/twitter.pl #sudo chmod 750 /usr/local/bin/twitter.pl
I also like to put a link in so I don’t actually have to type twitter.pl on the command line. It’s somewhat cumbersome and doesn’t cater to my ‘Uber-lazy’ way of life. So I create a link pointing to twitter.pl
#sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/twitter.pl /usr/local/bin/twLast but not least, we have to let Twitter know who we are. It’s important to keep this information as secure as possible. You do this by creating a .twitterrc file in your home directory. We also want to change the permissions on this file so they are as restrictive as possible. Inside the file we simply put our Twitter username on the first line and the password on the second line.
chris4136 some_bs_password
That’s it! We’re ready to twitter from our remote machine on the command line! Let’s fire it up and see what it looks like.
#tw -rThis retrieves my timeline.
#tw -r myFriendThis retrieves my friends timeline with the nic of @myFriend
#tw 'message from me'This posts a message from me. Keep in mind that you have to count the number of characters.
There are a number of options, to get a list you can type the ‘tw’ command and a usage menu will come up. It’s really that simple. Check out the screen shot below.
Use your iPhone!
Even geekier is you can attach to any network and use your iPhone to veiw Twitter the same way. Simply download an SSH client for the iPhone such as iSSH, and you can connect to your server in the same simple manner. All your Twitter iPhone activities on that network will be secured with an SSH tunnel to your server.