Search engine optimisation is important for a blog. Because that is, if your blog is small, the primary way to get visitors to your blog. It is evident features in blog systems such as tags and categories help towards search engine optimisation, and others as detailed below. But as many will stress, the most important thing of course is content. Content is king. It is important to have original and unique content and that your blog is updated regularly with original and unique content. If you don’t do this, Google is simply going to give another blog better search rankings that what your blog is potentially capable of being given.

Content is king

Content is king. So what sort of content are you going to write? The thing that works for my small blogs personally is writing about something unique and that hasn’t specifically be written by blogs that are more highly-ranked than my blog is. It all helps towards search engine optimisation and of course, getting valuable visitors, which is (mostly) the reason we have blogs in the first place – if, unless of course, your blog is for your own reference only.

So, talk about something original that may not be talked about by other blogs. If your blog is on sports, why not talk about something in sports that no one else is specifically talking about right now? Perhaps your opinions on something that isn’t being talked about by another blog that is more highly-ranked. Even though there is great competition between websites in terms of search engine optimisation because of how many websites are online and the amount of people using the Internet, if you think of the logical things you can do to help make your blog more noticeable by Google from an SEO perspective, then over time your blog will be ranked more importantly by Google bots.

Backlinks and deep links

Backlinks and deep links are important in order for Google to recognise your site as important. The obvious may well be submitting your site to relevant directories, but you can also do this by adding a link to your blog via your signature, especially on sites which you are active on. If you often post in threads that are related to your blog’s articles or main purpose, that is definitely a practical way of getting backlinks. And where you can, try and get deep links, too. Deep links are links of inner pages within your blog, and they are just as important as backlinks of the main page of your blog. Getting deep links is probably a little more difficult. I am sure if you post meaningful tutorials, articles or how-tos on your blog, perhaps others will link to that article if they find it interesting enough to provide a link back to it, perhaps on their own website or article on their own blog, or on a forum. For example, if blog post is on how to fix a particular issue, someone may find your blog post via a search engine and provide a link to your blog post on a forum topic to assist a particular forum member.

There are other ways of getting deep links, too; such as link directories that accept deep links or link submissions to articles within a blog or website. This can definitely help from a search engine optimisation perspective, so definitely consider this option too.

Of course, remember that Google’s algorithms are very smart and can easily and readily detect cheating and will penalise websites that cheat in the form of search rankings or out-right removal of a website from searches altogether.

There are many easy ways of finding relevant directories to submit your blog to, including this forum of the DigitalPoint forums that allows users to advertise their own directories.

Search engine friendly URLs

Most blog systems including WordPress allow you to have search engine friendly URLs. Instead of an article ID that is part of a blog URL to refer to the article itself, it is best to have search engine friendly URLs that perhaps display the title of the article as part of the URL, for example example.com/blog/2012/20/01/blog-post-title-here.

Use tags with your blog posts

Using blog post tags do help. Add relevant tags (not too many, though) that describe what the blog post or article is about. So if I was making an article on CentOS, I’d obviously use the CentOS tag but other tags more direct to what the article is about, such as Install CentOS, etc

I’m sure this is fairly obvious but also use categories for your blog posts. It does help from a search engine perspective.

Allow users to share your blog posts via various mediums

There are plugins for WordPress that allow you to add icons beneath each blog post allowing your readers the convenience of sharing useful blog posts with others; on Twitter, Facebook, etc. You may think, “Facebook? What?” but Google are now indexing Facebook comments!

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The httpd.conf file is a very important part and a configuration file which is utilized by the Apache HTTP server. Basically, the httpd.conf file is used to store data on several functions of the server, which is editable by adding or removing the “#” sign in the opening of the line.

In case if your httpd.conf file is damaged, probably you will have to create a new one of apache configuration in your cPanel. Creating a fresh new httpd.conf file will make your lose your existing configuration. With the following shell command you can easily rebuid the httpd.conf file.

Steps to Rebuild / Recover the httpd.conf file:

Step 1: Log-in to the SSH as a Root user.

Step 2: Enter the following command to recover the stable httpd.conf file, which will be created automatically via the cPanel shell script.

/scripts/rebuildhttpdconf

[Note: The httpd.conf file should be rebuilt only when it is edited in a wrong way due to which your apache web server have been prevented from starting.]

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Most of the webmasters uses GUI (Graphical User Interface) in order to manage their databases, though it is a web based tool such as phpMyAdmin or the MySQL Administrator which is a desktop tool. But, for a system administrator, it is much more convenient to use simple mysql commands via the command line interface.

Using the single mysql commands string a webmaster can easily add users and drop users from the MySQL database.

Step 1: Log-in to your server via SSH

Step 2: Enter the following command to login to the MySQL command interface.

# mysql -u -p  (For Eg: mysql -u joe_dbname -p password)

Once you enter the above command it will ask you for the username and password. Simply type the mysql username and password and hit the Enter button. If the login credentials are correct, the shell prompt will be replaced with the MySQL prompt:

mysql>

Step 3: In order to add a user to the MySQL, enter the following mysql command string:

mysql> CREATE USER user@host IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;

Don’t forget to replace the “USER” by the username you wish to create and “host” by the server IP.

Step 4: In order to drop or remove a user from the MySQL, enter the following mysql command string:

mysql> DROP USER user@host;

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Server security should be on the top of your priority list when you own a dedicated server. So, to have a better security a third party application such as a secured firewall must be installed on your server. But, before that it is necessary to consider how much can you afford to get a secured firewall for your server.

In such a case, you should opt for a Free Open Source Firewall called as CSF (ConfigServer Security and Firewall). CSF is a firewall which is frequently updated and provides lots of options in order to strengthen your server security from well known attacks.

In order to start, restart and flush the CSF rules you need to install it on your server. If you are not sure about the CSF installation, check out the following tutorial:

How to Install CSF (ConfigServer Security and Firewall)?

Once you have successfully installed the CSF Firewall, you can proceed with the Enable, Restart and Flush process.

Enabling the CSF – Enter the following command:

csf -e

Restarting the CSF – Enter the following command:

csf -r

Flushing the CSF Rules – Enter the following command:

csf -f

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For years, mobile phones (on a software and hardware level) were simply inadequate for displaying websites as they were meant to be seen. However, many phones back then displayed websites without images or in a conventional view in order to make it optimised for the software and hardware of the phones at the time.

As time has gone on, however, especially with the invent of the Apple iPhone back in 2007, all smartphones now can show the entire website as it is seen on a desktop PC (albeit shrunk down) because smartphones are more powerful than standard mobile phones or featurephones and the software allows the full website to be rendered within the mobile browser application.

So why is it “more important” to also focus attention on making your websites or blogs mobile-friendly?

Well. First, if you use WordPress, it’s incredibly easy. Simply install the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin (you can find and install it directly via the WordPress Administration Panel). It instantly gives your blog a mobile-friendly user interface if a mobile phone or user agent is detected.

However, you may wonder why it is even important at all. Well, foremost, let’s look at usage statistics:

With StatCounter, smartphone usage for surfing the web is at 9.39%. That’s a high number. That equates to 1 in 10 connections to a website may well be from a phone. And because smartphones are becoming used more and more for what our computers would usually be used for, many people simply use their smartphone instead of their computer to do basic computing tasks such as searching for something or for the answer to something, browsing the web, reading the news, etc.

Why should I build a mobile user interface? Smartphones are capable of viewing the full website as it is.

That is true, yes. But many websites now have specialist user interfaces specifically made for smartphones such as iPhones, Android Phones, BlackBerry smartphones, etc. For example, the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin transforms your WordPress blogs into a readable, clean format for small-screen devices. With the use of JavaScript, you can detect the user agent of the visitor visiting your website, and if it equates to a mobile browser or operating system, you can choose to provide them with a mobile user interface.

It also equates to a better user experience. Your users don’t want to be scrolling a lot to read the content on your website.

You could also consider making your forums mobile-friendly as well. While there would probably be plugins or add ons for the various popular forum systems out there, such as vBulletin, phpBB, etc., you could also install add your forum to mobile apps such as TapaTalk (Board Express on Windows Phone) which allows your users to access your forum via a mobile-friendly app. And it works for many popular forum systems, including vBulletin, Invision Power Board, MyBB, SMF, phpBB, etc.

However, there are disadvantages to using TapaTalk or Board Express. For a start, I don’t even think you can make any money if all your mobile users end up using TapaTalk or Board Express because your forum is available on it. If this is the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if forum owners have decided not to go this route because there is no way to make money when users are using your forum through a third party solution, in which you cannot make any money.

Inherent advantages to creating a mobile-friendly user interface

The inherent advantages are quite obvious. It makes it easier for your users to navigate your website or blog without having to pan and scroll a lot. It makes it more focused on the content on your website or blog.

Some other sligthly-irrelevant advantages is that it could save you bandwidth. Even though it may to matter to you much, if 9% of your visitors are from mobile devices, you could save yourself a portion of bandwidth if the mobile user interface transfers less data to the visitor when they visit your website.

Inherent disadvantages to creating a mobile-friendly user inteface

Well, if you have a mobile user interface, it would be very difficult to include advertisements unless you are able to fit in mobile-sized advertisements that coherently fit into your mobile user interface. If it does, great, you may make money via your mobile user interface, but often is the case that with a mobile user interface, such as with the WordPress Mobile Edition, while your users would be getting a better user experience, they would also not have the distraction of advertisements you may have installed on the desktop user interface through WordPress plugins such as Awesome Ads. So unless you can find a suitable way to add mobile-friendly advertisements to the mobile user interface part of that WordPress plugin, you would be without advertisements which is something to take into consideration. If a lot of your traffic (say, 9%) comes from mobile phones. That is the potential for up to 9% of loss revenue that may be potentially there if you had mobile ads on the mobile user interface. You may want to take this into consideration.

Some examples of mobile user interfaces that work perfectly on smartphones include:

If you noticed on the Engadget blog, they have mobile ads. It is definitely possible to implement mobile ads, Neowin’s blog (second image above) also has mobile advertisements at the top, too. There are many mobile ad firms you can use as well, in order to generate revenue through visitors on mobile devices.

Concluding…

So, there are many resources online to help you make your website mobile-friendly. This article is to help introduce you to as to why making your website mobile-friendly is indeed a good idea, because based on ever updating mobile data, it is becoming very important – even for businesses such as e-commerce stores, as more people may wish to shop on their phones. Of course, many e-commerce stores may opt to create an actual app for smartphones which provides rich user experiences with a mobile-centric app user interface, but others decide e-commerce stores decide to create mobile-friendly versions of their e-commerce store.

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