Fantastic-o!

Fantastico is just how the name implies – it’s fantastic! Fantastico De Luxe, developed by Netenberg, is an auto installer software will allows you to install various scripts easily through cPanel. Installing scripts may be a tedious job for the novice web master. Fantastico allows you to install more than 40 open source (free) software applications with minimum hassle. No technical knowledge (more…)

Preview: Google Chrome

It has been a week since Google’s much hyped “Chrome” browser was launched as a beta version. It has already claimed to have grabbed more than 1% of the global browser market. It created a record of sort by taking over 1% share of the global market within four days of its launch. (more…)

Introduction to suPHP

Many of you may be aware that SharkSpace is now implementing suPHP on shared hosting servers, which was announced here recently. Through this blog, we will try to explain to you what suPHP is about and how it is beneficial for everyone.

Securing a shared hosting server is a challenging task as it has to be secured from outside and from inside a website. Vulnerable scripts or incorrect permissions can cause compromises from inside a server. PHP has built-in features to help, but ultimately it’s the wrong place to address the problem. Apache has built-in features too, (more…)

Fun with .htaccess

In a web server, the server’s configuration file normally defines the settings that files and directories in your account follows. However these settings can be customized to an extend by yourself using simple text files called .htaccess. When properly congfirued, .htaccess file can allow you to ,etc. Each line in a .htaccess file is called a directive. Directives are applied to the directory the .htaccess file resides in and any subdirectories within that directory. So if it is placed in the public_html directory, all the files and directories in your account will be affected.

Creating a .htaccess file:

You can create a .htaccess file using any text editor like Notepad (Windows), TextEdit (Mac), vi (Linux), etc.. To create one, open your text editor, enter a few directives and save the file as .htaccess (with the period). If your editor won’t let you save the file as .htaccess, name it htaccess.txt instead. You can rename it after you’ve uploaded it to your server. When uploading the .htaccess file to your server, make sure that it is uploaded in ASCII mode. Some FTP clients may not show the file as files with names that begin with a period are normally considered as hidden files. So you will have to change the settings in your FTP client in that case. If there is an existing .htaccess file, you can just edit it with the required directives.

Even though most of the tweaks can be done using cPanel which uses .htaccess file, a basic understanding of various directives used in .htacess file will give you more control. We will cover some useful stuff that we can achieve using a .htaccess file in this blog:

1) Redirect Traffic:

You can redirect all visitors or certain visitors only based on their IP address, etc.

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 72.10.20.30

allow from all

Replace 72.10.20.30 with your IP address. Also replace page.html with the name of the page you want visitors to see.

2) Custom Error Pages:

The web server normally displays a 404 error when it receives a request for an non existant page. You can replace the server’s default error page with one of your own that explains the error in plain language and links visitors to your home page. Here’s how to use your own page:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

Replace 404.html with the name of the page you want visitors to see.

3) Redirect Moved pages:

When you move your pages to a new location, the URLs in the index of search engines will not get updated and you will loose traffic when visitors land in the old URL. You can use a 301 redirect to automatically send to the new page when they try to access the old one:

Redirect 301 /old.html http://yoursite.com/new.html

Using a 301 redirect also ensures the page doesn’t lose its search engine ranking.

4) Prevent Directory Browsing:

When there’s no index page in a directory, visitors can look and see what’s inside. This may be insecure as you are exposing hidden content to the public. Some servers are configured to prevent directory browsing like this. If yours isn’t, here’s how to set it up:

Options All -Indexes

5) User Friendly URLs

This one is a bit tricky, but very useful and helps in Search Engine Optimization as well.

For example, your page is at the location:

http://www.domain.com/html/new/contact.html

When it comes to URLs, as long as the meaning is clear, shorter is always better for your visitor and a search bot, like: http://www.domain.com/contact

With htaccess and an Apache module called mod_rewrite, you can set up URLs however you want. Your server can show the contents of “/html/new/contact.html” whenever anyone visits “http://domain.com/contact”. Here are a few examples:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^contact/$ /html/new/contact.html [L]

These are some of the basic tweaks that you can achive using a .htaccess file. You can find many advanced directives here.

SEO: Getting Listed in Google

Your new business or personal/community web site is finally up and running. But how do you attract visitors now to your website? The first step towards announcing your website to the World Wide Web is to get listed in Search Engines. Majority of the traffic to a website is through Search Engines. Google is one of the most popular Search Engines and we will give you a few tips on how to get listed in Google and increase the traffic to your website.

1) Add your URL to Google:

The first step to get listed for any website is by manually submitting your URL with Google. Visit: http://www.google.com/addurl/ and submit your website details. Google does not guarentee that your website will be listed, but you can improve your chances of getting listed by following the protocols outlined by Google. You can follow these protocols when designing your website to increase search engine friendliness.

You can also try submitting your URL at DMOZ The Open Directory which Google uses for classifying websites. This is a directory that is managed by volunteers that act as “category editors.” To list your site, simply go to the most appropriate category for your web site, then drill down to the relevant subcategory and select the “Add URL” link at the top of that category’s page.

The time required for the Google bot to start crawling your website will vary though you can expect it to start within a week or two.

2) Increase PageRank

Google uses PageRank algorithm for ranking websites. This is Google’s description of PageRank:

“ PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Hence it is important that your website should have links from and to other websites. The more number of links, the better PageRank for your website which means more traffic to your website! You can start writing articles and submit them to the article submission sites. All of the article sites (the good ones at least) allow you to include a section called “About the Author” or “Author Resource”. It’s here that you can include a link back to your site.

3) Sitemaps

Sitemaps help visitors to navigate between pages and also helps search engine bot to index very easily. Generate a sitemap and keep it updated so that Search Engines will be able to index your website efficiently. There are many Sitemap generators available. You can find a good list of Sitemap generators here.

4) Search Engine Friendly design

When designing your website, make sure that it is search engine friendlt. Meta description is an important component for on-page SEO. Google only consider 155 characters from Meta description. So it’s important to write a unique Meta description within 155 characters using keywords. Images make articles and pages attractive to visitors. More over images are also indexed different search engines. Using relevant keywords in the image ALT tags help Search Engines to recognize images and index them according to the ALT tags. Title tag is very important. Title should not be too long. For Google, 70 characters are enough. Descriptive titles have maximum clickthoughs.

5) Content is King

The most important factor for driving more visitors to your website and maintaining them is to keep your content updated regularly. This would naturally keep Google Bots busy as well as they will index more pages from your website. The more you update the content within your site, the more value it earns. it It takes more than simply having content on your site to bring visitors back to your site time after time. It takes quality content that is updated regularly.

Google and other search engines have a very simple goal with their search results: to provide the most relevant results to those who perform a search. It is important that your web pages are optimized for search engines if you want to get high search engine rankings. A combination of optimized web pages and high link popularity leads to high rankings on search engines like Google.