Imagine if you could monitor every time someone copies and pastes something off your site. To make it even better, what if you can insert a backlink when you text is pasted somewhere else. It’s a great way for attribution, tracking what content is popular, and gaining some inbound links.
There is a service called Tynt Insight that allows you to do this. It’s a free service and there is even a slick reporting dashboard. You simply signup, generate your unique bit of JavaScript and insert it into your site.
There are times when you may want to block search engines (or other robots) from including certain directories or files in search engine results. One way to do this is to create a text file called a robots file. You can use Notepad or any other text editor to create the file.
If you wanted to block robots (like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) from everything on your website you can use:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Is that it? Yes. Simply copy and past that into a blank text file and upload the file to your top-level directory. You can test it by accessing your robots.txt file @ www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt
When the bots visit your page they will read this file and get instruction.
Below, I’ve included some other examples of usage:
Google Analytics is hands down one of the most popular free analytics platforms. It is used by large sites as well as personal blogs.
There is a ton of information provided in the reports that Google Analytics generates and since the reports are customizable you can slice and dice the information any way you see fit.
Google Analytics helps you identify where visitors are coming from, how long they stay on your site, which products are selling, which keywords lead to the highest conversion rates, which pages are most popular, and so on. I will have plenty of posts in the future discussing Google Analytics (including some advanced tweaks), but in this post I’d like to discuss the ”Traffic Sources” sources portion in Google Analytics. In particular, how to include information into your URLs to help you and Google Analytics identify a source of traffic.
What is a web hosting service? How do I choose one?
Some people at Wikipedia have said:
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a serverthey own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center.
Basically, a host is a computer where your webpages, images, video, etc are located. When a person types into their web browser http://www.yourcompany.com. Their computer contacts your website and says “hello, would you like to show me anything” and your web host responds immediately with “Yes, you’ve come to the right place and I know what you are looking for…here it is” and sends the information (webpage, images, etc) over to their computer where their browser displays everything the way you intended it to be displayed.
There are different types of web hosts. Some hosting services handle almost everything for you, some you are almost entirely on your own, some are powerful, and some are extremely inexpensive. I will cover some of the most common choices:
It’s pretty well known that Craigslist is one of the most popular sites in the world and many of the top companies in the world as well as small businesses post their job announcements in the Jobs categories.
It’s easy. You visit craigslist.org and either search in the “Jobs” category or in one of the subcategories.
But what happens when you close the window? What if you didn’t enter the right search term? What if your dream job was posted in another state and allowed telecommuting? Simple, you’ll miss the opportunity.
One of my favorite applications on the web is a free Java application called TouchGraph Google Browser. I use it to help in everything from finding inbound link opportunities to planning a linkwheel strategy and even helps with reputation management projects.
There are a couple tools available on the TouchGraph site, but the one I use is the free TouchGraph Google Browser tool and you can find it here: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html