• Local: my notebook with Ubuntu 11.10 and NetBeans 7.1 as IDE, I think that NB is very useful, it’s free, you can use a lot of programming languages and if you work in team, it support SVN and CVS;
• Virtual Machine: VM hosted on developers desktop or possibly development server, I chose the first option, you can use VMWare or VirtualBox without problems for emulate a Production Server or understand the behaviour of your software in other enviroment;
• Development (aka sandbox): normally a foreign environment than those listed (local, VM, etc.) in which experiments can be done so it may not even open a development phase, whose purpose is to investigate the effects of any changes or developments that are still in phase “of the feasibility study” or “study of the costs and benefits.”;
• Stage/Pre-production: Mirror of production environment;
• Production/Live: Serves end-users/clients.

And how is your setup?

head: Use “head” to get the first 10 lines of a file. To change the number of lines use the -n option like this:
head -n 1000 access.log
That will output the first 1000 lines of a file.

tail: To get the last 10 lines of a file, use tail. To change the number of lines, use the -n option. The following command outputs the last 1000 lines of a file name access.log:
tail -n 1000 access.log

grep: The syntax for grep is:
grep [options] PATTERN [FILE...]

Commonly used options are:
-e
This turns on extended regular expressions. It allows you to use regex patterns that aren’t possible in regular grep. You can either turn this on by using grep -e or egrep — they are the same thing. See below for more about extended regular expressions.
-i
This makes the search case-insensitive.
-v
This means to find every line that doesn’t match.
-o
This means to extract only the matching part of the line.
-m [number]
Stop after [number] of matching lines.
-r
Search recursively, decending into all subdirectories.
-n
Add line numbers to show where the match was in the file.
There are many more options than the common ones I’ve listed above. Type man grep in the terminal for a complete list.

To search a log file for every line that contains Googlebot and write to a file called google_access.log, you could use this:
grep Googlebot access.log > google_access.log

The following example of grep takes a logfile that only has hits from Googlebot and removes all of the requests for .png files.
grep -v \.png google_access.log > google_access_no_pngs.log

Lynx: Google’s Webmaster Guidelines say:

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

So you can get the text from a Web page as well as a list of links:
lynx -dump "http://www.example.com/"

or get the source code from a Web page with Lynx:
lynx -source "http://www.example.com/"

or, yet, get the response headers with Lynx:
lynx -dump -head "http://www.example.com/"

For today is all, the next time we will see another and very interesting commands in Linux

Security is not a product but a process

I think it’s the same regarding the SEO, but the word “process” is not good, is too generic so I prefer to use “marathon”, why?
Because to sustain a marathon should be better prepared not leaving anything to chance, but very carefully prepared and carefully analyzing all the aspects that are part of a preparation aimed at Marathon; we should schedule training macrocycles based on your experiences in foot and we can organize them into:

• Period of Building or General;
• Fundamental Period;
• Period Specific or Competitive;

and the same for SEO. We cannot expect great results right away but it takes time, practice and perseverance as to obtain a good position in SERPs, at the beginning we don’t have a good results but if we making the appropriate strategies and maintaining an ongoing SEO strategy in the long term, we will begin to see valid and meaningful results and will continue to add more value to our business.

• Content writer an individual who specializes in providing relevant text content for websites. Content writers must be capable of adapting their writing to the varying demands of different websites. Most of their work centers on marketing products or services that particular websites are selling or endorsing.
• Analyst/Strategist whose goal is to do all the analysis and development of new strategies to improve the performance of the services of SEO/SEM, improving results of visibility, traffic and conversion, so as to support our customers’ expectations.
• A Link Builder is worth their weight in gold. Anyone can find links to sites with low page rank or domain authority. A solid link builder will understand quality link building and how to build a link portfolio that looks natural to the search engines. They should not be satisfied with just link building but link maintenance as well so that overall link quantity continues to rise year after year. It is important to find someone with networking skills that will build relationships which will convert into .edu, .gov and other high value links.
• A Keyword Specialist
• UX Designer: we have already discussed how SEO can use the UX (or Information Architecture) and which advantages bring. Obviously a site is made ​​for people and not for a search engine, have a UX expert can only bring benefits.
• Project Manager: the success of an SEO campaign is not limited to your ability to execute SEO tactics. It’s often dictated by your ability to manage projects, people, clients, and external factors. As your strategies become more complex, learning how to manage a project is an invaluable skill. I believe skills as a project manager helps an SEO manage expectations, put out fires, and work to get buy-in on an idea.

Of course this is my idea, you can improve, expand, focus more on Social Media, not have all the figures. Tell me your opinion.

Off-page factors

Off-page SEO is the thing that happen outside of your site to help it get ranked (i.e. backlinks). Off-page SEO can:

• Compensate for flawed on page optimization for less competitive keywords.
• Take a new page from not in the top 1000 results in Google to Page One in weeks.
• Get deeper less important pages in Google, Yahoo or Bing’s index to create more mid-tail or long-tailtraffic.
• Keep competitive pages at the top of search engines (if link quality, velocity and relevance are observed).

and most important

• Develop authority for the page and website (which is the basis of long-term visibility in search engines).

So, we would like to optimize them for SEO and for UX, how?

• Embed Keywords Into Links this increases internal link relevancy and you don’t need to read contextual information above or below link to obtain meaning moreover it’s good for accessibility;
• Keyword Focused Breadcrumb Navigation, for SEO this automatically creates keyword focused internal link to each page on Web site but also users can see hierarchy of information and you can use Breadcrumb Navigation as orienting tool;
• SitemapSitemaps normalize the flow of Page Rank through the site and establish additional link relevance also allow visitors to use an additional navigation system which some users prefer (like lynx);
• Related Products Links establishing additional cross links at the product level augments SEO performance for those pages and improves conversion rates and up-sell potential by helping customers understand purchasing options.

Social Media

Social media is media for social interaction as a superset beyond social communication. Enabled by ubiquitously accessible and scalable communication techniques, social media has substantially changed the way organizations, communities, and individuals communicate.

• Link to Social Media Profiles on All Pages this increases the likelihood that these sites will rank for brand related terms (reputation management) and allows users to find social media profiles easily regardless of first entry page;
• Keyword Focused Tag Navigation establish additional keyword focused internal linking and provide additional navigation that is centered around the words that are most likely to resonate with users.

Other tips

• Make all PDF’s available in HTML format:
1. More pages on your website;
2. Spiders currently cannot parse all content within PDF’s
3. Losing link popularity;
4. Users have a reason to come back to website;
5. Open up more communication channels with users.
• Site Navigation Not Built With Java Script or Flash: ensures that link metrics can be assigned correctly to each page of the Web site and that all pages on the Web site will be indexed. UX side: ensures that people who do not have these technologies enabled in their browser (i.e. iPhone broswer) will still be able to navigate the site and understand what the navigation is communicating.

Now, apart from that I can’t imagine the call center operators to fix their water pipes and sleeves but:

If only 50% of all callers, has a computer and know how to use it (ie, excluding older people or the famous housewife of Voghera) to understand what had happened, the wait would be decreased to 2.5 min and also operators would have had half of work, just spend 5 minutes writing a message.

Here this is the Usability, benefits both for the company and for the users.

By now you should know, my taste in style, are quite clear… Let’s say I do not like to lose myself in “frivolous”) and Flash sites much prefer HTML5 & CSS3 … So, the best way to make you the wishes you anticipate something about fdicarlo.com next year:

• Change hosting;
• CDN for improve the performances of the website;
• Some tutorials/courses about SEO, UX, Copywriting, etc;
• And if someone want “Guest posts”;

so Happy Holidays !

Since the advent of Web 2.0, off-page factors like Social Media (and the user-generated content) are becoming more important and is very crucial for a company to manage their aspects especially because through LSI algorithms the Search Engines (and their spiders) can measure very accurately which documents in a corpus are really relevant with a search phrase even if the phrase appears in a document. Measure the relevance is a key component in an algorithm for sorting the results of a Search Engine. Now I’m trying to explain, and compare, which SEO and UX factors may bring benefits to a site.

Keywords research

Keyword research is a practice used by SEO professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the Search Engines when conducting a search. SEO professionals research keywords in order to achieve better rankings in their desired keywords. From UX side keywords are used to improves conversion, comprehension and is more likely to resonate with those users who are looking for those words.

On-page factors

• Title: For SEO is most important on-page element because keywords that appear in these fields are thought to be good indicators of overall content relevance. For the user, instead, title is used to understand in which page we are (think if you have, like me, 9-10 tabs of Chrome opened);
• Headings: Second most important on-page criteria, bring more weight to the contents and are used to summarize blocks of content, from a User perspective Headings break up information into meaningful chunks of information, improving the speed of searching and scanning documents;
• Content (1/2): Put most important content above the fold because some spiders have an indexing limitation and text at top of page given more weight. If you use inverted pyramid writing style (Conclusion first, then 1st supporting topic, 2nd supporting topic) because Users scan from top to bottom you can increase chances of being scanned by user;
• Content (2/2): Provide updated/new content, this provides new opportunities to target new keywords, you can have page of internal links to boost internal link popularity and crawlers come back more often like Users that have a reason to come back to website and you have a possibility to open up more communication channels with users;
• Alt Tags: Images should to have keyword focused, descriptive Alt tags; this approach allows the Search Engine to understand what keyword phrases the link is relevant for, and also allows users without image viewing capability to understand what content the link points to.

For this first part is all, next time I will talk about Off-page factors, Social Media and other little things to improve the UX of your site.