HM2K.com

Turn dynamic URLs into friendly URLs

I’m sure we’re all familiar with URLs that look like this:

http://www.example.com/?nav=page

These type of URLs aren’t particularly “friendly”, they are known as dynamic URLs. As a rule of thumb search engines such as Google don’t like them as much as “static URLs”.

However, Google has recently released an article on this very subject entitled Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs, I recommend you give it a read so you fully understand what we’re talking about.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently Matt Cutts posted an article on his blog about Recording an IRC channel on Linux/Ubuntu.

However, as you can see his article was all about using the irssi IRC client on Linux/Ubuntu.

I decided that some people may wish to know how to do it on Windows.

Here’s how…

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I received a phone call from one of my clients who said that they had a BT engineer with them. OK. I thought, what’s going on here…

They then proceeded to ask me “what do we rank for on google?”, my response was “your company name, unless you request otherwise”.

They then went on to mentioned that “the man from BT” can get us listed “at the top” of the search engine for “our keywords”.

Naturally I reply to this with a sigh, but how they can they go around making such statements? It’s so unethical to make these kind of claims.

After reading their marketing bumph, I found out what they meant by “at the top”. What they are offering is the ability to list as the “sponsored links” in search engines, which appear “at the top”.

They requested my email address to send me “further details” through, below is the marketing email I was sent. I couldn’t wait to pull it apart.

This isn’t at all a review of the BT Web Clicks service, in fact i’ve not used it, it’s simply an analysis of their marketing blurb.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 2004, I signed up my old site “hm2k.org” to Google AdSense as an attempt to raise funds for my work.

It’s content was mainly made up of what I was researching around that time, including a few controversial topics such as hacking, trojans and warez distribution. (Oh the joys of being under 18, or at least I was at time of original creation).

Read the rest of this entry »

So you’ve got a shop, or perhaps a new product range and you want to build a website so you can sell online.

What you need is some kind of web based eCommerce shopping cart system, the question is which?

I decided to build a short list of web based eCommerce shopping cart software out there.

The scenario is this, you have a client who wants an eCommerce solution, they are paying you, but not nearly enough, you’re doing this as more of a favour. You started to develop a solution for them, but felt their feedback wasn’t sufficient which would ultimately lead to missing things out, and it probably wasn’t worth it anyway. What is needed is a base platform to build upon.

The rules are this, it must be open source, and it must work out of the box.

Please remember, this is based purely on my options, by all means, take them on board, and form your own options.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the world of web development and search engine optimisation you find this topic is frequently discussed, yet often without any reasoning or conclusion. Therefore the purpose of this article is to investigate why.

So, let’s start at the very beginning, and find out what “word separators” actually are, and why we need them in URLs.

Traditionally a word separator is a space, yes, an every day space you create with your space-bar key.

The problem with using spaces in URLs is that when the URL is utilised in a browser (for example), the URL is encoded using percent encoding which causes spaces to appear as the encoded “%20″, resulting in an ugly URL formation which is humanly difficult to read.

ie: http://www.example.com/percent%20encoding

How do we overcome the problem? Over the years a workaround has developed…

…the dash, no the hyphen, no in fact it’s the minus sign (yes, I mean this “-” symbol)…

ie: http://www.example.com/not-percent-encoding

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I come across a claim by Network Solutions stating:

Did you know? Registering a domain name for a longer term not only saves you money, but helps to increase your search engine ranking. Consider a 5-year term!

Why it works: Search engines perceive domain names registered for 5 years or longer to be more legitimate than domain names registered for a shorter term, and therefore rank them more highly.

Source

Read the rest of this entry »

The idea was to have the ability to create unlimited subdomains simply by creating an appropreate directory for it in your html root directory.

Since most people don’t have direct access to their httpd.conf, the obvious solution was to create a method using mod_rewrite within “.htaccess”. This also allowed it to be setup very easily and quickly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why you should be focusing on one domain name for one site

Often you will find yourself buying a domain for your project (eg: example.com), however these days to secure the brand you have to buy all the associated domains (eg: example.net, example.org, example.co.uk, example.info, etc).

I then find that visitors will end up entering the sites at different points from different domains, depending on how they find it, or what they have been told.

Read the rest of this entry »

I get asked this question time and time again. People seem to believe that the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) will help with their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Well, does it?

The short answer is no. The long answer is as follows…

Read the rest of this entry »