Servage Magazine

Building content is crucial for many websites nowadays. If you run a blog with primary income from advertisements, then you need to attract new and recurring readers every day. If you run an online store selling products, then you need to attract customers and funnel them through to a purchase again and again. Even non-commercial sites wish to spread their message and need to generate and optimize their content to spread their messages. Own content vs. aggregated content Generating own content is the best and most original way of building your site. This works well if there is often something new or noteworthy to write about. Entities that have events on a regular ...

“The historical reasons why you might’ve wanted to go for a subdomain don’t really apply as much, and that leaves you with, okay both are on the same domain, overall, and so it’s really a question of which one is easier for you..” - Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Webspam Team, Halloween 2012 With his brief message in late 2012, Cutts updated the ongoing dispute between between making use of subdomains and subdirectories. Google has basically made the two virtually equal in the SEO game, where previously subdomains were given an edge for the ability to provide a sense of unique linking. And so, we’re back to fundamentals. What is the case for ...

Are your Search Engine Optimizing your website? There are many things to consider when doing so. Have good and proper content, relevant to your products etc. Support it with relevant meta tags, like keywords, description etc. Implement SEO friendly URLs, which make it easier for search engines to index your content, but also makes your URLs look nicer to the human eye. Here is how you can get going: Example URLs // Bad URL: http://my-domain.com/products/descriptions.php?productId=463 // Good URL http://my-domain.com/products/my-super-product-title In the second example, you simply get the product title (or slug) from the URL, and search your database to provide the proper product page, instead of doing it by productId, like in the first example. Getting virtual URLs to map to ...

Geotagging has become one of the new buzz words in the Internet industry. Lots of popular services are introducing new location-based products. Facebook introducing places, Flickr showing of pictures on a map, sports applications tracking your fittness activities, mobile phone applications automaically finding resources near you, restaurants, bus stops and more. All these services, new and old, are making heavy use of mobile devices, cameras, and other GPS enabled devices to automatically capture and submit location data. Of course we all like the ease of automated systems, but aren't we forgetting about all other - existing - content on the Internet? A whole lot of content out there is somehow ...

We all see them everywhere we go in the virtual world of the Internet: Those annoying series of letters and numbers we have to type in to submit a form, often making no sense at all. The captcha. It is a challenge response used to validate an input is originating from a human being rather than a computer system (automated bot). It is used to avoid abuse and junk data being sent via web forms to spam discussion boards, contact forms etc. If you want to have a captcha on your website to gain above advantages, then you have two ways to go: You either create an own captcha system, where you ...

We are following statistics for our online resources pretty closely, and have been doing so for a long time. Therefore it's interesting to follow the visitor's browsers' trend, seeing the Internet Explorer loose more and more of it's turf to alternate software. More and people become aware of the alternatives for their Windows PC, such as Firefox, Opera or Chrome, or they are switching to a different platform such as Linux or Mac. These statistics are important for us when determining the necessity of certain features, which resolutions we should target, and so on. It's highly recommended that you follow similar statistics for your own project to know what software your ...

Website statistics contain powerful knowledge that can help you understand and improve your pages to suit the demands of visitors more efficiently. It is also crucial in determining the quality and success of referrals and ad campaigns. Reviewing your websites statistics should be a routine you do on a regular basis. Daily, weekly, monthly, depending on the visitor volume of your pages. There are various tools out there to assist you with the gathering and evaluation of data, and today I would like to present one of them to you: Google Analytics. Like many other features from Google, their analytics tool is free to use, integrates nicely with any ...

Have you ever thought about offering your product internationally? Obviously the Internet by nature already makes your product available worldwide, but often that is not enough to really reach the global markets. Many web-services originate from English-speaking areas, or are created in English to accommodate a larger portion of the world's population. However, there are many countries and cultures where people strongly prefer localized versions in their own language. Also considering emerging markets like China, India, Brazil and Russia where English is not as common among average consumers as in western countries it would be an ideal step to localize content. If you already have a web-service that is only available in one language you ...

You have a great website or blog, you have cool and interesting articles, you have readers, and you wish to spread the word about your content faster and more efficiently? Sharing and bookmarking your content across a wide range of online services like Digg, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter is a great way to promoting it, and thus broadening your reader base. However, it's even more efficient if your readers can do it for you! Free services such as AddThis.com and ShareThis.com offer exactly this functionality for your website or blog. It's easy for you to integrate and it's easy for you to use. You get a button ...

Search engines are not just search engines. For many websites they are one of the primary ways of promotion by driving traffic from the search engines to the site. However, the Internet has billions of websites, hence searches for common terms may result in millions of results - making it unlikely that your website is among the top results by default. Search engine optimization (called SEO) is the action of modifying a website to be as accurate and search engine friendly as possible, so it becomes more likely it is displayed among the top results for a given search. I will help you to understand the basics of SEO in this article. Search engines ...