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Sviluppo Ruby on Rails orientato SEO

jekil — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:13:19 +0000

(Photo credits: marciookabe)

Lo sviluppo in Ruby on Rails del mio ultimo progetto mi ha portato a scontrarmi con l’ottimizzazione per i vari motori di ricerca dell’applicativo web.

SEO è la tecnica del come ottimizzare il posizionamento nei motori di ricerca di un sito web in modo da ricere più visite dalle ricerche.

Di seguito elenco alcune semplicissime ma altrettanto efficaci tecniche da tenere in considerazione nello sviluppo di una web application Ruby on Rails ottimizzata SEO.

Friendly URLs

Invece che utilizzare URL che recano la sola indicazione dell’ID dell’oggetto come:

http://example.lonerunners.net/show/11

Utilizzate degli url sexy che recano indicazione del titolo, o altre informazioni, della pagina come:

http://example.lonerunners.net/show/11-this-is-a-test

Metadata dinamici

I tag dei metadata che descrivono la pagina come title, keywords e description è bene che non siano statici per ogni pagina del sito. Fate in modo che vengano generati con contenuto diverso per più pagine possibile.

Evidare la duplicazione

Se avete contenuti o pagine che vengono duplicate bisogna far in modo che i duplicati non siano indicizzati dai motori di ricerca. Questo si realizza semplicemente con un uso accorto del file robots.txt o aggiungendo il seguente tag nelle pagine che non devono esser indicizzate:

Sintassi

Far in modo che il codice HTML generato sia w3c compliant e non contenga errori di sintassi.

Accessibilità

Cercare di disegnare un sito nel modo più accessibile possibile e ricordate di utilizzare i tag alt e title.

Must Have SEO Firefox Extensions

jekil — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:22:00 +0000

Firebug - With this helpful little add-on, you
can tweak and monitor CSS, inspect and edit HTML, debug, visualize CSS
metrics, monitor your network and also make changes in JavaScript live
in any web page
Google Global Firefox Extension - As results for Google differ from one country to another, results become limited. The end to this problem is Google Global.
Global is an unobtrusive Firefox extension that allows you to see
what the Google search results that you are viewing, look like from
different geographical locations. This is very useful if you want to
compare organic search results in different countries or if you want to
see how your AdWords PPC campaigns appear in different regions. With
Google Global, you can change depending on your personal browsing
habits. You can open the search results in a new tab, useful for
comparing results, you can add as many countries to your Google Global
search options and you can also depersonalize the search results shown
by Google Global
Google Webmaster Tools External links ++ - With
Google Webmaster Tools External links ++ you can check the PR of the
pages linking to you and the anchor text used on the link. This
Greasemonkey script determines PR for the link through an XML HTTP
request and adding it in front of the link. You need to have Google Webmaster Central Account and the site added and verified in it. If the link is found, and it’s normal, the PageRank and anchor text is displayed in black, with the anchor text within quotes.
- If the link has rel=”nofollow” on it, the info is made orange and striked through.
- If the link is not found the info is made red, and the text “Link not found” is added.
- If the link is an image link, the text “img, alt:” with the alt text is added. Since v1.1
- If a single frame is encountered, the script opens it and tries that for the link, matching Google’s behavior. Since v1.1
- URL’s without www are now properly recognized as well.
LinkChecker - With LinkChecker, you can check
webpage links at a glance with simple color coding. Ditch those massive
listings of bad links that provide no context and add LinkChecker to
your arsenal of web development tools today. The best thing about this
extension is that the creator, Kevin Freitas is constantly developing
it and some of the expected upcoming features are:
- Sidebar with broken link summary list anchored to bad links
- Link duplication checking/count
- Options dialog to set timeout, color, skip criteria, right-click menu visibility, and other settings
- More detailed or SVG progress pie chart
- Easy bookmark link checking (currently achieved by finding your
  bookmarks.html file on your computer, loading it in Firefox, then
  running LinkChecker — not exactly ideal, is it?)
- Abilty to remove or “turn off” LinkChecker colors after check is complete
- Option time delay each link checked so script not seen as robot
RankQuest SEO Toolbar - RankQuest SEO(Search
Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30
intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and
Google respectively ensures the popularity of the site. Once you
download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks
away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations.
available in Japanese, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, German,
Dutch, French and Chinese languages.
SearchStatus - Display the Google PageRank,
Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with
fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting,
backward/related links, Alexa info and other SEO tools. In simple
words, you can check how any website, no matter where in the world, is
performing. With SearchStatus, for every site you visit, you can view
its:
- Google PageRank
- Google Category
- Alexa popularity ranking
- Compete.com ranking
- Alexa incoming links
- Alexa related links
- Backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN
SEOpen - Provides some basic tools to help with
search engine optimization. Including google backlinks, yahoo
backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features
are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by
using the included toolbar.
Highlights of SEOpen 0.8 are:
- Yahoo Backlinks
- Pages in Yahoo Index
- Google Backlinks
- Google Cache
- Pages in Google index
- Google Translate to English
- Google Related
- PageRank Check
- MSN Backlinks
- Pages in MSN Index
- Alexa Overview
- Alexa Traffic
- Alexa Related
- Alexa Backlinks
- “Mass Check” multiple sources at once
- Check DMOZ Inclusion
- Keyword Density
- Page Size Checker
- HTML Validator
- Server Header Viewer
- Wayback Machine
- Check robots.txt
- Whois Info
Server spy - Server Spy indicates what brand of
HTTP server (eg. Apache, IIS, etc.) runs on the visited sites. When a
tab is selected, the corresponding server name is shown on the
right-hand side of the browser’s status bar
Web Developer extension - The Web Developer extension
adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer
tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and
will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows,
Mac OS X and Linux.
X-Ray - With X-Ray, without viewing the
sourcecode, you can see the tags on a page. One installed the X-Ray
command is available by right-clicking as well as in the Tools menu.
When applied to a page it can help you see how the document was
constructed without having to go back and forth between the sourcecode
and the page in your browser. Is that list made of li, dd or p
elements? Is that an h3 tag or just some bolded text? X-Ray shows you
what’s beneath the surface of the page.

SEO for WordPress

jekil — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:37:00 +0000

WordPress is a blog software optimized for humans not for search engines.
Here is some crap about optimizing WordPress.

Links:

A list of SEO plugins for WordPress

jekil — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:38:00 +0000

Akismet – This one actually comes with wordpress you only need to get a liscence to
activate it. Unless you have need for spam in your blog this is one the
most effective tools for stopping it. Very little actually gets through
and very little gets flagged as a false positive.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
- Let’s be honest once you’ve got a site over 50 pages maintaining a
sitemap by hand is tedious and inefficient. This plugin has quite a few
options and takes care of all the grunt work for you.
Organizer
- This plugin allows you to create and upload files from the web
browser without having to fire up your FTP program. It’s especially
helpful on blogs with multiple users who aren’t tech savvy. The only
downside is if they don’t know the rules things can get messy and
disorgainzed very quickly.
Feedburner Replacement Plugin – Let’s you keep your feedburner feed on your domain.
Objection Redirection
- This plugin by Dax is one of the most powerful and useful plugins I
use. It let’s you redirect old and broken url’s to clean and fresh
url’s without you having to touch an htaccess file.
Google Sitemaps The Google Sitemaps
Webmaster Central program by Google is absolutely one of the most
helpful things Google has ever put out. If you are fixing your own site
or someone else’s there’s no better way to figure out what a search
engine thinks about your site. This plugin updates and rebuilds the XML
file everytime you make a new post and ping’s google to tell them about
it. It’s especially helpful if you publish on a predetermined schedule.
Warning make sure you have the file permissions set correctly or this
won’t work properly.
WordPress Database Backup
- If there is one wordpress plugin you absolutely need this is it. It
gives you the ability to backup the core database tables and any other
tables you specify. The backups happen on demand or on a nightly
schedule. While it might be against TOS what I do is set up a dedicated
gmail account for each wordpress blog. I then set this plugin to backup
the tables every night and email the file to a gmail account. Viola a
free daily incremental offsite backup.
Permalink Redirect – In the event some wise guy tries to mess up your blog this keeps things neat and tidy.
Search Pages
- This plugin ties the built in search function in wordpress to the
pages. The default installation only searches blog posts. This is an
absolute neccesity if you are using wordpress as a CMS and not a
blogging tool.
Search Meter
- Looking at search logs to find out who’s searching for what can be a
valuable tool for figuring out what’s right and what’s wrong on your
site.
Static Homepage – If you want to use wordpres as a CMS instead of a blog this plugin makes the homepage magic happen.
Adhesive – Allows you to stick a posting to the top overriding the standard chronological order of things.
Adsense Deluxe – A powerful way to control adsense from a master level on your blog.
Adsense Injection
- Another Dax special that randomly inserts Adsense somewhere in each
posting. Not advisable for the control freaks, definitely advisable for
sites with lots of returning readers who don’t normally click on
Adsense.
Bunny’s Technorati Tags – A simple and easy interface for tagging in each blog post.
Bread Crumb Trail Generator – A little tricky to configure but very useful once you do. Especially nice when used on a static website.
Feed Copyrighter – Let’s you add copyright info to your feed. Makes it easy to track and follow scrapers.
Moderate Trackbacks – Not used as much as it once was Akismet catches most of the spam, but I keep it around as a backup.
Postie
- A very powerful tool if you do remote posting via email. Takes a
little tinkering to get it set up right but once you do it’s hands off.
Combine with cronless postie for regular automated checking.
Related Posts – Automagically creates a list of related posts.
Recent Posts and Recent Comments – Shockingly these two plugins give you a list of recent posts and recent comments, go figure.
Flickr Photosets
- If you are doing anything with flickr this plugin kicks ass letting
you tie it into your wordpress bog. Especially nice if you’ve upgraded
to flickr pro and have multiple albums, see an example.
Top 10 Posts – gives you the top 10 posts by views, very hackable see my top 100 posts for an example.
WP Cron
- Makes all sorts of wordpress housekeeping features happen
automagically. Just be sure to activate the main plugin first before
any of the others or things may not work properly.
WP – Admin Bar – Puts a really nice navigation bar up for users who are logged in.
WP Contact Form – A very simple no frills contact form.
Bad Behavior
- Does a really good job at keeping out robot scrappers. Also does an
excellent job at blocking people who have their user agent set as bot.
Also does an amazing job of blocking bots that you may want to let in.
Not very configurable.
Custom Query String – Let’s you set the number of posts to appear in a category or monthly archive page. Can result in some really huge files.
Subdomains by Category – Very cool but also dangerous if you don’t know what the heck you are doing.