Crafting A Web Master Piece – Part 1
by James on Sep.06, 2009, under SEO, White Papers
We are going to craft a web master piece from scratch. I am going to go very slow, but it is only to educate the readers properly. Okay so before we start anything you need to ask yourself these questions ?
- What is the goal of this website / web app ?
- Am i going to monetize it ? If yes, how ?
- Do i have enough material to complete the job ?
- Can i keep a persistent interest in the project ?
Unless we are not clear on these, we can’t decide from where to start.
I will take a lyrics website as an example here. Okay so i have decided to build a lyrics website, and this is how i answer the above questions:
- Deliver lyrics to the end-user promptly, in a simple and easy to use interface.
- Yes, using Text-Ads, CPM and CPA Advertisements.
- Yes
- Yes
Step 1: Know your competition, keywords, audience
Firstly, we make a google search for “lyrics” and we see that these are the top 10 URLs from a total of 247,000,000 :
- www.lyrics.com
- www.lyricsfreak.com
- www.azlyrics.com
- www.sing365.com
- www.lyricsmania.com
- www.metrolyrics.com
- www.lyricsmode.com
- www.elyrics.net
- www.hindilyrix.com
- www.letssingit.com
What we see here is that its a pretty competitive keyword and Google has around 247,000,000 indexed pages which match this keyword. Next, we see that top 3 results have “lyrics” in their domain name. Using SEO 101’s we pick a domain name which also contains the word “lyrics”: www.zoneLyrics.net
Next, i visit each of the above websites and try to understand them. This is what i understand:
- Almost all of them use mod_rewrite to rewrite their URLs in a keyword rich links.
- Most of them have link exchanges with each other.
- All of them are very old domains, except lyricsmode.com which was registered in 2007.
- They all have around 1000 back links, except lyricsmode.com having more then 20,000 back links in Google.
- All of them had some on page optimizations.
- Viewing at the Alexa site detail page, more then 70% of the traffic to these websites is coming from search engines and they are receiving a lot of traffic.
- The major keyword all these websites target is lyrics and song lyrics. They also have the greatest search volume in this niche.
Analyzing this, I decide that i will use mod_rewrite to build keyword rich links along with the latest on page and off page optimizations in order to compete with them.
So far we have learned:
- We are going to target 2 main keywords: Lyrics and Song Lyrics
- Our audience has to be majorly from search engines
- The competition is very dense and most of the sites have been around for a very long time.
Step 2: Listing your main website features
- Lyrics
- Artist details
- Album details
- Music video or music song streaming (if available)
- Search within lyrics, albums, artists
- Popular artists
- RSS feeds
- Mobile Version
- Management Panel
- User interaction: submit, correct, request or report lyrics
I need to design something which has all these features, is nicely optimized and has a easy-to-use interface.
Step 3: Pre-Design planning
Google and other search engines crawl the page from top left to the bottom right. As they go down and down the page, they start to loose interest and start devaluing links and content. So in order to present them unique and keyword rich pages I have decided to give them the actual page’s content right after the <body> tag in HTML. Before the header, sidebar and footer.
How am i going to accomplish this ? Simple. Using CSS div aligning and Javascript.
Next, I have decided to use tables to a minimum because most of the browsers tend to render tables slower. Instead I will use divs which are rendered much faster on almost every browser.
We will continue to craft a web master piece by following a very efficient and logical approach. Keep visiting to read the next part of this exciting journey.
To be continued …
Profiling a data organizer
by James on May.18, 2009, under MySQL, PHP
From the past week or so i was building a data organizer, here is what it does:
- Collects data from various sources.
- Checks for duplicates, and stores for further checking.
- Spawns multiple threads to check the stored data.
Initially i used text files to store the data, and the data was checked for duplicates using array_unique() function.
This script took alot of memory because inorder to remove the duplicates correctly i needed every chunk of data to be stored in an array first. The constant file reading and writing took the cpu to 90% usage aswell.
I then used usleep() function to sleep the process inbetween and decrease the constant cpu usage, was able to bring it as low as 20% after making the script sleep for 1 milliseconds after collecting each data fragment. However this alone wasn’t helping and i still had to do something about the memory so i created a MySQL database and started storing data in it.
MySQL can check for duplicate entries and discard them, solving the memory issue.
Next i used MySQL query preparing and was able to speed up the scripts performance by 40%.
Conclusion
- Using MySQL is a good option if your dealing with a huge amount of data and you don’t want duplicates.
- If your going to do run a lot of INSERT, UPDATE or SELECT queries then preparing statements speeds up performance.
- usleep() calls can decrease the cpu load and is able to sleep the process in microseconds.
DotA 6.59d is out
by James on May.18, 2009, under DotA Allstars
While i was waiting patiently for 6.60 IceFrog released another sub revision of 6.59
Lightning Revenant
I am really curious to see the new Razor (Lightning Revenant) which has been promised in 6.60, So far i have heard that his 3rd ability and his ultimate have been changed. I personally would have never changed him since he is already a very balanced hero.
There are going to be 2 new heroes (Batrider and Tauren Chieftain), 1 new neutral creep and a couple of changes to the organization of recipes.
I will have to dedicate a week or 2 to understand and remember the changes made in this new map before i go out playing with other clans.
