SEM Blog

The term "Hotlinking" may not be a familiar one to all of you, but you definitely know it’s meaning. Hotlinking is when someone uses a picture from your site directly off of your site, stealing bandwidth but at the same time redirecting spiders to the source image or users to the site of that picture when it is clicked on to view the image. Many people consider hotlinking to be in very poor taste as it can get you in a lot of trouble and often result in the link being removed and your site having a big gaping hole where your stolen picture was.

Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal referenced a conversation with Aaron Pratt, a member of the Google Groups Webmaster Help, in which Pratt said “anything linked to including images shows that people out there might like what you have, google then has to determine is the linking is real or make believe. :)”

The only real benefit that Baker was able to prove through all this information is that your image will gain more weight in the Google Image Searches if it is properly tagged. You won’t be getting any link juice or real due credit in any trackable form unless the image is actually clickable bringing you to its full sized form hosted on your site. As people who utilize hotlinking aren’t really in it to benefit anyone, they can easily strip away your beneficial information from the image code itself.

How do you stop this? Put a watermark on all of the pictures on your site. Make it so the visitors to the linked site realize where the image comes from, reducing the likelyhood that they’ll return to that site if they see all of your images elsewhere, and increasing the chance that they’ll visit your site organically.

Don’t invest too much time into hunting down hotlinking, as your time is better spent advertising your site then hunting down those that hurt it.

If someone asked “does your site validate” would you know what they meant? If not, now is the perfect time to find out. Site validation is a process which makes sure your web page is coded “by the rules”. There are many rules to composing web code and if you don’t follow them you could end up in a lot of hot water.

By ensuring that your code is setup properly you increase the chances of your pages loading properly in a variety of web browsers and search engines. Bad code can cause a lot of strange symptoms so it’s always best to make sure your code validates. Many webmasters, including myself, have wasted countless hours stumped with problems caused by bad code.

Although validating your pages may sound complicated it’s actually a pretty simple process. The first step is to open the W3C Validation (http://validator.w3.org) and put in the address of the page you want to check. More than likely when you hit the “Check” button you ended up at a page saying something like, “Failed validation, 16 Errors”. Don’t fret; it’s not unusual for a web page to fail the first validation check.

Scroll down and you’ll find an itemized list and description of the various errors W3C found. Many of these errors are self explanatory and easy to fix. You’ll notice that W3C is kind enough to tell you which line your errors occurred on. Make sure you have an editor which shows line numbers.

In my experience many errors are caused by using the wrong type of element for the doctype you’re using. For example, you can’t use HTML code in a XHTML document. Another common problem is when you’ve accidentally nested elements incorrectly such as : (h1)(a href)text(/h1)(/a). This is called ‘tag nesting’ and must be done properly so your code is easily understandable by all browsers. This code should read (h1)(a href)text(/a)(/h1).

There is another variety of error W3C will spit out and that’s the type which makes no sense at all. When you encounter W3C errors which you haven’t the slightest clue about try copy and pasting the error into Google, and someone will likely have a solution. So many people use W3C that any mysterious errors you come across have probably already been solved by other people.

In the world of PHP and MySQL, databases have become a daily part of a webmasters and end users online experience. The database is the heart of your web site, without it most sites would not exist. Because the database is so critical it’s important to keep a fresh backup copy on hand in case something goes wrong.

Anyone with access to cPanel can easily save a backup copy of their database using the following steps.

1. Log into your cPanel (your domain.com/cpanel or domain.com:2082 or whatever your host requires).

2. Select the phpMyAdmin icon under databases OR Select MySQL Databases and then Scroll to the bottom and click phpMyAdmin (whichever your cpanel requires).

3. On the left hand side select the database you want to backup.

4. On the right hand side select the Export tab at the top .

5. On the right side towards the bottom check the box which says “Save as File”.

6. Below the “Save as File” select which type of compression you want (none, zipped, gzipped).

7. Click “Go” on the right hand side, this will begin the download of your database.

Do you have a favicon for your site? DynamicDrive.com has come out with a very user-friendly favicon generator that I would like to share:
http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
To create a favicon you browse to find the image on your hard drive you would like to use for your favicon, and then click on “Create Icon”. Upload the favicon as favicon.ico and insert the code shown below into the head section of your pages:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>

For anyone not familiar, a favicon is a 16×16 pixel image that is basically used for branding your site and getting people to remember your site by the little icon in the address bar. It also serves to be useful in favorites (or bookmarks) where your icon will show with the book marked listing. The idea is that if the bookmark for your site stands out in a potential visitors bookmark list then that user is more likely to see it and click to visit your site.

It is best to pick an image that represents your site. In many cases a site’s title is too long to be used as a favicon but there are many other options. You can try using your logo or even an acronym that accurately represents your site. For example, Yahoo uses their capital Y with an !. This red Y is small enough to fit in the 16 x 16 space and still be easily read. It also stands out and can be recognized by many as being the trademark for Yahoo!

If your site does not already have a favicon you will find that by adding one to your pages they will look more complete. It is amazing what one tiny icon can do to make your URL stand out both on your live site and in bookmark lists.