All server request invoked with AJAX will use XHR (XMLHttpRequest) whether done using XML, plain text, or JSON. There is also an easy way to capture the server response when the session expires. It doesn’t matter if you’re using jQuery, MooTools, or writing your own custom javascript.

Here’s some PHP code as a simple function:

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function ajax_redirect($url, $permanent=false, $statusCode=303) {
    if($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] === "XMLHttpRequest"){
    	echo '<script type="text/javascript">'.$url.'</script>';
    }else{
        if(!headers_sent()) {
            header('location: '.$url, $permanent, $statusCode);
        } else {
            echo '<script type="text/javascript">'.$url.'</script>';
        }
        exit;
    }
}

If you’re using a framework like codeigniter, simply create a helper file and autoload it. There are so many people complicating this with additional javascript. Now you can invoke this inside any controller by redirecting (303) back to the homepage or login page.

Or, just add the above code to your own custom PHP file and call it using:

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ajax_redirect('http://www.domain.com');

However, if you’re at this post..more than likely, you already know how to implement at least the basics of cufon. Don’t forget to take a look at their styling documentation also. You can do some pretty cool things, like add drop shadows and gradients. Remember, search engines will read this all as text, and this makes for great SEO by being able to wrap the rendered text in H1 text, etc.

This post already assumes you have functional jQuery tabs working and just got stuck with your hover state, or whatever CSS property, not refreshing properly. Let’s say you used the following code to render your text (adding the slick drop shadow effect):

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Cufon.replace('#your-tab-id',{hover: 'true',textShadow: '#000 0px 1px'});

If you read the cufon API documentation, you might notice that it offers a function Cufon.refresh(); and describes exactly what is needed to get the tabs to properly refresh, but the documentation really doesn’t do a good job in a live example. Now, if you go to the documentation on jQuery for the tabs…you will see that you can apply a show event to make the magic happen.

The final code to get cufon working with jQuery tabs is:

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$(function() {
	$('#tabs').tabs({
		show: function() {
			Cufon.refresh('#your-tab-id');
		}
	});
});

The show event will be called after the tab is selected. Obviously, you have multiple tabs. In that case, just call the refresh function for each tab as many times as you need in the show event. Here’s to hoping this saves you many hours of coding to get these awesome features working together properly!

One thing will always remain at the top of any SEO checklist, and that’s content!

Good content will always trump any other criteria because people will visit your page often and probably link to it. Below is a current list that should be addressed on every page throughout your website. All of these items below have been well documented and proven to work. Everything is listed in the order of largest impact to your website.

Here we go!

• Keywords in URL
  Using target keywords in the URL of a page can improve the page’s ranking with search engines. Your URL should contain one or two of your most important target keywords, without exceeding 160 characters.
• Title Tag
  Search engines use the title tag to assess a page’s relevance and to display the description of the page in search results. Including target keywords in the title tag can help increase your page’s relevance in searches. The wording of the sentence or phrase in the heading should appear natural and grammatical. Also, each page on your website should contain a unique title tag that briefly describes the content of that page, and the title tags of multiple pages on your site should not be identical. The title tag on each page should be shorter than 65 characters.
• WWW vs. Non-WWW
  Multiple version of a homepage can be a problem if they are all being indexed by the search engines because they create duplicate content. Your site should contain a single version of your homepage, with a single path to that page. Use either a 301 redirect or a canonical rel=”http://www.domain.com/about-us” attribute between the head tags to eliminate duplicate homepages being indexed.
• Heading Tags – H1
  The presence of target keywords in an H1 tag gives search engines an easy way to assess the relevance of a web page, and can quickly help improve the page’s rankings. The wording of the sentence or phrase in the heading should appear natural and grammatical. Using a couple H2 tags can show secondary priority, but beyond that simply becomes page formatting in your design and to the search engines.
• XML Sitemap
  Search engines use the sitemap.xml file to ensure that they have completely indexed your website, including pages that contain only JavaScript or Flash content without HTML links. Your site should contain a single sitemap.xml file that is accessible to search engines, typically at your website’s root directory, and is up-to-date with entries for all pages in your website.
• Outbound Links
  Too many outbound links from a page tend to dilute the page’s ranking in search engine results. In general, if more than 5 links to an external domain are present, the links should contain the “rel=nofollow” attribute in the anchor tag to the links that are less important. This attribute causes search engines to pass no Page Rank value to the external link. Click noindex and nofollow for more details.
• Robots File
  The robots.txt file is used to prevent search engines from indexing certain pages or sections of your site. Search engines look for this file and if they do not find it, its absence might affect your site’s rankings. Your site should contain a single, properly-formatted robots.txt file that is accessible to search engines at the root of your website structure.
• Lead Conversion Form
  Effective websites use forms to gather critical contact data from visitors for follow-up and conversion to leads. You website should provide such a form in an easily accessible, user-friendly presentation.
• META Description Tag
  The META description tag is often displayed in search results as a summary of your site. The text within the tag should be a clear and precise description of the actual content of each page, be unique, and shorter than 156 characters.

Adding both Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools are also highly recommended to measure progress. In Google Analytics, you can track visitors and the criteria used to reach your site over any date range. In Webmaster Tools, you can..and should submit your XML Sitemap described above. Webmaster Tools will also track the number of inbound links, whether your site has any crawl errors, and how it generally looks across the web. There are a lot more advance features and techniques, not part of this scope.

The next step is Off-Page SEO. This includes link building, social media, article submissions using Unique Article Wizard or similar, local listings, blog/forum posts, and everything and anything to get as many “quality” inbound links from sites relevant to your target audience and content.

A couple of notes before we get to the script:

1. Download PuTTY – Telnet/SSH Client if you’re on a PC. Run it and enter your domain to gain access. Use your cpanel account info at the username and password prompts.
2. Make sure your host gave you a “normal” shell to work with. If you SSH to your domain and see “jailshell” at the command prompt, you will need to email your host to make the quick change to a normal shell.
3. Create a folder called backup in your home directory and chmod 644 it.
4. You will need to create a file with the code below. The best way would be to manually create a new file using vi right in the SSH session. If you’re not familiar with vi syntax, you can copy/paste or download, then just upload the file. Don’t use notepad to edit the file locally, as it is not linux friendly with the carriage returns. Use wordpad to create the file on a PC.

Some quick vi commands:

1. vi filename at the command prompt. The gets into the file, if the file doesn’t exist, it will be created.
2. pressing i in the file puts you into “insert” mode. Just hit ESC to go back.
3. pressing x will delete the character you’re on. I think it’s easier to just go into insert mode to delete, type, use the arrows to move around.
4. when you’re done press :wq then enter. This stands for “write quit”. If you want to just quit, press :q enter to quit without saving

These basic vi commands should be enough. Now let’s take a look at the shell script you’ll be creating.

At the SSH prompt, type: vi my_backup.sh or whatever you want to call the file. By default, you should be in your home directory already. Alternatively, you can just download the file from here and upload it using file manager in cpanel. Then simply vi into the file and change the variables to match your mysql and folder structure setup.

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#!/bin/sh
 
#this is the prefix before the filename and can be anything you want
fileprefix='mysql_backup_';
 
#this is your mysql user - best to create a new mysql user called backup that has access to all databases
myuser='backup';
 
#your mysql password
mypass='s0mething$ecure123';
 
#the backup directory that you should put at the root, not public_html
#chmod 644 the backup folder and leave the trailing slash
backupdir='/home/{typically your main cpanel account here without brackets}/backup/';
 
#more emails can be added by using a , to separate
emailto='test@test.com';
 
#subject of the email
emailsubject='mysql backup';
 
#body of the email
emailbody='mysql db backup attached';
 
#shouldn't need to change below this
date=`date '+%Y-%m-%d'`;
file=$fileprefix$date.gz;
 
mysqldump -u$myuser -p$mypass --all-databases | gzip > $backupdir$file;
find $backupdir -name "$fileprefix*"  -mtime +7 -type f -exec rm -rf {} \;
echo $emailbody | mutt -s "$emailsubject" -a $backupdir$file "$emailto";

Go ahead and test this script at the command prompt by typing:
/bin/sh /home/{your account}/my_backup.sh

This script will also delete all backups older than 7 days to keep things nice and clean. All you have to do now is create a cron job in your cpanel. Find the cron jobs icon and create a new job by just choosing the “common settings” for “once a day”.

In the command space put: /bin/sh /home/{your account}/my_backup.sh

I could probably clean this up more by adding an “account” variable to specify the paths better, but you get the idea. If you have any questions, let me know!

If you just casually browse the web, chances are you’re using IE, and this is no big deal. If you’re on a mac, Safari is solid.

If you’re a web developer like me who relies on Firebug, this is no bueno. Even worse, if you’re using the many “add ons” for SEO purposes (ie. SEOQuake, Delicious), they fail! Also, a lot of websites are not rendering pixel perfect…it’s like Microsoft developed this version. Haha, all joking aside…now what?

Well, there’s good news. A lot of the layout properties can be restored.

MenuBar / Firefox button

• HOLD down the ALT key while pressing the keyboard letters VTM. The Menu Bar will appear like the previous version of Firefox

Tabs on top (above other toolbars). To change Tab Bar to a position below the toolbars as in prior versions, click (to check or un-check) “Tabs on top”

• Using Menu Bar: View > Toolbars
• Using Firefox button: click Firefox button, click small arrow to the right of Options

Home Button can be moved back to before the address bar

• Using Menu Bar: click View > Toolbars > Customize
• Then, just hover your mouse over any element in the toolbar and move it anywhere you want!

For SEO purposes, It’s no big deal that SEOQuake fails. I recommend SEOBook’s toolbar anyway. And, if you’re in SEO and still bookmarking with Delicious..shame on you! Yahoo is phasing out Delicious.

I’m sure Firefox will fix the pixel rendering issues in a new release very soon and this really is the best browser!

What’s even more exciting is that posterous.com has a page rank 7. For search engine optimization and marketing benefits, this is huge! At this time, Posterous allows you to embed “dofollow” links in your profile section. For a detailed explanation about the SEO benefits, take a look at this article link: noindex and nofollow explained. The article is a little techie, but feel free to contact us with any questions. This new avenue for posting to all sites might just be a golden ticket to take any site’s marketing to the next level!

Again though, this is just a first post…and it will be interesting to see how this simple email message with a quick link and image will translate to each social media outlet. If this works as well as it claims, there will be many more post using this source, not only from ZS, but from many new clients as their keywords dominate the web through the marketing efforts of Zadro Solutions.

Until next time, happy marketing everyone!

Put simply, you NEED SEO to be found on search engines.

This blog entry will focus on what you can do immediately to your website for on-page optimization. Obviously, a killer social media game is also critical.

First, take a look at this chart taken from SEOMoz.org

The first thing that pops out is that over 23% of your Google Ranking is given to the trust or authority of any linking domain. In other words, the “trust” of the sites linking to YOU are the most important for determining your Google rank. You can go to alexa.com and see the top 500 sites. Get a link from 1 or more of those sites, and you’re on your way to high page rank!

Moving on, you can see that 15% goes to on-page optimization…

Your website “title” tags are crucial to get indexed. However, if the website content doesn’t match on that specific page, you’re gonna get dinged. Remember, there is no exact science here (and if anybody tells you otherwise, fire them). But, you really need to use some common sense. If your website title has “Chicago Web Design” in the title, there needs to be a reference to it in the body of your website.

Let’s talk about meta tags a little. There was a time where the “keyword” tag was being abused and a phrase was coined: keyword stuffing. Believe it or not, people were putting any popular keyphrase even if it wasn’t relevant to the website. At one time Google used this meta tag to rank your website. These days, it’s more of a cross reference to your content again. Noticing a pattern yet? Content is king.

A couple meta tags that are still highly relevant are the “description” and “robots” tags.

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<meta name="description" content="A description of the page" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />

Google will use the description tag only in some situations where they fit. No one knows what those situation are. Just make sure you add them to each page if you’re in doubt. The robots meta tag is used to let the web crawlers know whether or not to index your web page. See this blog post for more info. Btw, all these meta tags go in between the “head” tags of your website.

The next thing is URL structure. We all should know what a URL (uniform resource locator) is by now, especially since the web has been out for..oh..about 20 years. If not, http://www.zadrosolutions.com is an example of one. But, the structure comes into play after the .com in any URL or website address. Take a look at the URL of this blog post. See how it relates to the article? Again, it needs to relate to the website content. If the URL was http://www.zadrosolutions.com/blog?id=12345, that wouldn’t be good. Also, if you have domains like http://www.domain.com/index1.html, those will not get crawled properly.

Internal linking is increasingly becoming more important. These links are commonly referred to as “anchor text”. The internal anchor text of your site helps the search engines determine if the..wait for it…CONTENT is relevant. Basically, throughout the body of your website content, make some of those links to other pages in your site. The anchor text should be any keyphrase that you would like search engines to pick up on.

I hope this helps with some basic on-page tips. The rules change slightly for each search engine, but this should cover the basics. Again, a great social media game is a must. If you would like a FREE evaluation of your site, click the contact button and reach out.

Happy SEOing!

For the “normal” version:

Find the code:
return elem.offsetWidth === 0 || elem.offsetHeight === 0

Change to:
return elem.offsetWidth === 0 && elem.offsetHeight === 0

For the “min” version:

Find the code:
return T.offsetWidth===0||T.offsetHeight===0

Change to:
return T.offsetWidth===0&&T.offsetHeight===0

This is the ticket regarding the issue:
http://dev.jquery.com/ticket/4374

And here’s the fix for it:
http://dev.jquery.com/changeset/6282

That’s it!

Their first question to the audience was to define social media. I thought this was an excellent way to open the segment. And, people in the audience rambled off all the buzzwords: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and the rest. The second question was to define the use of social media. Almost the entire audience thought social media was nothing more than a “networking” tool!

Even worse, more people in the audience are networking via LinkedIn rather than Facebook. With 435 million subscribers on Facebook and only 65 million on LinkedIn…well, you do the math. One might argue that LinkedIn is more “professional” than Facebook. This might be a valid argument, but we still didn’t get to the 1 and only point to social media for business.

Ok, I won’t keep you waiting any longer. The ONLY reason you should be leveraging Social Media in your business plan is to drive traffic to your website! Period. You can have a thousand friends following you on Twitter, but if you’re not directing them to useful information on your website, it’s all pointless. All the social media outlets should be used and treated like the rest of your marketing material. Actually, this is the new way to market. Print media has been dead for a while. TV ads are great for Coke and Pepsi, but most companies can’t compete at that level.

It doesn’t matter where the traffic is coming from. As long as your name is out there. The larger the reach, the more traffic you drive to your website. Simple, right? LinkedIn isn’t even in the top 20 when it comes to site ranking. For site ranking, check out Alexa.

Once you leverage social media to drive traffic to your website with useful content, you will gain Page Rank on your website. Gaining page rank on your website means better results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Bottom line is that Social Media is a powerful tool to increase your SEO efforts by driving traffic to your website. That’s it!

If you would like to setup a proactive plan to increase traffic to your website through proper Search Engine Optimization, please click on contact and reach out. There is no obligation and the benefit could easily double your leads and call volume when done correctly.