SEO, SEM, web design, coding, iPhone, iPad, Android 

Succeed Online

How to add a custom "vanity url" to your facebook Pages page.

Here is how Facebook describes Page usernames:

“Usernames allow public entities to easily promote your presence on Facebook with a short URL. This username can be used in your marketing communications, company website and business cards.”

If you pick the username “AHFXnet,” then your Page’s URL becomes “facebook.com/ahfxnet.”

It is important to note that you need at least 25 fans before you can create a custom URL for your Facebook page. You must also be an admin of the Page in order to secure its custom URL.

Facebook also says,

“Usernames can only contain alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) or a period (".").”

We recommend picking a short and memorable username that reflects your company name or brand. You cannot change your username, so think wisely and ask for a second opinion when deciding on your page’s permanent username. For branding purposes we would suggest you use the same name as your twitter account.

Here are the steps to create your custom Facebook URL.

• Login to Facebook, with the account that administers your Facebook Page


• Go to http://www.facebook.com/username/


• You will see in a yellow box, the username for your PERSONAL profile. This is not related to your Page username.


• Below, you will see a link that says, “Set a username for you Pages”


• Click on that link


• A box will appear, and if you have more than one Facebook Page which you administer, you will see a drop down menu with all of your Pages displayed. Pick the desired Page from the list.


• If you are eligible for a username, meaning you have at least 25 fans and have not yet set your username, you will see a box that says “Enter Desired Username”


• If you select a page that does not have 25 fans, Facebook will tell you that you are not eligible. If you pick a page with already has a username, Facebook will display the current username, which cannot be changed.


• Once you enter a username, you can click “Check Availability.” If your desired username is available, you will see a box reminding you that you cannot change your username once it has been set.

• If you are ready to set your username, click “Confirm.”


• Now you have a custom Facebook URL! Share it on your other social networks, and you can even have it printed on your business cards.

Test your custom facebook pages url by going to www.facebook.com/ahfxnet (replace ahfxnet with your new custom url). This page also lets you claim your own custom personal url for your account as well.

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/185

Succeed Online

Eliminating questions allows you to achieve better web usability and quicker navigation making your site much more effective.

Today you can do almost anything in a minute or less, more specifically when it comes to the web, it is important to create web sites so that they can be quickly navigated. A user comes to a site for a specific purpose. They want to find what they're looking for and get out with as little thinking as possible. Making the elements of your site self-evident creates better usability as you start to eliminate questions such as, "Where is the navigation?" "Can I click on that?" or "How do I search?"

Another way to eliminate questions and create fast navigation is to be concise. Users won't read everything on your site. Instead they will scan until they find what they are looking for. By eliminating needless words you are creating a cleaner page and allowing the user to find the elements that they want quickly, making for an effective visit.

Constructing page elements that look like what they are creates better usability. If you are creating a button make it look like a button; if you are making a search bar make it look like a search bar and so on. This is another way to reduce questions. When the user can find the submit button because it looks like a button then you are allowing them to quickly use your site, without any deep thought. Creating better web usability with self-evident elements will make your site much more effective.

Usability is very important to think about when designing a website. Being conscious about the user and the questions they will have will help you to create a more effective site that is easier to navigate.

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/184

Succeed Online

Firefox loses ground while Chrome and mobile gain percentage points. IE remains constant.

Browser statistics for the beginning of 2011 show that IE has remained at a consistent 61% market share. Firefox fell the most in 2011 losing 5.86% over 2010. Chrome surges again with a 2.65% increase over 2010. While the mobile market continues to increase as Safari mobile doubles its market share over 2010 numbers to 2.98%.

It appears that Internet Explorer has finally curbed its downward trend with the rapid releases of IE 9 and beta releases of IE 10. Google's Chrome has continued to draw strength from Google's aggressive marketing campaign.

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/183

Succeed Online

Failed hard drive on a Dell PowerEdge server placed Raid 5 on a PERC 4/di in a degraded state. Here are the steps to rebuild the Raid array on a Dell PowerEdge.

We had a harddrive crash on one of our Dell PowerEdge servers this week. Fortunately, we had no downtime because it only took one drive out of our Raid 5 configuration. Once we installed the new drive everything rebuilt, but the Array Disks still showed in a degraded state. After trying a lot of options like reseating the hot swap drive, rebuilding the raid array again, running a lot of diagnostics on the drives, etc., we were still getting a predictive drive failure with an error code of 2094 in Dell's OpenManage log alerts.

We decided to try another drive. It worked. The first "new" drive we put in was failing the S.M.A.R.T. test and showing a predictive failure. Replacing the "new" broken drive was the trick. So when it was all done these were the steps to get it out of degraded mode on the PERC 4/di controller array disk.

• Remove bad disk (hot swap so no need to power down the machine)
• Replace with a good disk of same size or larger
• It automatically rebuilds the array
• Once the rebuild goes to 100% it still showed in degraded state
• Clear logs
• Clear alert log
• Do a global rescan
• Everything shows a good status and running without problems.

I was very nervous about pulling drives on the fly, but everything went well.

We hadn't seen much of a drop in performance, although most articles I've read mentioned a huge hit in performance. We saw some performance drop in our website log statistics. Other than that everything went very smoothly for a hard drive failing.

The lesson here is always have backups and check your servers often for failing hardware. Preventative checks are much easier to handle compared to rebuilding a machine from the ground up.

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/182

Succeed Online

PageRank is dead.

Really.

It's not coming back.

Thankfully we have mozRank.

PageRank is not Rankings

I want to make sure that you don't think that PageRank is how well your page ranks for a given keyword set. PageRank was Google's original idea of how to give weight or a numerical value to "how important" a page is. So while it is a factor in how well a page ranks, it is not THE deciding factor. For more on rankings see our rankings pages.

Why should you be more interested in mozRank than PageRank.

In the good-ol'-days PageRank was constantly updated and explained a lot about why certain sites outranked other sites. It was Google's bread-and-butter. However Google soon moved past their simplistic view of the web and started adding more and more key indicators in their ranking factors. This, along with people's greed for the magic green bar, caused Google to give less and less feedback to the community in the form of PageRank updates.

So despite Google's claims of making data free, they have locked down PageRank and don't even show an "outdated" PageRank like they used to. They've just stopped updating PageRank.

The biggest problem with this is that it takes away our ability to identify how deeply Google is crawling and indexing our pages. Being able to say that the homepage is a 5 and the product page is a 0 is a big indicator that you might have a problem.

Luckily there is a company that has noticed a need and has begun filling the void left by the absense of PageRank updates. Welcome SEOmoz's opensiteexplorer with their free and regular updates of mozRank.

Data should be free

SEOmoz's opensiteexplorer does what search engines should have been doing all along. Letting you know what they have "really" indexed without any "it is best if you don't know everything" filtering. Full data disclosure. Even now we don't get the true picture from tools like Google's Webmaster tools. Google worries that giving us too much information will tip their hand and give us too much knowledge and allow us to poison, spam, or manipulate the results. Oh wait, that is already happening with automatic content generators, adsense garbage sites, etc.. Luckily SEOmoz's opinion of making data free is in line with how much information they provide.

Regardless of whether Google descides to do another PageRank update or not, I've move past it. PageRank is dead to me. We now solely rely on mozRank. It is a better indicator. Period.

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/181

Succeed Online

Browser statistics for 2010 show that IE loses 6% of its market share. Firefox stays constant with a slight increase at 24.87%. Chrome increases 3% and Safari increase 2.75%.

Internet Explorer (IE) users have been shifting toward the newer versions of IE 8. We have seen a decrease of 8% in IE 6 users (I can hear all the web developers rejoicing over that fact). IE 7 users have also dropped by 17% and moved to IE 8 (with an increase of 19%). Interestingly, IE's overall market share has dropped by 6%, while Firefox has stayed fairly constant at 24%.

Those picking up staying IE users are the Safari and Chrome crowds. Chrome has increased almost 3% over 2009 and Safari has increased 2.75%, partially influenced by the increase in mobile browsers. I expect Chrome's smart move to add extensions to their browser has helped with their market share. IE should take note of this fact.

Mobile browsing has also seen an increase in about 0.5% as more and more people turn to their smart phones, iPods, and iPads to access their favorite websites.

Early adoption of IE 9.0 and Firefox 4 are extremely small despite IE 9.0 hitting 20 million downloads.

While the browser wars continue to wage a few things have become clear. People expect updates more often. We also expect to be able to "enhance" our experience through custom extensions and tweaks. Mobile browsing is here to stay and will continue to eat away at the "sit in front of a computer" to access information perception.

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/180

Succeed Online

A quick review of Shoemoney's "Free SEO Report".

I've been a big Shoemoney follower for a long time, but when I read about his latest adventure I was suprised because I had already used the service - Free SEO Report, without knowing that he was behind it.

Here is a quick review:

The report contains some good basic information. You get information like:

• Url PageRank
• Yahoo Linkdomain
• Yahoo Links
• Alexa
• Domain Age
• Title Tag Breakdown
• Headings
• Text Count (densities)
• URL Breakdown
• Sitemap Info
• Description Meta Tag Breakdown
• Link Breakdown
• Size/load Time Breakdown
• Images with Alt Text Breakdown
• Keyword Suggestions

Some of the cooler features are from the backend where you can "skin" the report for your own clients.

Now, while this has some good basic information there are some things that seem to be lacking (and I know you are listening Jeremy):

• Pages indexed by Google (general count using the site: opperator)
• Pages indexed by Bing (seeing as Yahoo is transferring to Bing's services)
• Local Google Listing - this is a big item for better local competition
• I'd use mozRank instead/along side of PR because of how infrequently Google updates
• Bold/Strong & Italics/Emphasis usage

So while this is a nice little "quick report", I can see that it has a lot of potential to grow. If Shoemoney is pursuing this, then I know he'll make it work.

Get your FREE SEO Report now.

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/179

Succeed Online

For those of you in the web site design business, what document, guideline, book, whatever, did you find most useful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Here is some quick advice:

• Always follow the Google webmaster guidelines
• Make sure you use a unique and descriptive title tag
• Make sure you use a unique and descriptive meta description tag
• Make sure that your pages are all accessible through plain text links
• The farther from your homepage a link is, the more likely it isn't going to be indexed
• Gaining links to your site will help you the most after you have taken care of on-page items
• Use bold and italics to give importance to words you want to rank for
• Keep your content fresh and update your site on a regular basis (read my page about "Four Steps to a Better Ranking in the Search Engines")
  

All of these items plus additional information can be found on my blog at www.ahfx.net/tags/seo and at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/178

Succeed Online

How to fix 'nbsp' not defined error in Google Chrome.

I have fought with this problem for a long time and finally found a "correct" answer.

If you have problems using MooTools in Chrome and get "Entity 'nbsp' not defined. Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error." I have a great answer for you. All you need to do is change the following code in your mootools.js file:

doc = new DOMParser().parseFromString(root, 'text/xml');

to this

doc = new DOMParser().parseFromString(root, 'text/xhtml');

Just search for "text/xml" (it was the second result for me) and replace it with text/xhtml. That is it. No worrying about doctypes. No worrying about "& #160;" characters. This just fixes it so you can use normal xhtml instead.

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/177

Succeed Online

Too many companies fail in these incorrect assumptions about SEO when dealing with search engine optimization to get first page results. Rand Fishkin mentioned these two ways companies often incorrectly approach SEO.

Myth #1: SEO is something you tack on after you have built your website, service, product, etc.

SEO is best accomplished when it is integrated in the entire website development process. If you don't have SEO in mind from the beginning for what keywords you need to rank for, who your customer is, and what they really want, then you are wasting your marketing dollars.

The first mistake is that they think SEO is something that they tack on after they have built their product, service, website, whatever. You have a lot of these big companies, media companies, e-commerce companies, traditional companies, even consulting services, whatever business they are, and they think, build a website, get the product, oh right, SEO lets add that in too.

That is the worst move you can make. If you architect SEO from the beginning of your productization, if you put it in with the product group, the strategic group, you will build something TEN times better than what someone who is doing it after the fact can do. If you don’t have that expertise when you start product planning, you are just going to lose out to the people who did. And that is a tragedy. If you want to have a win in this department you have got to do it.

Myth #2: SEO is a one time activity

They think SEO is a one time activity. Oh right, we got to do SEO for the website. Hey did we do that yet, we contracted someone last year, ok good we did our SEO, dumb move. Is marketing a one time activity? Do you hire a marketing department for a few months and then, ok, we are all done we’ve done our marketing. We don’t have to do anything else.

If you are not tracking things over time right, are searching in your space going up but you are staying flat which happens to a ton of people they look and say, "Well SEO isn’t growing for us but it isn’t shrinking."

I’m here to tell you it is shrinking. Every month there are 10, 12, 15% more queries on Google, on Yahoo, on Bing than the month before. So if you are looking flat or not trending up in the same direction as your industry, you are loosing share to competitors. This is something people don’t think about when they look at their numbers.

If you have subscribed to either of these antiquated philosophies, call us today or fill out our form to build your website the correct way from the ground up.

This article is from the AH Digital FX Studios website design blog:: Helping your business succeed on the web, and can be found at http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/176