Webmaster’s and web site owners should take advantage of Google “Webmaster Tools” program. Upon logging into Google Webmasters Tools, you will see a simple dashboard indicating your web sites that are currently active in the program. Below is a sample of my dashboard:

Upon selecting a web site from the dashboard, you will then have the power to educate the Googlebot (which is Google’s search engine spider) to scan certain pages, enable rewrite rules, set crawl rate, block URL’s, image search optimization, and so on. All of these features will only benefit and your web site as the Googlebot will have a better understanding of your preferences.

Diagnostics-
Under the Diagnostics tab, you will have access to monitor Google’s Web and Mobile crawl of your web site. I check this regularly to keep track of any HTTP errors or Not Found errors.

Statistics-
I browse the Statistics tab on a regular basis due to its great advantage for SEO purposes. All of the options under that tab can be used for advertising purposes, top keywords, Google statistics, and much more..

Sitemaps-
I believe this is the first most essential option for your web site. If your web site does not currently have a sitemap, I would encourage that you create one and submit it to Google by selecting the “Sitemaps” tab. Upon submitting a sitemap, Googlebot will have a much easier time scanning your web site for new content. You will also have the ability to view the last time Google downloaded your sitemap.

Tools-
Analyze Robots.txt - This is another essential option for your web site as you can tell the Googlebot what to do when “it” visits your web site. I feel comfortable with my current robots.txt file, but if you want to get more information regarding your robots.txt file, do take advantage of this option.

Manage Site Verification - This is a must if you want to take advantage of the Google Webmaster Tools.
Set Crawl Rate - I feel that this is a pretty cool feature as you can control the Googlebot crawl rate. If your server is having trouble handling traffic as-is, it may be best to take advantage of this feature by changing the crawl rate to “slower”, improving your servers performance.

Set Preferred Domain - Now this is a feature that I absolutely love! Before enabling this feature, my site had duplicate pages indexed in Google as http:// and http://www. In order to solve this, I enabled this feature which redirects/rewrites all http:// indexed pages to http://www. I believe this is something that will really help in SERPS as you will not be slapped on the wrist for having duplicate content..

Enable Enhance Image Search - By default, this is disabled. If you have an Album or image database that are all images owned by yourself, I would DEFINITELY take advantage of this feature as you could experience a great increase in traffic from Google Images. When enabled, this feature allows the Googlebot to observe images across your entire web site. So if you have a Gallery or Album, and your images have defined alt tags, you should benefit greatly with this option enabled!!

By teaming up with the Googlebot, you can help excel all of the potential in your web site. So sign up, verify your site, and work with your new friend “Googlebot” to help achieve betters SERPS!!

Today I decided to implement a few new new features to Jon-Kingsbury.com by creating an Album and Resume page:

Album:
Pictures from the past couple of years which include:
-Trip to Rome, Italy 2005
-New England Dragway
-1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass
-2006 Harley Sportster Custom 1200cc

Resume:
-My currently updated resume

Please do comment some of my pictures in the Album!

Enjoy!!

It’s official, www.umlforums.com is now officially open for free registration to all University of Massachusetts Lowell students!

What came about the idea of a UML discussion forum? Well, just last week I had a chat with my roommate about the future of www.expertiseforums.com We both agreed that ExpertiseForums was a good idea, but there is just too much competition and work involved to get that discussion forum going.. The software alone costs roughly $300, and it was just useless as I had no ambition for the forum. So we brainstormed a bit until we finally came up with the idea of a discussion forum for all UMass Lowell students.

After registering www.umlforums.com and selling www.expertiseforums.com, ideas just kept popping in my head. One particular idea that may be of great interest to UML students is the thought of having an online marketplace to simplify used-book sales. Buying new books on campus could amount to over $400 easily/per semester. By having a discussion forum as a resource, we could all save some serious money simply by selling/swapping books online.

Some other possible future additions could include a database for off-campus housing, albums/gallery, and many more..

This is surely going to be an interesting project!

Just recently, I noticed the United States is now all green indicating visitors from all 50 states to Defending the Truth (in the past month) Every Monday, the staff of Defending the Truth receives an e-mail with detailed information listing the web sites Visitor rates, Traffic sources, Content analysis, and Goals in graphs/text. These stats are provided to us thanks to the new and improved Google Analytics program. I encourage those who have not enrolled to definitely take into consideration the free Google Analytics program as you will be amazed with the detailed statistics regarding your web site.

Below is an image of the entire globe. Beige indicates no visitors, Light green indicates a small number of visitors, and dark green indicates many visitors from a specific country. Click on the image below for an enlarged view:

Upon selecting a country, you can zoom in to see which states have sent x number of visitors:

That’s not all…Check out California when I zoom into that state:

Now with these detailed statistics, I’ve been submitting Defending the Truth to directories and search engines of states and other countries of which in the past have sent no visitors. After doing so, I was able to achieve my goals in receiving visitors from every state in the United States.

My next goal.., achieve visitors from every country to Defending the Truth!

It’s very painful to hear all over the news the Democrat’s and the Republican’s race to the White House. In 2008, we will likely only have 2 to 4 candidates to choose from, which are good odds that the candidate who will win the election, could be just another disaster for America.

Currently, the Democrat’s and the Republican’s are working hard to find their best candidate. However, on both sides of the fence, the candidates are very close among popularity ratings within their own party.

Now here is the problem. Since America is divided amongst the Democrat’s and Republican’s, (well yeah and the few bright ones who are Independent or unspecified) this will truthfully leave us with only 2 candidates to choose from (as the third or fourth likely have no hope). Why not give the American people the opportunity to choose among lets say 6 candidates? Or even more? For example, 2 Republican candidates, 2 Democrat candidates, and 2 Independent candidates? You may ask why I would suggest something like this; well surely you do remember the elections back in 2004! We had to choose between two idiots! We only chose the candidate who seemed to be less dumb.

If we were allowed to choose among 6, or even 12 candidates, I feel that overall the American people would be much more comfortable and relaxed with the coming elections. The odds would be improved that there actually could be a candidate, or two on the ballot that may actually have a brain.

Today is the first day I came across www.hostingreviewsbyusers.com

In all honesty, I wish I had stumbled across their web site in the past before I whipped out the credit card. Currently I am hosted with www.wirenine.com and I am very pleased with the performance and services. I wrote a nice positive review for WireNine and not two hours later, received a thank you e-mail from Joel and Ben.

HostingReviewsbyUsers has a network of domain names based on the name of the hosting company being reviewed, and a central domain which collects all the data.
For example:
WireNine.com –> WireNineReviews.com
iPowerWeb.com –> iPowerWebReviews.com

One thing that struck me as relevant was the amount of negative reviews left for iPowerWeb. iPowerWeb was my first host and I was very pleased with their services (don’t laugh yet, continue reading). Yet let the reviews speak for themselves…A couple of years back, they were getting an enormous amount of increased clients and sales.. The problem with this was a large reduction in server performance (overloading) and a very long wait time for tech-support (sometimes 1-2 days) due to all of the downtime I was experiencing. So, I spent about a good month searching for a very reliable host instead of jumping too quickly into another “poor” host. I thankfully found www.wirenine.com and I will never turn back. Since day 1, I have been 100% pleased with their services. Now if you visit wireninereviews.com, you will notice that they only have positive reviews..go figure.

Back to my point…I would like to thank Joel and Bill for their innovative idea in setting up a review system based on the most common hosts found on the Internet. If you visit any any the web site of any hosting company, you will only find “positive” reviews. Thanks to HostingReviewsbyUsers.com, you will find only true positive or negative reviews given about a specific hosting company. This is a great way for people to easily and quickly find a reliable host.

Thank you Joel and Ben!

DtT, which is the acronym for Defending The Truth, has engaged in some new ideas of which you may have noticed in my last blog posting. In this posting, I would like to focus on the new “Interviews” idea for the political web site.

This new feature will bring to the members and visitors of DtT different aspects of the web site which are not primarily forum based. The idea behind this new feature concludes interviewing the members of DtT along with displaying the interviews on a static page. This will be a great way of getting to know the members politically and socially.

Tadpole256, a moderator at DtT, thankfully volunteered for the position to conduct the interviews. He has chosen myself to be the first interviewed, which can be seen here:
Interviews - Jonathan Kingsbury

Tadpole256’s next interview will be onthefence, another moderator at DtT. I think his attitude of interviewing the staff members first is a smart move as it will allow the members to get a better understanding of the staff at DtT. He will then most likely focus his interviews towards the active members of the web site who have been with DtT for the longest time, most postings, and so on.

Tadpole256 is also greatly interested in voiced interviews. Although I do not really enjoy hearing myself on any type of recordings, I think this is a great way to build a closer connection with the members. Even though I only know a couple of members personally, I feel that the new interviews and voiced interviews will help all of us to get to know eachother much better..as if we have met in person.