Visitors Since Site Inception (late 2005) : 146,790
Visitors This Month : 13,835
Nice to see the visitor count rising, which shows the new engine is doing it's stuff.
The actual DB weighs in at 5mb even with 400 posts, countless links, notes, snippets, etc. plus it handles the digg-effect with ease!
Good stuff, will have to do a future post on this.
;-)
Still improving my lil’ demo apps code I’ve moved on to create more permalink google-friendly site structures and reading data off RSS feeds.
So in the benefit of others, here’s what I found,
SEO on Rails …nice blog on integrating basic SEO tactics into your rails app, friendly permalinks, url mapping and dynamic metatags.
Screen Scraping …good in-depth article on screen scraping with Rails, pulling off html data from a target website (e.g. Twitter) to import into your database
Google / Yahoo Sitemaps …excellent article showing how to get your Rails App to create Yahoo / Google compatible sitemaps using the in-built XML features of Ruby.
Enjoy,
John.
SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
Have you ever wondered whether there was a quick and easy way to get your site noticed by all the search engines around the world, and hence get your site to become more popular?
Well there are several methods, first is simple, just post good content.
Second, post comments on other peoples blogs which will in turn get rooted back to you and hence connect and crawl you up the list (but try to be nice at the same time).
And third is to post your site to all the major search engines, by letting them know you exist you create instant word-of-mouth and jump faster up the ladder.
Below is a list to help get in touch with the big search providers, better than a postcard.
All services are free at time of writing.
another tip is to use the Box Model and put everything in div tags, having your main content at the start of the page and everything else below, like sidebars, header, footer, etc.
so when the bots crawl your page the get right to the content first and don’t get confused of side-tracked by anything else.
also include meta-tags, keywords, use the DocType (strict / transitional), always helps, anything to make a bot’s life easier. also a robots.txt file to tell them where they should start and a sitemap.xml to give them a roadmap of your site.
John Griffiths
