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Quick FTP connect with FileZilla

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 02:11:33 +0000

FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol”. In order to transfer files to a server, you to need use a software known as a “FTP client”. FileZilla is one such software for Windows and is free. (Mac users can use CyberDuck)

In this tutorial, we will show you how to use FileZilla’s “Quick Connect” feature to transfer files to a web server.

Although this method is the simplest way to connect, it is not the best because it transmits passwords and data over the internet route via “clear text”. Once you have learned the basics of FTP, ideally you will want to use SFTP which is a secured transmission of data as described in our other tutorial.

FileZilla Quick Connect FTP

Step 1: First download and install FileZilla from FileZilla-Project.org. Click on the “Download FileZilla Client” button. It is free.

Step 2: In order to connect to the webserver, you need three pieces of information provided by your webserver administrator: 1) the host name, 2) the username, and 3) the password.

In this example tutorial, we use these three fake pieces of information…

server: example.com
username: someone@example.com
password: 123456

Note that depending on the webhost, the username can in the form of an email address (but it is not a real email address) as in the above or it can be a single word as in “someone“.

Step 3: After you run FileZilla, enter the server, username, password and click the “Quick Connect” button as shown.

Quick FTP connect with Filezilla

Step 4: The pane on the left shows your local disk. The pane on the right shows your webserver. In the left pane, navigate to the files you want to upload. Using the left pane and then drag those files from the left pane to the right pane.

Step 5: When done, disconnect the connection to the server by clicking the disconnect icon.

More info…

Tools for Freelancers

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:32:52 +0000

Here are some tools that may be useful to freelancers…

FreshBooks.com – invoicing
BatchBlue.com – CRM
EchoSign.com – capture digital signatures for contracts.
GotoMeeting.com – online meeting and screen share
TeamViewer.com – remote control and desktop sharing
Basecamp – project management
Skype.com – Voice of IP telephony
Google Voice – telephony you can get your own number and forward it to your cell phone
RingCentral.com – toll-free or local hosted number for small businesses
OvernightPrints.com and VistaPrint.com for business cards

Resources of Job Sites for Job Seekers

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:28:25 +0000

Below are some collected resources of sites where you can find work and jobs. If you are looking specifically for freelance work, go to our Freelance Work section.

Job Search Engines

Indeed.com
oodle.com/job
SimplyHired.com
JobSter.com
JobPile
InSourced.com
Job-Search-Engine.com
AllJobSearch.com

Job Staffing Agencies

ManPower.com
Robert Half Technologies
Aquent
Volt Information Sciences
CreativeGroup.com
AdeccoUSA.com
Act-1.com
Hudson.com
Yoh.com
TechniSource.com
Spherion.com
Accolo.com
FrogDesign.com/jobs

Resume Related Sites

VisualCV.com – online resume with video
ResumeCourier.ca – resume distribution
Employment911.com

Other Noteworthy Sites

LinkedIn.com – career networking
GlassDoor.com
JobFox.com
RiseSmart.com

Resources for Finding Freelance Work

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:26:13 +0000

Here are some collected resources of where freelancer might be able to find freelance work.

If you are a business owner that require the services of a freelancer or whether you are a consultant who needs some expertise in some technical area, these resources can also be a great place to find freelancers.

Freelance Marketplace Sites

If this is not enough, also take a look at AllFreelance’s hugh list of freelance job boards.

Job Postings for Freelancers

GoFreelance.com
oDesk.com
ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com
FreshWebJobs.com
Gig Board on 37Signals.com
AuthenticJobs.com – click the freelance tab
CraigsList.org – Look under “Gigs” for your city
BackPage.com – look under “jobs” for your city
Job board on FreelanceSwitch.com
AllFreelanceWork.com
MediaBistro.com – look for “Duration = freelance”
Behance.net/Job_List
FreelanceBBS.com – click “available projects”

Job Listing on Forums

Freelance Work in Application Specific Expertise

Sites and Forums for Freelancers

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:16:26 +0000

Here are some sites, forums, and resource for freelancers that might have useful information for their freelance business.

Sites for Freelancers

Forums for Freelancers

Be sure to take a look at list of places to find freelance work.

Freelance Web Design and Business

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:13:36 +0000

So now you have gain some skills in web design and development. Some might want to find a corporate job and other may want to do freelance work. That is a personal choice, so we have provided resource for both.

See list of places to find a job and see list of places to find freelance work.

Freelancing Resources

If you are just starting out as a freelancer, be sure to check out the sites and forums listed here that are devoted to freelancers. Forums are a great place to ask questions and gain insights from other freelancers who have probably encountered some of the situations that you are facing.

See list of tools that might be helpful in your freelance business.

Forming A Company

If you do freelance work (in the United States) without forming a company, you are considered a “sole proprietor”. Later you might want to form a company to limit your personal liability.

Some more resources…

When you form a company, many states require you to name a register agent that is available during regular business hours and whose address is publicly available. This is so that people who wants to sue you can deliver the Service of Process (or notice of litigation). There are firms that provides register agent services for you which has the added benefit of keeping your own address private.

Employer Identification Number

You may need an Employer Identification Number (or EIN) for applying for corporate bank accounts, or applying for business license, for filings, or for other business activities.

The IRS has online application for obtaining an EIN

LLC (Limited Liability Company)
LLC’s are becoming more popular because they are simpler to form and administer than corporations. They also have the advantage of limited liability.

LLC must keep separate accounting, checkbooks, and credit cards from personal accounting. In general they must file a separate business tax return in addition to the owner filing a personal return.

However, single-member LLC’s are permissible and they have the advantange of limited liability as well as pass-through taxation. Publication 334 says “Generally, a single-member LLC is disregarded as an entity separate from its owner and reports its income and deductions on its owner’s federal income tax return. An owner who is an individual may use Schedule C or C-EZ.” This is true, unless the single-member LLC elected to be taxed as a Corporation, in which case the LLC must file a separate return.

TurboTax article says in regards to single-member LLC’s: “Note that just because you don’t have to file a separate return for your LLC, that doesn’t mean your liability limitation is any different. It’s not; the way your business is taxed has nothing to do with liability.”

Forming an LLC requires filing an Article of Organization with the Secretary of State. And depending on your state you may need to file a “Statement of Information” and pay annual “limited liability tax” that is paid to the Franchise Tax Board.

City Filings

Also check with your city. You may have to apply for a business license with your city and if you work from your home, then also an “Home Occupancy Permit”.

Search Engine Friendly URL

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:02:02 +0000

From a SEO point of view, it is beneficial to have keywords as part of your url. This is known as “search engine friendly” url or SEF for short.

There are my dynamic applications where pages URLs looks like …

http://www.example.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1&products_id=7

A search engine friendly url would look like the following instead…

http://www.example.com/dog-treats/bone-biscuits

Not only is this type of URL more search engine friendly, but I consider it more user-friendly as well.

WordPress and Drupal has configuration settings that automatically sets up search engine friendly URLs for your post and pages. Joomla has an sh404SEF extension that you can install. Zencart has an Simple SEO URL mod.

After making your web application with search engine friendly urls, you will want to generate a XML sitemap of all those URLs and submitting them to search engines.

External factors of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 21:59:24 +0000

You site’s search page ranking depends on both internal SEO factors and external SEO factors.

In this article, we will focus on the external SEO factors.

Few people really know the exact algorithm that search engine uses, since that secret formula is kept proprietary. This algorithm changes from time to time and differs from one search engine to another. Google is the dominant search engine at this time and should be the one we should focus on. The below techniques are just some of the techniques people are using to increase search engine ranking. The technique of building incoming links and having good content is by far the most important and is well agreed by the web communities as being important. For some of the other techniques, it can be effective, but is debatable as to the extent of its effectiveness. It may work well for some sites and not work too well for others. It would be wise to give it a try and then analyze your traffic patterns via server logs and Google Analytics to see whether they are effective or not.

Incoming Links

One of the more important external factors that determines your search page ranking is how many people are linking to you and by whom. It is both quality of the links as well as the quantity. This is also known as “link popularity”. You want deep, contextual links from other websites. “Deep” means that they do not just link to your homepage, but rather to internal pages of your sites that may be within directories and subdirectories. Contextual means that you want links from websites of related topics and with surrounding text that talks about the subject of your page.

More info…
Link Popularity – Chris Beasley

Good Content

The techniques mentioned here will work best when you got good “value-added” content that people are looking for. By virtue of having excellent content, people will naturally link to you even without you asking. And they will be more likely to link if you do ask. Also they will also more likely to “social bookmark” your site such as Facebook “Like” it, Google +1 it, Digg it, add it to Delicious.com, submit it to StumbleUpon, and so on.

Social Network Bookmarklets

Add social networking bookmarklets such as AddThis.com or individual social buttons. If a visitor likes what they read on your site, they might “bookmark” it with one of the many social networks, giving you a temporary boost in traffic. Social networks includes sites like Digg and Delicious.com and StumbleUpon.com

Forums Signatures and Leaving Comments

This means participating in forums and posting replies or comments to forum thread. Most forums will let you have a “signature” appended to the bottom of your post where you can put a link to your website.

Although in some forums, the “signature” link may be attributed with the “nofollow” attribute in which case it would not have any benefit in terms of search engines. Even if the link was not “nofollow”, search engine generally do not consider forums with high “authority” numbers and does not get much weight to links in forums.

But humans who see the link may see click on the signature to visit your site. And if they like it, they might add it to their social networks or blog (in which case you get another link).

See Sitepoint article “10 Rules for Driving Traffic Using Forums“.

The same is true in regards to commenting on other people’s blog. Leaving comments also refers to posting comments to other people’s blog. As Darren of ProBlogger.net mentions, leaving comments on other people’s blog may help increase your traffic. Often times (but not always), when you leave comments, it will ask for your name and your website URL. When your comment is displayed, it will show your name with a link to your website.

Directory Submission

You can get your site listed in various “directories”. There are many different types of directories, and you should evaluate which directories to submit to. How valuable this is and whether this effort is worth the time is subject to debate. More info about directory submissions.

Internal factors of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 21:28:19 +0000

How high your website comes up in the search engine results page is determined by many factors. Some of which are external such as how many people are linking to you and from whom. And other factors are internal, such as the structure of your webpages, what tags you are using, whether you content contains keywords, etc.

In this article, we are mainly focused on the internal factors that affect your search engine ranking — also known as “on-page SEO”. Next article will go into the external factors.

We start by listing some general articles to give you an overview of these internal factors that affect SEO and then we provide more references to the details of each of these factors.

General Articles

10 SEO Rules for Designers
On Page SEO Techniques

title Tag

One of the more important internal factors for SEO is what you place for the title tag for your pages. Typically, for the title tag, you should have the website name and a tagline containing the keywords you want to optimize for. Ideally, you do not want the title tag to be the same for every single page on your site. Instead, you want your title tag to be customized with the keywords that is relevant to the content of the particular page.

Preferably put the keywords at the front of the title if possible; they have greater weight there. And do not make your title too long; it dilutes the weight of the keywords.

h1 and h2 tags

The HTML “h1″ tag represents “heading level 1″. Text within that tag can weighted more by search engines. Make sure you give good descriptive titles wrapped within your “h1″ tags. Use only one h1 tag on a page. Other secondary heading, use “h2″ tags (which you can have multiple of them on a page).

alt Attributes

Use the “alt” attributes on your image tags. Search engines can not “see” your images, but it can and will read the text in your “alt” attribute and the image filenames.
So instead of …

you should put …

Notice that we also gave it a more descriptive filename and have added the “alt” attribute.

Some people use the “title” attribute in an anchor tag as well. As in …

But unless it adds to an user usability, it has little or no weight in SEO.

URL

Just as search engine can read the filenames of your images, it will also read the filename of your HTML file, or more specifically look at the words in your domain name and URL. If possible, name your HTML filenames and directory with descriptive names containing your keywords that you want search engines to find you. Many content management system allow you to rename your URLs to be what are known as search engine friendly URLs.

strong tag

Bolding certain keywords and text will indicate to search engines that those text are higher in importance. But do not over do it.

Outbound Linking

Link to relevant sites or pages and give descriptive text for your links. Instead of a link saying “click here”, use a link such as “More info on Mexico resorts”.

Internal Linking

If you have a site with a lot of content, don’t forget to link to your own pages. It counts. This is known as “internal linking”. In fact, Barrie North, author of Joomla! A User’s Guide says on page 208, “Almost as useful as the holy grail of external links is internal links — and certainly a lot easier to implement. Who knew?! This is easily the most underrated criteria”.

Here when he said “external links”, he was referring to other websites linking to your website (which we will talk more about in the SEO external factors under the section “incoming links”).

Clean Code

Clean simple code (preferably tableless layout instead of table-based) will generally give you a lower code to content ratio. The less code and more text content, the better.

Keyword Meta Tag

The content of this tag is not displayed publicly on the page. And it is not looked at by Google. So don’t worry about it.

Learning SEO

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 21:21:20 +0000

Now that you have your site built, you might have the need to promote it so that people can find and visit it. And more importantly, you want to optimize your site so that people doing searches in search engines will be more likely to find it. This is known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Note that the material presented in this section are based on the general belief of the web communities. The exact search engine algorithms are proprietary information and are thus not known to the general public. Plus the SEO field is always changing.

Why Search Engine Optimization is Important

Seach Engine Optimization is important if your site generates revenue and relies on user traffic to do so. Example of such sites are …

eCommerce sites
Sites that sells services (such as web designer services)
Sites being montetized by ads such as Google AdSense (where site owner gets ad revenue if users clicks on the ads on the site).
Sites that are monetized by affiliate ads such as affiliate programs (where site owner get paid if ads directed user from his/her site to another site and then user makes a purchase or take some other action such as filling out a form).

SEO Techniques

SEO techniques are techniques that optimize the website so that it has a better chance of being found by people running searches in search engines. These techniques consists of internal SEO factors that the site owner can control by the way the pages are coded. And these SEO techniques consists of external SEO factors such as link popularity in terms of how many people are linking to the site and the page rank of the linkers.

Using Search Engine Friendly urls and submitting XML Sitemaps to Google via Google Webmaster Tools is another good way to get your site pages indexed by the search engine. This is especially useful if you site is rich in AJAX and dynamic content where some pages are not readily linked to via traditional anchor links.

SEO Tools

There are many tools that aids the site owner in performing site and traffic analysis as well as tools for keyword selection.

Some server-side tools for tracking traffic includes AwStats. And some client-side tools are Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer. These three tools are all free from Google. Since Google is (at the time of this writing) the leading search engine, they make great site analysis tools. See Google’s video presentation of these three tools here.

For keyword selection, use the Google External Keyword Tool.