Webmaster Blog

A lot of people are getting confused here, so I thought I’d offer a hand.

You will all have seen that due to recent scams going on on DigitalPoint Forums; you can now ‘Verify Domain Ownership’ when selling domains on the DigitalPoint Marketplace.

Whilst this sounds like a great idea, most people do not know about Total DNS control, or how to use it.  Which isn’t surprising – it can be confusing if you’ve never used it before!

So here’s a walk-through for verifying your domain on DigitalPoint.

Firstly, you need to set up your sales thread for your domain.   Be sure to enter your domain into the bidding system not just in your post otherwise you will not be able to verify your domain!

Once you have done this, view your sales thread.  You will see on the right hand side of the bidding section of your thread, a line that says “Verfied Owner: No“.  Click on it!

This will bring you to a page which says something like:

Add the following TXT record to your DNS configuration:    digitalpoint-site-verify:ab12345cd12345ef12345gh12345

How many people does this make sense to? – Not many.  Hence why nobody verifies!

So here’s what you do!

Go to your domain manager with whoever your domain registrar is.  Find your total DNS control panel.  This may be entitled MX control, or refer to C-Names, A-Names, MX management.

You should see a long list of names and values under different categories such as “A Names” “C Names” MX – Mail” etc.. Look for the one that is titled TXT.

You then want to click “Add TXT Record”

This is where most people get stuck.  They don’t know where to put in the ‘code’ they got from digitalpoint!

Well here’s what you need to put in.

Name: @
Value: digitalpoint-site-verify:ab12345cd12345ef12345gh12345  (replaced with your actual DP verification)
TTL: Default (leave as it is)

And that’s it!  Now go back to the screen where you were given the code by DP, and click Verify!  It might take a few minutes (up to an hour actually but it wont take that long xD) to work..

If you need further assistance just leave a comment!

Popularity: 25%

This SEO article will explain how to search engine optimise images, and how it can help drive traffic to your website.

Most webmasters do not realise it, but SEO can be implemented with images on your site, and it is a very good idea to do so.

Why? When users search for images and you have images of the searched description, you will more than likely receive at least one visit from that person.

How to SEO your images.

When displaying images on your website, generally you will have something that looks like:

<img src=”http://yoursite.com/path/to/image.jpg” />

Whilst this is fine for showing a picture to your already acquired audience, it’s not bringing you the full potential audience of those people who actually search for those images – even if you give the page a really good title!

So instead of having your standard picture code as shown above, give it an ALT attribute (alternate text).  The true purpose of this is for when the image cannot be displayed, it will show the alternate text instead to give the audience a rough idea of what the image was supposed to be..

BUT it’s true value to you – the webmaster – is how the search engines use it!

Using ALT text on your images allows top search engines like Google to apply a real title to the image.  Okay you might have a post title which the image is relevant to, but the image isn’t necessarily going to be named the same as your post.  So to name it accurately in the eyes of the top search engines, use the ALT attribute.

So how do I SEO my Images?

Well instead of using your standard “<img src=”http://yoursite.com/path/to/image.jpg” />” image code, use this:

<img src=”http://yoursite.com/path/to/image.jpg” alt=”The SEO Title of the Image” /> – obviously replacing “The SEO Title of the Image” with the relevant text to describe your image.  Keep it short though – a paragraph wont help you, think of it as naming a file, it just needs to be a title for the image, but a relevant one.

Now, go get recognised on Search Engine’s Image Searches now by implementing this handy SEO method!

Popularity: 7%

One of the biggest requests here is for SEO articles, so finally I’m going to start on the band wagon and give some useful tips to get your website high up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

The first thing to realise with SEO is that you want to take full advantage of every possible place you can in terms of relevant keywords.  This includes your URLs

Search Engine Optimising URLs

The first thing to understand with URLs / links is that if you can’t read them and get a small insight as to what the page is about, how will the Search Engines?  Sure the crawlers will pick up the content on the page but they do take the URL keywords into account!

So, you want relevant keywords in your URL, not /page.php?id=1

Let’s say you have a website about vehicles.  Each vehicle  is listed under the categories for ‘type’ and ‘manufacturer’.

You have a page for a Ferrari F430 Spider under the category “Ferrari”.  A search engine optimised URL for this would be something like:

chuckunvehicles.com/sports-cars/ferrari/ferrari-f430-spider.htm – See the hyphens (-) in between the words? It’s always a good idea to use hyphens in URLs.  Why?  Well simply to define your actual keywords… If you didn’t use hyphens, a search engine crawler may read this as “sportscars” and “ferrarif430spider” – See the problem?  We want to define our keywords without mistake or misinterpretation!

Also, notice the order of the categories? It’s only sensible to make sure your categorised URLs are in a logical hierarchy!  This shows search engines that the page is under ferrari, which is under sports-cars.  You want to build understandable relevance with your URLs.

To create good SEO URLs without making each page individually you’ll need to know how to use Apache’s .htaccess file to retrieve the content.. I will write a post on .htaccess soon!

All the best with your SEO! Come back for more soon!

Popularity: 10%

Hooray! Today is a good day!

Why? I have reached page 1 on Google for the keywords: Webmaster Blog!

I have been straining to get on page 1 for a long time, and it seems all that effort has paid off.

Thanks to everyone who has linked to my best articles, I am sure this has no doubt helped a lot

As a celebration I feel I must do something.. So expect some big change or offer here over the coming week!

Thank you all!

Popularity: 6%