How to

How To Make Navigation Menu Stick On Top When Scrolling

April 18, 2015 by Arun Sarathy Leave a Comment

navigation menu on top sticky when scrolling webpage

WordPress: Create Sticky Menu That Stays On Top When Scrolling Using CSS

This post is a little techy which involves working with code in WordPress > Appearance > Editor section. In particular, the menu items can be found in style.css file which can be fixed on scrolling.

If you don’t want to worry by coding or making changes to your WordPress themes, just check out the various plugins that are available in the WordPress market which does this job.

For those who want to fidget with the codes to create fixed menu when scrolling page, continue reading:

1. Go to your website as it is now. Right click on the menu you want to float while scrolling. Click on Inspect Element.

2. The name for your menu depends on which theme you use. It will mostly be named appropriately – ‘#navbar‘ or ‘#menu‘ or ‘#mainmenu‘ or ‘#subnav’. In this example, it’s named as ‘subnav‘. Expand this line by clicking on the small triangle icon to see all your menu items listed.

3. Now search this ‘subnav‘ in your style.css file. It’s better to take a backup of this file by copy-pasting the style.css contents to a Notepad file.

4. Find the attribute that says position: relative; and change it to position: fixed; you can also add other attributes like width, right, top, left depending on your preference to position your sticky item. Just check this w3.org article to know and read further.

5. Save. Exit. Refresh your webpage and you’ll notice that the menu bar sticks on top when you scroll down. I have Genesis Framework installed, so I had an option to install a custom plugin to do this job. However, following the above steps will help you accomplish the same tasks without installing any plugin.

Alternatively, jQuery also comes to rescue and you can find more details in this post and this post.

What other ways do you know to keep menu stick on top floating while scrolling? Let us know using the comments box below.

Dofollow and Nofollow Attributes – When to add these?

March 22, 2015 by Arun Sarathy Leave a Comment

I attempted to put my solo-brainstorm at work and the result is this post.

Hope you find this solo brainstorm about rel=”nofollow” useful.

What is a rel=”nofollow” attribute?

A rel=”nofollow” attribute, in layman’s terms is, simply asking search engines not to follow a link that you’ve given in your blog post. Every webpage acquires certain PageRank in terms of Google search and crawl analysis, which gets passed and shared on to other links if you add them to your blog. This is also sometimes referred to as SEO juice. If you don’t want your SEO juice to freely pass on to other websites that are not worth it, you can simply add rel=”nofollow” attribute to that hyperlink.

When to use rel=”nofollow” attribute?

If you feel that you want to add a hyperlink to a website that you know for sure is good for nothing to your readers, then simply add a rel=”nofollow” attribute.

What is a ‘dofollow’ attribute?

‘Dofollow’ attribute is just the opposite of rel=”nofollow”. In fact, the absence of rel=”nofollow” attribute is a ‘dofollow’ attribute. There is no need to add a dofollow attribute specifically to a URL.

What does Matt Cutts, the head of Web Spam team, has to say about rel=”nofollow”?

As per Matt Cutts, one can add rel=”nofollow” to specific links. Read more here.

What do we gain by adding this attribute value?

We actually are passing our good karma by NOT adding rel=”nofollow” attribute to our links. Thus, one must ensure that the good karma passes on only to deserving websites that are really useful to people. If not, just remember to add rel=”nofollow” tag.

Apart from the Karma metaphor, you can also see it as a positive vote. Because, just like you, there could be many linking to a particular website. This is nothing but positive vote for that target link – which increases its value in turn – because Google thinks that if many people are linking to a website, then that has to be a good one.

What do we lose by adding this attribute value?

Nothing. By adding this tag, we lose nothing. In fact, this helps us in fighting web spam in our own small way – if you look at the larger scheme of things.

Will this increase my PageRank?

Adding ‘nofollow’ attribute actually doesn’t pass any PageRank juice to the target link that you’d added.

Ponder more: PageRank sculpting

What kinds of links should be marked as rel=”nofollow”?

Any link that you feel is not a good resource for your blog reader.

Is there a way to automate the rel=”nofollow” addition to my URLs using any plugin?

There are many plugins available in WordPress plugins database that you can search and use the one you like. However, there are a couple of plugins I recommend and love. They are:

NoFollow Link WordPress plugin. Developer name: Alex Jose (Spikes)
Ultimate Nofollow WordPress plugin. Developer name: bitacre

How to add rel=”nofollow” to a hyperlink/URL manually?

By default, any hyperlink looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.thekeyponderer.com/about”>About TKP</a>

To add ‘nofollow’, just add it this way:

<a href=”http://www.thekeyponderer.com/about” rel=”nofollow”>About TKP</a>

(Just so you know, href means Hyperlink Reference).

Here’s an interesting InfoGraphic created by SearchEngineLand:

How to Create Your Own Affiliate Banners

March 22, 2015 by Arun Sarathy Leave a Comment

Here’s a situation:

DreamHost Affiliate is one of the many options to earn money online. Earlier, I have also written a very detailed guide (a long post) on how to create your own Promo Code a.k.a Coupon Code and earn money online from DreamHost at no cost for you.

Once you signup for their affiliate program you get to earn up to a maximum of $97 per sale. Along with you also get to earn sub-referral commissions when your referrals refer someone else. This is called Tier-2 commission.

However, all these things are good. But as with all rules in blogging, adding images to spread your word about your own promo codes is the key to add a little spice to your message.

If you want to use images and affiliate banners to design your announcement and promo codes, DreamHost offers their own images and affiliate banners in a zipped format which you can see after logging in to their cpanel. But what if you don’t find good variety of affiliate banners there, and what if you wanted to create your own by adding your blog logo?

That’s when I use Canva! Like the one I used above blog post title header for this post.

Canva comes to my rescue whenever I have design needs. Canva helps me to create a banner for almost every kind of need: Presentation, Twitter header, add logos, PNG images, Instagram posts, other posters.

They have also recently added (March, 2015) Blog Title category with which you can create beautiful blog title designs.

There is also this new Ads category with which you can create Facebook ads, Leaderboard ads, Skyscraper ads, Medium rectangle ads, etc.

Check out canva.com.

Actually, you can use Canva for creating any design for any platform, not just DreamHost affiliate banners. Let me know your thoughts, comments – if you know of any other valuable, almost-free-kinda-resource like Canva.

How To Do Domain Name Research? – A Detailed Post

March 18, 2015 by Arun Sarathy 1 Comment

How to research if a domain name was previously in trouble with Google?

You finally decided to buy your own domain name. Great!

What would you do before you jump of the fence? Would you make any purchase in your life without much forethought, especially if you know that one purchase is going to change your life?

Domain name purchase is also no exception.

Domain research using the tools given in this post can help to make a better decision before you buy a domain. If already bought, you still have some corrective actions that can be taken.

You may buy a new domain or register one by buying from someone – existing domain from a reseller.

Firstly, let’s see the options for performing a domain name research:

Do a search for the domain in Google. Try doing a “site:search”. This gets you results from that particular domain, if it’s already used by somebody.

e.g. site:YourSampleSiteInQuestion.com

If there is no information from that domain inspite of having some content on that site, then it is a pretty bad sign, because the site was not indexed – or it was de-indexed from the search engine database for some corrective reasons.

If you see historical data, domain names were registered first back in the 1980s. There is an interesting infographic on this:

If after your domain name research you find that the domain is parked, Google tries to take it out of their results anyway.

Ponder more: What is a parked domain?

Also search for the domain name…like the name of the domain without the .com or .net or whatever the extension is on the end – this helps you in finding the reputation of the domain. Just do this kind of website lookup using tools given below in the resources section. You can also use Webmaster tools¹ to do URL lookups.

There are also domain name finders available in the internet ecosystem that you can use to find the ones that you want to research for. This helps in finding out the actual domain owner in most of the cases, especially whois.com² research helps you do this exact thing.

May be spammers used it for some abusive purpose previously, or simply to find out how people were talking about it. Probably you can find a comment or two to see if anybody were complaining about the domain for spamming their blog, or something like that.

You can also use the internet archives. Just head on to archive.org and search with that domain name – it will show you what the older versions of that site looked like. If that domain appears to be a lot like spamming, that is a clear sign to be a lot more cautious in buying that domain.

This could mean that the previous owner might have spoiled the domain’s reputation and it takes a lot of effort for you to even get it back to good reputation and to clean it up, especially if there is an associated social media presence with that name.

If at all you decide to buy an existing domain from somebody – may be a reseller – then you can request for the analytics from them, see for any new messages in the Webmaster Tools and check for the existing traffic that goes to that domain. If the traffic looks okay without any sudden drop, then it’s ok to go for that domain, of course after doing all kinds of research outlined in this post.

If at all you find the nitty-gritty too late, after purchasing the domain and find the site to be in a bad reputation, then you can still request for reconsideration in reindexing.

Consider why you are buying the domain:

For all the previous content?
For the links that come to it, the back links?
For the domain name itself?

The backlinks might not carry over as per Matt Cutts in one of his interviews³, so please be prudent of that fact. If you have all spam links and content, you can consider doing a disavow using Google’s Disavow Tool⁴. This can give you a fresh start.

Use the above techniques to find out if the previous owner of the domain used it for spam purposes or not, to decide if you want to purchase the domain. If you find it all well after performing these tests, and you are satisfied, then you might want to consider buying it.

Hope that helps.

Interesting Reading:

History and Present State of Domain Names – How things have changed in the last 25 years

Resources:

Webmaster domain tools
Whois.com domain name research and lookup
Matt Cutts Interview
Disavow Tool

These are the main methods to do the domain name research. If at all you’ve decided to invest to purchase your domain name, please do follow the guidelines given above so your investment gives you a good return and not make you work more than what is necessary. All the best!

10 Great Videos To Improve Blog Quality – Google Webmaster Videos

March 17, 2015 by Arun Sarathy 5 Comments

Matt Cutts, the head of Web Spam team at Google is currently on a long vacation at the time of writing this post (March 2015). However, his lessons and videos that are on YouTube never stops helping the SEO enthusiasts and bloggers alike. These videos are a part of the Google Webmaster series posted on YouTube.

I don’t know if Matt Cutts will extend his vacation further, but I do know that even if Mr. Cutts does extend his vacation, he is still going to be fine.

The reason am saying is because he has left so much of his “thought-prints” (like foot prints) around the internet that his explanations of SEO, website quality guidelines are all figuratively ever green for years to come.

Since you clicked on this post and are reading this, I assume that you are either a blogger or going to be one.

But whatever the case, am pretty sure you’ll like this post because given here are some of the basic yet useful videos by Matt Cutts which can indeed help both newcomers as well as established bloggers.

Ponder more: Get the summary of all Matt Cutts videos

I have curated some of the best of those videos and posted here in a single article so anyone who wants to learn a few basics and few advanced topics on SEO or blogging can be benefited to improve blogs.

These links are given in no specific order. However, the #1 rank is aptly given, at least in my humble opinion.

This is definitely not a complete list. These are just the 10 videos that I felt which are truly great.

I can go on adding more to this list, but just thought that these 10 videos are really basic as well as under-estimated by many new bloggers. Just focus on these first, even if you want to go further in this exciting journey of blogging.

These helped me learn the basics of SEO and blogging, and will help you too, I guarantee that.

Resources: For more videos like these – subscribe to Google Webmasters Group.