Some of the pointers in this guide will help you to make your code beautiful. Yes, I mean it…

1. Use CSS based layers for the layout and use tables only for tabular data: I have seen many big the companies / designers using tables to code the layout. Tables will just help you to increase the lines of codes. Let me explain it by giving an example:

Table based sample code CSS based sample code

Table Based Code:

CSS Based Code:

Now in this simple example, there is not much of difference in the number of lines (since it is a very simple piece of code) but what mainly differ here is number of attributes which are simply not needed for such a small thing. We can just define display:inline style in CSS for list and specify the padding to give the same output.

To check some live examples you can take a look at the code of these sites that I have coded, you will notice that the number of lines are less than 100 in the code. If I wanted to implement the same layout in table based layout, it would have taken more than 100 lines. So I can say that I saved 100 lines by using CSS.

But again I am not saying that you should not use tables at all, tables are needed to display tabular data.

2. Use heading tags: We generally use larger font sizes to display title of the page or to display something important on the page. But many of us, istead of making use of heading tags, just use font size tag and bold tag to make the text size bigger.

Example of the code can be:

Now we can use something like this:

I know I know, the size of the font will be bigger than what we want but we can define the default h1 font size using css. We can use following code:

Now this will be a default size for all the h1 tags on the site so you do not have to specify it again everywhere.

3. Code Logically: I have noticed many designers / coders code just for the sake of finishing the site quickly, they do not think much and apply the easiest solutions.

Few examples would make this point clear.

Recently I had checked preview site of one of the biggest portals in India and I was really shocked to see their code.

Following code was used to display list of products in bold letters.

Now the same can be achieved simply by coding like this:

CSS Class:

That’s it. There was no need to add extra bold tags and div tags. font-weight will do the job for all the links placed under class “center”

Few more examples:

Code to make body margin as 0

Correct usage

CSS:

Code for table border:

If we use in above way, it will show black border only in Internet Explorer but in other browsers, it will show a dirty looking border.

Correct usage:

CSS:

Above code will show a solid black border around the table and it would look same in all the browsers.

4. Keep the scripts Away: If you are using Javascript in your webpage, put the code in a JS file and link it in the html page rather than putting the whole code in between the html. (You can do it by using script src option)

5. Nest it well:

Messed up code:

Nested code:

Many designers do not use proper nesting for the code and they end up making a mess of the code. Messy codes makes it really difficult to edit it as it will take more time to understand, which tag is closed where and which one is opened where.

If you look at the 2nd example, you will clearly understand where id pagewidth is closed and where wrapper is. It just makes life lot easier for the coder.

6. Comment it: If you are working in a company and you coded some site and went on holiday. But to make changes in the site, someone else had to edit the code. So, if your code is commented well with proper info written in the comments, then other person can quickly make changes. If the you have not used comments in the code at all, it will make other’s life hell in making changes.

This is very useful if you are working in dynamic site where some of the content on the page is being fetched from database.

But then again, you should not use comment excessively, use it whenever it is needed and is important.

7. Validate it: This is very important factor. Many people say that validation is not important as invalid code does not make any difference in the output. But I would say for a good coder, validation is must. It helps a lot to understand your mistakes and afterall, mistakes make a person perfect, we learn from those mistakes.

I think these points are enough to make the code gorgeous looking

Following links might help you:

1. W3 Validator
2. CSS Layout Generator
3. A List Apart
4. Sitepoint CSS Forums (Best place to shoot your CSS related doubts)

Well, before starting this, I want to make one thing clear, this is total basic tutorial which makes you understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), search engine optimization is more than page optimization, it depends on many factors like link building, quality of incoming links etc…

So let’s start with the basic….

What is search engine optimization?

It’s a magic which no one can understand, kidding

It is a simple logic which any kid can understand….

It works like this: for a human being, to become popular he needs to do something extra ordinary so that whole world can know about it and he becomes known face in the world from nowhere

So same logic applies for websites also, to make your website popular first you need to do something good so that other people know about it, for example: you have a genuine site with good content and once people know about it they talk about the site (provide links, give your site links in forums, sites, blogs etc…

So search engine optimization is a process of taking something extra ordinary out of your site and let the whole world know about it, it’s kind of makeover for your site.

Now to make your site known to public you will have to do few things on your site….so let me start explaining things one by one in short…

Following things are important part of your site and are helpful for your ranking….

Page Title: The most important part. Page title plays major role in SEO, your page title must contain the keywords you are optimizing page for. Let me give you one example…

Our example keyword is Technology Blog

Title 1: Example.com – Your own Technology Blog

Title 2: Technology Blog – Your own Tech Blog by Example.com

Now from above 2 examples Title 2 is correct because it gives keywords as first preference than the site. It also includes one more keyword – Tech Blog – so you can optimize for one more keyword on the same page.

Let me explain why Title 1 is not correct.

Title 1 started with the site name i.e. example.com which people are going to hardly search but the main keyword – Technology Blog – which is searched by many people, is given last preference…

Meta Keywords: Many people say that none of the search engines do not use Meta Keywords tag but I do not agree with it…there are still search engines which give preference to Meta Keyword tags too.

This tag should only include the keywords which you are optimizing our page for.

In our case the keywords will be “technology blog, tech blog�

Many people just stuff the Meta Keywords tag with useless keywords but there is no point in doing that, you will never get top tanking with it.

Adding long list of keywords in the tag won’t give you top ranking at any cost.

Meta Description: This tag plays very important part in the ranking. Many search engines fetch content from this tag. Best example about this would be search engine Google. Google fetches description of the site from Meta Description tag and if not present, page content is used. So if you use your keywords in a smarter way then it makes sense to both, users searching for the keyword as well as search engines.

Let me explain this by examples:

Description 1: Technology Blog, Tech Blog, Technology Blog India, Tech Blog India. Example.com is India’s best Technology Blog. Example.com is India’s best Tech Blog.

Description 2: Technology Blog – India’s First Tech Blog with latest happening in the technology world. Technology news, tech reviews and more…

Now in this 2^nd Description is more readable than the first one. It makes more sense to users reading as well as for search engines. The keywords are not repeated many times but are framed such way that it makes proper sentence as well as includes keywords more than once.

So stuffing keywords is certainly not the way to get higher ranking but still few sites succeed in it but sooner or later search engines will detect and consider those sites as spam. So it is always better to play safe.

Page Content: People say content is king and I won’t disagree with that but at the same time I would call Page Title and Meta Description also as king because they are as important as page content. I have seen many sites with less content but powerful Title and Description tag on top and I have also seen sites on top with no description, no keyword tags..just Page title and Page content. You can take example of this blog itself…No Meta Keywords or Description are used here…and site ranks very well in search engines for many keywords.

Page content should contain the keywords but like I said earlier, the keywords should not be stuffed in the content. The content should be readable to the users. Person should not use the hidden text i.e. keeping text color same as page background or use CSS to hide the text.

It is always better to use heading tags in the page i.e. H1, H2 etc…but it should be used only when it is needed and misuse of these tags may land you up in a ban from search engines. Now a days search engines (Specially Google) are becoming very smart and detects search spam done using Heading Tags and CSS. Google employee, Matt Cutts’ blog gives very good information on Search Spam.

Footer: This part should contain link to the important section of the site and in this you can include keywords too…

For example if you have 2 different sections News and Reviews then you can have links with text Technology News, Tech Reviews etc…

Some people prefer stuffing keywords with the footer copyright note but there is no point in that and should not be done.

Site Map: This should be the page containing links to main pages of the site. This will help search engines and users to find the sections of the site. Search engine crawlers will crawl through the links provided on that page and include them in the search index. (It is possible that it may not crawl all at the same time but sooner or later the pages get included)

Resources or Links section: If you are optimizing the site then you can have this section for link exchange. You can include the links of your link partners or in simple worlds, the guys with whom you have exchanged links. More the links you have coming from various sites, more it helps. Search engines will find more sites pointing to you and will increase the importance of your site. (This section is not necessary in all the cases. You can also optimize the site without this section too.)

Now this does not mean that you have to exchange links with every other site you see in the world. It is always better to exchange links with the sites in your theme and make sure that you ask them to write your keywords in your link.

Following examples will make you understand it properly.

For a technology blog, there is no point in getting links from sites which are totally in different category. i.e. getting links from sites dealing in clothes, gifts or link directories which are not related to technology. Google will consider them as a link but the value of link coming from technology site will be much higher than the one coming from non-technology site. Getting links from tech forums or other technology blogs could help a lot.

Now 2^nd part of this is, including keywords in the link:

Link 1: Example.com

Link 2: Example.com – Technology Blog and Tech Reviews

From above examples 2^nd one is better because it includes the keywords of your site and it will make search engines understand that, example.com contains Technology Blog and Tech Reviews.

Page Code: This is not very important part for many sites but yes it should not be ignored too. Cleaner the code, better the chances. Many people will disagree with this but somewhere down the line, page code plays some role in optimization.

Many people use table to create the layout…there is nothing wrong in it, the person should use whatever he is comfortable with it BUT the code should be clean i.e. there should not be many unnecessary tags like

The same thing can be driven by CSS and this will make code clean and search engines will find your page content easily compared to messy code.

I personally use CSS based layouts for my websites because I feel that it makes code cleaner because of less lines and everything is driven by CSS file so pages are also of less size and it also saves bandwidth.

Off site factors

Once modifications are done with the site, you will have to move on to submitting the sites to directories.

There is no need to submit the sites in search engines. The ones who say, we will submit your site to xxx number of search engines and all are just fake. Till now (as far as I know) only 3 major search engines are present; Google, Yahoo and MSN. These 3 search engines have their different crawlers. Rest of the search engines just use combination of search results generated by these 3 major search engines. There are few more search engines which use their own crawlers but they still use combination of search data from these 3 major search engines.

To get your site listed all you have to do is, get a link from the site which is already listed in search engines. For example: if any of your friends is having a site or blog which is already listed in search engine, ask him to provide your link on his site, search engine will visit his site, find your link (if easily visible), follow the link and jump to your site…so this way your site will also get listed. OR if you have RSS feed of your site, you can submit it to Yahoo, Technorati and other blog search networks. This should help to get the site crawled quickly.

Now let’s move to Submitting the site to directories: For this you will have to pick selected directories only i.e. no point in submitting the sites to the directories which are meant just for spam purpose. Generally the spam directories have many links on the page as sponsored section. I have seen few directories with keyword stuffed links in header, footer and right navigation area. So it is better to stay way from these sites. Directories like Dmoz, Best of the world (BOTW) are examples of good directories. (BOTW is paid now)

There are many paid directories too but I personally won’t suggest submitting the site to paid directory unless it is needed. In some industries paid directories are must and very helpful in generating leads and sales. But in our example…technology blog, there is no need to submit the site to paid directories and waste money.

The list of good directories can be found here
The other important factor in search engine optimization is, Link Building…this factor mainly deals with getting links from other websites or exchanging links with other websites. You can use sites like Link Market, Link Metro etc…

But I must remind you, these link exchange sites are helpful only for basic purpose, for serious SEO purpose, you need to go way beyond these link exchange sites.

That’s it, I am ending this lengthy tutorial and in next article I will cover SEO tools part. But I am not sure when it will be.

This question was bugging me like hell when I was taking backup of my outlook data today.

I took backup of all the folders, rules but I could not find any option to take backup of email accounts.

I googled for quite some time but could not find anything…
I knew there was a registry key for this but it wasn’t so easy to find….
after digging the net / google for more than 30 minutes, I finally found the way to do it…

Just locate the following key in registry (start – run – regedit):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook

Then right click on the key, outlook and select option, Export…save it anywhere you want…
and run it while restoring your outlook.

This will restore your old outlook profile with all email accounts and rules.
But, you will have to enter passwords for the accounts again. It does not store the user passwords.

I hope this helps people like me..who are lazy to create the email accounts again…

Let me explain in few simple step..

Directi Part:

1. First, Log on to your directi resller account panel
2. From menu on the top – Go to Settings – Branding – Storefront & Control Panel – URL
3. Add your subdomain under “Branded Urls ” option (Change “Partially Branded Primary Url” if you wish to) For example. if you want domains.example.com should show directi control panel then put that in Main URL box

Part 1 Done…

WHM Part at your end:

1. First, Log on to your WHM
2. Select Edit a DNS Zone from DNS Functions, Select your domain and click on Edit
3. Now in the bottom you will see option “Add New Entries”, so there add new entry with your subdomain on the left (if subdomain is domains.example.com then put domains not the full address), Select CNAME from the drop down menu and on the right put your branded URL without HTTP, generally it is something like “YourBrandedName.myorderbox.com”
4. Save the settings

Don’t have WHM? Want to do it Manually?

Here is the way to do it….

1. Get into the server using root
2. Go to location /var/named/
3. Edit the file example.com.db (pico example.com.db) (Replace example.com with your domain name)
4. Add entry “YourSubDomain 14400 IN CNAME YourBrandedName.myorderbox.com.” (You may check the CNAME of previous domain and copy the same code and replace it with your domain)
5. Cntrl + X and press Y to save it

Done….

All done, wait for sometime for DNS to propagate.

Important Note: When you put your branded URL on the right side, do not forget to add . (dot) in the end, if you fail to do so then it will not work, it will take branded URL as subdomain of your site. YourBrandedName.myorderbox.com as YourBrandedName.myorderbox.com.example.com)

To cross check your settings you can visit DNS Stuff website and put your storefront subdomain under DNS Lookup (Select CNAME from the list)

Here is the way to do it…

1. Make sure that you have 2 IP Addresses free
2. Go to EDIT A DNS Zone from DNS Functions in WHM
3. Select the site / username of the reseller
4. In that add 2 new entries, for example: ns1.resellerdomain.com A xx.xx.xx.xx & ns2.resellerdomain.com A xx.xx.xx.xx (replace xx.xx.xx.xx with your IP Address)
5. Confirm everything once, save those entries
6. Now click on Reseller Center from option Reseller
7. Click on Edit Privileges/Nameservers
8. Add those name servers in Primary and Secondary Nameserver box (Don’t click on Assign IP Address or Add and entry for this name server)
9. Click on Save

That’s it…all done