Parsing and Analyzing Apache Log file using linux commands

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5 step process to improve your SEO in a month

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is something which is bit intangible and unpredictable and so quite interesting area also. Lots of people think to do the SEO but hardly anyone understand what they want to achieve out of SEO.

 Lets try to understand the intent and possible achievement out of SEO.

SEO can be understood as marketing strategy, by ranking up high in Google, but it's the only 1st step of SEO. SEO has 2 more steps left which has almost remained hidden.
So what are the steps:

1. Short term strategy - Helps in quick marketing, few keyword ranking for increasing your reach-ability, estimated time is 1 month
2. Long term strategy - Helps in building a sustainable traffic, estimated time is 6 months
3. Ecosystem strategy - Helps search engineer in refining their knowledge and search, estimated time is 2 years and more

Now a days the search engine algorithm is mature, intelligent, and intuitive. While there are quite a few things that require technical expertise, the overall theme of SEO is pretty simple. So if you are targeting something short term strategy and planning to do some keyword ranking optimization, it's pretty simple.

Do these 5 step process and it would improve SERP within a month.

1. High performance is must : Your page should load as fast as possible, As an average measurement in GA if it is taking more than 7 seconds, you are bad, 4 seconds is awesome, even if it is 5 seconds, it's good. Write good HTML to save DOM execution time, use CDN to deliver CSS, JS and Image, use caching etc.

2. Understand your business and customers and write a quality blog about educating your product, talking about peripheral of your business domain, product and may be your competitors. This helps a lot to Search engine to decide your seriousness of the product, their social need and as the people will start consuming your product, Search engine will give lot of weight to your product, your website. Blog is to educate them, providing extra value about your product. Google algorithm also considers social websites, blogs and social contents to be pushed into Google news section, which is an advantage.

3. Keep watching your spamy links : Google Penguin updates are targeting to penalized website who create spamy link backs. With October Penguin 3.0 update it's much more clear that any anchor text manipulation and spamy link will get penalized. It's good to keep watching your links through webmaster or some tool and audit them at least once in 6 month. And work towards get good quality link back, blog is one of the strategy to get good link backs.

4. Content is the king and play on keyword density: Creating high quality content is still the central idea in SEO. Think about creating a content in much more organized, creative and new style. Like providing good meta information, images, bread crumbs for navigation, readable and something new(be creative). Use the keyword density keyword repetition intelligently on the page. You can use SEO quake kind of tool to check the keyword density. Every keyword repetition should have a value, it should not be just stuffed.

5. Promote your website on social website
Create Facebook page, twitter handle and other social properties to talk about your product, gather people and promote your website, links. This has 2 advantage, one social index score becomes better which also plays a role in SEO and other you can get extra traffic from social media.

And Few small things to remember:

1. Don't publish or build business on illegal stuffs
2. HTTPS serving websites are getting extra value
3. Don't play on aggregation and content farming, now it doesn't work
4. Only keyword stuffing can kill you
5. Being mobile friendly website is quite helpful to receive mobile traffic

It's still simple to achieve good but you've have to focused, consistent and dedicated. It works, it really works :)

Some concepts of Solr

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Enabling JMX in Tomcat

Any Java program can be monitored using Jconsole. Jconsole is an user interface which comes by default with any JDK package, you just need to type jconsole on your terminal and it will show you the interface. Jconsole works along with JMX, which has to be enabled in the respective java program or JVM.

How to enable JMX in tomcat?

You to enable these variables while starting of the JVM. In tomcat you can simple enable them by using CATALINA_OPTS variable in setenv.sh file in bin folder of tomcat.

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote 
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port={port to access} 
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false 
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false
-Djava.rmi.server.hostname={optional, allow what ip to access this Tomcat}

export CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=9999 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Djava.rmi.server.hostname="

To know more details about variables, you can check here,
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/monitoring.html

After changing this, start the tomcat and then run jconsole from anywhere and connect using
"IP:port", if authentication is enable, enter the credentials also. Now you can see all the JVM stuff, threads, memory usages, CPU usages, GCs performed etc.

RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) 'www.domain.com' does NOT match server name

Hi,

I was getting this error on restarting of my Apache,

"I receive the Error: "RSA server certificate CommonName (CN) 'www.domain.com' does NOT match server name"?"

And there was on website which was able to tell me that is something wrong, which is http://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html

In my case, I had missed an entry of "ServerName" directive in Apache virtual host configuration.

<VirtualHost _default_:443>
        ServerAdmin webmaster@domain.com
        ServerName www.domain.com

SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /root/ssl/domain.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /root/ssl/server.key
SSLCertificateChainFile /root/ssl/bundle.crt

</VirtualHost>

So after entering the ServerName, apache error.log file stopped showing the error message. And the website sslshopper also, started getting the certificate of diagnosis, which made me believe, that issue is resolved.

In general, you should also check
1. DNS entry (host name and IP is correct)
2. /etc/hosts file
3. while creating CSR file, did you miss the common name by any chance, In this case create a new CSR and Re-key the certificate and deploy new certificates.
4. Check in Apache or Nginx, ServerName must match, certificates are issued for a fix domain.

fb:share_button/fb:login_button/fb: failed to resize in 45s

I saw one strange issue while using fb_share button which I would like to share and How did I fix it.

When you use fb_share buttons with their stats, means you are using some javascript to get the starts and show beside of the button. When the page load it was working fine, but when you navigate to any other page by clicking on a link or button, and you do browser back to the same page again, it tries to load fb_share button again.. but it keep the textarea locked for 45 seconds, which was quite strange.

I guess it had to be with while fb tries to get the data it also tries to make the proper UI of the button, size and all, and during that period, it locks the textarea.

I started searching for the issue and got a pathetic solution on stackoverflow which says to use this css

.fb-share-button span,
.fb-share-button iframe {
    width: 120px! important;
    height: 25px! important;
}

And amazing part is, it works :)

Make an anchor tag with href but do not let user navigate away

This can be utilized a lot for SEO purposes. Anchor tag href would be crawled by search engines, but when user will be click, it will not navigate away the user from the page, and you can handle the onclick even in anyway you want to.

<a href="http://www.google.com" onclick="dothis(event); return false;">Click me</a>

<script>
function dothis(e){
if (!e) var e = window.event;
alert("ok");
if (e.stopPropagation)
e.stopPropagation();
return false;
}
</script>