SEO Sitemaps Give Websites a Boost
A lot of web pages will find an SEO sitemap useful in improving their performance. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, the process that aims to create or revise Internet sites so that it can be better found by search engines. The objective of SEO campaigns is to have websites appear in the top listing or first results page of search engines.
Internet search engines, such as Google and A9, maintain a very large database of Web pages and available files. To do this, they devise a program called a web crawler, or spider. This software automatically and continuously surfs and hunts content in the Web. Pages that the spider finds are retrieved and indexed according to text content, giving more weight to titles and paragraph headers. Spiders never stop navigating the web from page to page, to index the relevant content of the Internet. Besides looking at the text of titles and headers, some programs are able to identify default tags and keep a library of these page keywords or key phrases in the index.
When a user connects to the Internet types a query, which is automatically interpreted as keywords, the search engine scans the saved index and creates a list of web pages that is most appropriate to what the user is searching for.
SEO will use all the combined techniques of keyword analysis, smart code, good content literature, link popularity study and website organization to place the subject web page as high as possible in the list of search results in search engines. Web pages displayed on the top of results pages are assumed to get the most attention, and therefore, opportunity for earnings for web businesses and pages with sponsor links.
Search engines usually return a list of results ranking pages according to the number of Internet sites linked to them. Results can be classified as organic, or sponsored links. Sponsored links are shown prominently because their creators or agents paid the search engine. Sponsored links are the main source of income of search engines. “Organic” search results are the lists of actual results from the engines index and are directly related to the keyword typed in the request.
One of the more effective techniques of SEO is the creation of a well-organized site map in a website. Since the site’s main page and other content are directly linked to a site map, spiders can more easily move through the website, identify the key words of the content, and index these for a search engine. This is where the SEO sitemap helps the website creator or administrator.
Site maps are usually pages filled with links. These are shown as tables or lists, although lists are generally more effective. Writing code for SEO sitemaps is very easy and simple to format and maintain. These are ideally basic HTML pages with default tags, logical titles and keywords scattered in the Meta description. Introduction areas can contain more of the keywords. The site should have a main heading for every directory.
A simple list layout helps reduce unnecessary tags that might “hide” your keywords. Some spiders give more weight to the following, than text in the normal body of the webpage: heading text, content within link elements, text nearer the top of the page and the text written for a link. Therefore, writing the keywords and links in these areas could somehow move up the web page’s ranking. This goes for SEO sitemaps as well.
Web sites should be designed consistently, so navigation models should follow the flow of the site map. Therefore, the first section in the site map should be the first link in the navigation bar.
In an SEO Sitemap, and most pages, the headings contain title attributes where more key phrases in the site map can be added. Keywords are generally well chosen and written in the body of a webpage. However, in an SEO site map with little text, key words should be added as much as possible. As much as possible, web links should follow web page titles, and must undergo SEO during coding. Care must be exercised not to cram the page with keywords and links, or the page will be interpreted as blatant spamming and not receive any traffic at all.
There is no way to guarantee that a website will be shown in the topmost ranking of “organic” search results for an extended period of time. However, smart and responsible SEO sitemap techniques can be used to place the website high up in the search position. Regular monitoring and adjustment of the SEO Sitemap and search results would ensure that a website is kept near the top ranking and receiving lots of web user traffic.
Categories: Internet Tags: Boost, rdpclip.exe farpoint spread application, reportingservices grayed "gauge control", Sitemaps, websites
Boost Speed and Memory with DevExpress ASPxGridView
With the release of Outlook 97, Microsoft introduced to the masses an entirely new way in which to deliver information to end-users within a grid control. Component vendors such as us then released components which allowed developers to build Windows® and ASP.NET applications that mimicked the capabilities of Outlook 97’s grid. Over the last 10+ years, countless individuals have come to rely on the grouping/sorting/summary computation capabilities of this new grid metaphor on the Windows and ASP.NET platforms.
The Power of an Outlook® Style Grid
The real strength of the Outlook style grid lies in its ability to organize information for the end-user and report on that information in an effective manner. In a traditional 2 dimensional grid, a user would not have the luxury to analyze the information displayed on screen. Assume for a moment that a grid is used to display sales information. Old style 2-D grids do not allow the user to group sales information by region and to better understand the data being presented to them. But when using an Outlook style grid, the user is free to group and summarize information by any column…giving them the productivity tools needed to get their job done instantly without generating complex sales reports.
Size Matters
The UI power available in an Outlook® Style grid, however, comes at a cost. That cost is dataset size. Large datasets in an ASP.NET and Windows Forms application impact the usability of the application. When it comes to this modern grid UI, users will invariably want to analyze information and they will rarely understand why a grid performs well with a 100 records and fails with 100,000 records. To illustrate, let’s continue with our previous example. Assume a developer builds a web or Windows UI that displays sales data within a grid control and during testing with 100 sales records, the web server (or Windows client machine) and the components used to build the application perform admirably. The developer then delivers the solution to market and the customer is elated by the new UI.
As the customer begins adding information to the database and the dataset size grows, problems take shape. Grouping, summary computation, sorting, and navigation speed start to bog down. The problem worsens over time and eventually the developer is left with only a single option – to restrict the number of records being rendered on screen.
The developer then delivers a modified solution to the customer and the customer asks a very logical question…Why am I not able to group and summarize sales information for my business over the last year? So what if my database has 500,000 records in it? Why can’t I just see the information on screen without having to wait 2 minutes to get incorrect results?
Compromise is Not the Answer
Outlook style grids are extremely powerful but this power can only be realized if the grid control can consume data effectively. If this is not true…if the grid should only be used to display limited datasets, then why bother using an Outlook style grid?
When we chose to write our ASP.NET and Windows Forms grid, foremost in our minds was performance and optimum memory use against large datasets. Our reasoning was simple – whether a grid displays 1 record or a million, the server and client should respond instantly and give the end-user the means with which to operate his business without unwanted roadblocks and hurdles.
Let the Database Server Do What it Does Best
No matter how well one designs a data processing engine, it will never do its job well if one fails to recognize that database specific operations ought to be executed on the database server. No matter how ingenious the algorithms – no matter how brilliant the technology…if the grid is forced to manage data itself, you can bet that a large dataset will eventually bring the web server or the Windows client to its knees and make the application totally unusable.
Don’t Kill the Web Server and Windows Client
The obvious question one might ask at this point is why – why should a large dataset, hundreds of users, and the need to group/sort/navigate records throughout the business day impact the application in such a massive way. The answer is simple: With ASP.NET and Windows, most grid controls need the entire dataset to be loaded and processed for every operation…be it a trivial operation such as record navigation from one page to the next or complex operations such as data grouping. Yes, it’s the web server that is forced into this position by competing grid controls and it is the web server and or Windows client that has to allocate the necessary resources to keep the application running.
At the end of the day, that’s why developers resort to filtering result sets – they need the web server or Windows client to function and not fail.
Enough with Crippling Limitations
The new ASPxGridView and XtraGrid Suite confront the limitations we’ve outlined head-on and have been engineered to free you from the hassles you otherwise would be forced to workaround.
Instead of reading the entire dataset from the data server and then managing data within the grid, the ASPxGridView and XtraGrid Suite simply display data that has already been grouped or sorted on the data server. This is possible because of our specially designed data provider included within the suites. This provider can produce smart queries so that all the grid needs to do is download records to be displayed within the current page. If you have 100,000 records in your data source and want to display 10 records on the page, the grid will need to download only 10 records rather than the 100,000 records required with each postback or callback when using competing grid controls. This means that with the ASPxGridView or XtraGrid Suite, what was once simply impossible with competing grids (but entirely needed by end-users) can now be easily accomplished.
Figure 1
See it for Yourself
You don’t have to take our word for it. To see how all of this works, review our online 300,000 Records demo and compare results with your current ASP.NET grid control.
Figure 2
Seeing is Believing
For a detailed tutorial and explanation of the mechanics involved, please review the following video
Reproduced with permission from DevExpress
Categories: Programming, Whitepapers Tags: ASPxGridView, Boost, component, datasets, developer, download, grid, mailmergelib samples, Memory, microsoft, Outlook
