How to improve SEO ranking of the website.

An important part of promoting your website online is to have it listed by search engines in their search results. The higher positions in the search engine results you get, the more clicks and traffic you will have.

 

The key to having good rankings in free searches is the so-called “Search Engine Optimization” (for short SEO) which starts by having your site indexed by search engines, goes through optimizing the content for search engines and then building valuable links to it. Google has the most dynamically changing algorithm to consider for search engine optimization.

 

There are common issues which are need to be fixed to increase SEO ranking: -

Meta Title:

• Your page’s meta title is an HTML tag that defines the title of your page. This tag displays your page title in search engine results, at the top of a user’s browser, and also when your page is bookmarked in a list of favorites. A concise, descriptive title tag that accurately reflects your page’s topic is important for ranking well in search engines.

• The meta title of your page has a length of 71 characters. Most search engines will truncate meta titles to 70 characters.

Meta Description:

• Your page’s meta description is an HTML tag that is intended to provide a short and accurate summary of your page. Search engines use meta descriptions to help identify the a page’s topic - they may also use meta descriptions by displaying them directly in search engine results. Accurate and inviting meta descriptions can help boost both your search engine rankings and a user’s likelihood of clicking through to your page.

• The meta description of your page has a length of 252 characters. Most search engines will truncate meta descriptions to 160 characters.

<h1> Headings Status:

• Check if any H1 headings are used in your page. H1 headings are HTML tags that are not visible to users, but can help clarify the overall theme or purpose of your page to search engines. The H1 tag represents the most important heading on your page, e.g., the title of the page or blog post.

 

<h2> Headings Status:

• Check if any H2 headings are used in your page. H2 headings are HTML tags that are not visible to users, but can help clarify the overall theme or purpose of your page to search engines. The H2 tag represents the second most important headings on your page, e.g., the subheadings.

 

Robots.txt Test:

• Check if your website is using a robots.txt file. When search engine robots crawl a website, they typically first access a site’s robots.txt file. Robots.txt tells Google-bot and other crawlers what is and is not allowed to be crawled on your site. Read More

Sitemap Test:

• Check if the website has a sitemap. A sitemap is important as it lists all the web pages of the site and let search engine crawlers to crawl the website more intelligently. A sitemap also provides valuable metadata for each webpage.

 

SEO Friendly URL Test:

• Check if your webpage URLs are SEO friendly. In order for links to be SEO friendly, they should contain keywords relevant to the page’s topic, and contain no spaces, underscores or other characters. You should avoid the use of parameters when possible, as they make URLs less inviting for users to click or share. Google’s suggestions for URL structure specify using hyphens or dashes (-) rather than underscores (_). Unlike underscores, Google treats hyphens as separators between words in a URL.

 

Image Alt Test:

• Check if images on your webpage are using alt attributes. If an image cannot be displayed (e.g., due to broken image source, slow internet connection, etc.), the alt attribute provides alternative information. Using relevant keywords and text in the alt attribute can help both users and search engines better interpret the subject of an image.

Inline CSS Test:

• Check your webpage HTML tags for inline CSS properties. Inline CSS property are added by using the style attribute within specific HTML tags. Inline CSS properties unnecessarily increase page size, and can be moved to an external CSS stylesheet. Removing inline CSS properties can improve page loading time and make site maintenance easier.

Favicon Test:

• Check if your site is using and correctly implementing a favicon. Favicons are small icons that appear in your browser’s URL navigation bar. They are also saved next to your URL’s title when your page is bookmarked. This helps brand your site and make it easy for users to navigate to your site among a list of bookmarks.

JS Error Checker:

• Check your page for JavaScript errors. These errors may prevent users from properly viewing your pages and impact their user experience. Sites with poor user experience tend to rank worse in search engine results.

CSS/JS Minification Test:

• Checks if any external JavaScript or CSS files used in your page are minified. Minified files reduce page size and overall load time.

 

Directory Browsing Test:

• Check if your server allows directory browsing. If directory browsing is disabled, visitors will not be able to browse your directory by accessing the directory directly (if there is no index.html file). This will protect your files from being exposed to the public. Apache web server allows directory browsing by default. Disabling directory browsing is generally a good idea from a security standpoint.

 

Plaintext Emails Test:

• Check your webpage for plaintext email addresses. Any e-mail address posted in public is likely to be automatically collected by computer software used by bulk emailers (a process known as e-mail address harvesting). A spam harvester can read through the pages in your site and extract plaintext email addresses which are then added to bulk marketing databases (resulting in more inbox spam). There are several methods for email obfuscation.

Solution: In HTML section, write a tag with random href and In JavaScript file replace href attribute  with original email address. 

 

<a href="mail" id="linkMail"><img src="~/images/mailtoicon.png" alt="Mailto" /></a>

 

$("#linkMail").attr("href", mailto:info@binaryrepublik.com);

 

 

Micro-Data Schema Test

• Check if your website uses HTML Micro-Data specifications (or structured data markup). Search engines use micro-data to better understand the content of your site and create rich snippets in search results (which helps in increasing click-through rate to your site). Read More

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.

Deep Dive into Data Visualization Techniques

What is Data Visualization?

Data visualization is terminology that helps us to understand importance of data by visual/graphical/tabular representation.

Data is time variant and as time passes, data from different sources is collected and processed/analyzed. And, this processed/analyzed data enables decision makers at different levels to gain better visibility on various business aspects such as market trends, organization’s revenue, profit percentage over past years etc.

As common human mentality, people concentrates more on data represented in charts and graphs compare to long pages, bunch of papers etc.
 

Why Data Visualization is Important?

Visualization helps people to analyze data in pictorial or graphical manner. Even the data volumes are very large, patterns and design can be spotted quickly. Visualization convey information easily and it makes it easy to understand.

For example, it is difficult to extract information from normal spreadsheet. It is also time consuming process. Data visualization presents data in a way that, it becomes easy for the user to interpret and analyze data.

Main reason behind the data visualization is that, it provides the past and current trend of data. In a way, it becomes easy for decision makers to take decisions with the help of visualization of historical data.

Selecting Solution for Visualization

As we all know that, if any organization is able to produce and visualize data in effective and correct manner, and if they are able to produce the accurate information then it is the key for doing successful business and enable decision makers to take accurate and right decision.

There are three questions that should be answered before selecting visualization solution:
    1.  What do we want to do with our data?
    2.  Which devices are users consuming the data on?
    3.  Where is our data located?
 

Microsoft Technologies Supporting Tool for Visualization

There are several tools provided by Microsoft that can be helpful in visualizing data in correct manner. All these tools have their own advantages and targeted for specific user’s skill set.

Selection of visualization tool also depends on the organization requirements and the targeted user to whom data will be delivered.

    -  Excel Services
    -  PowerPivot
    -  SSRS
    -  Power View
    -  Power BI
    -  Performance Point
    -  Visio Services

How to Select Right Tool?

There are several use cases that will help organization in selection of tool.

Use Case 1: If user is an Excel Pro. And organization have lot of data and have SharePoint On-Premise and need to provide and share information to many users on intranet.

Solution is Power Pivot:
    -  It is part of the Excel family (Add-in).
    -  We can build a Pivot table from multiple table (multiple sources).
    -  We can build relationships between these tables in GUI.
    -  Enables the ability to quickly process millions of record.

Use Case 2: Organization have SharePoint On-Premise and they want users to do data analysis and discovery on the intranet on their own.

Solution is Power View:
    -  Power View can be used to explore data, to analyze, sort and to filter the data.
    -  It can also be used to discover relationships and to spot any trends.
    -  It provides interactive data.

As we have seen above use cases, but those are just for example. Selection of tool is based on business requirements and needs of users.

Performance Point vs Power Pivot vs Power View vs Excel vs SSRS

1.  Performance Point:
With Performance Point, we have advantage of advanced drill down on complex cube.

It's better to use Performance Point, if our report is based on certain measures and indicator using Key Performance Indicator.

Performance Point reports are supported on iPad, we just need to hold our finger on any chart and our report will be drill down easily.

2.  Power View:
Power View report runs on Silverlight and this can be considered as disadvantage due to it's incompatibility on iPad.

Power View enables self service report creation for end user. So, user can create report based on Tabular Model Cube and Power View will manage connection to model automatically.

If you would like to merely get a grid of information from the source (cube), Power View is that the only one that will do it. Whereas Excel Services provides view into cubes, that needs to be viewed in Pivot Table.

3.  Excel Services:
Excel services provide many rich feature to visualize our data using Pivot Table, Charts, Slicers etc.

The graphing motor of Excel Services is the best out of all the others. It gives the most choices for designing, diagram sorts, 2D/3D graphs, information names, and colors.

4. Power Pivot:
In Power Pivot, we can pull database up to 4 GB into Excel Sheet by creating data model and then, we can use that model to create reports.

So, basically it will allow users to view data in disconnected mode, in other words, user can carry data with them.

5. Reporting Services (SSRS):
In the event that we require a report to be printed to paper, we might need to have tight control over how the report looks and this is the place where SSRS is truly sparkles, it has capacity to make pixel flawless reports and control things like page edges and widths.

On the off chance that we have reports that should be emailed on a timetable, this should be possible utilizing SSRS. This is helpful in the event that we need a day by day or week after week report to be sent via email.

With SSRS,we can export report to DOCX, XLSX, PDF, MHTML formats.

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.

Mail Address not getting synchronized in SharePoint 2013

People might have stumbled upon issue of mails not getting synchronized in SharePoint 2013 and might be wondering why is it so and how do we fix it? Here, I'll walkthrough in detail in order to fix the issue.

 

Cause: this issue is raised because User Profile Service application is trying to sync Work Email with AD attribute "proxyAddresses" instead of "mail" attribute.

First of all, make sure User Profile Service and User Profile Synchronization Service are started.

Now, follow below Steps:

• Go to User Profile Service Application:
• Manage Service Applications --> User Profile Service Application.
• Click on the "Manage User Properties" under People section.

                                     

• In Manage User Properties page, navigate to "Work email" property under Contact Information section. Click on Edit.

• In Edit User Profile Property page, Navigate to Property Mapping for Synchronization section, and remove proxyAddresses mapping.

 

• Now, Go to Add New Mapping section, and select "mail" from Attribute drop down and click on Add.

• You can see "mail" attribute in Property Mapping for Synchronization section.

• In Edit User Profile Property page, click on OK to apply changes.

Start Full Synchronization and wait for Profile Synchronization Status to get "Idle". Now, you can search for any profile on Manage User Profiles page, you will see mail addresses will be filled in for users.

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.

How to create a Custom Plugin in Redmine

Redmine is a free and open source, flexible web based Project management and Issue tracking tool written in Ruby on Rails framework. It is cross-platform and cross-database. We can create our own custom plugin and deploy it in redmine. Here are the steps:

Step 1:
Open Command Prompt For Redmine (Note: Don’t Use normal command prompt of windows.)
To Open command Prompt,
Start -> All Programs->Bitnami Redmine Stake->Use Bitnami Redmine Stake -> Run as Administrator

Then apply below command:

 set RAILS_ENV=production  

This command tells that our Rail environment is Production. To create a plugin, this is initial step . DO NOT forget to execute this command.

Step 2:
To create a custom plugin in Ruby, you have to use command prompt. First, Create a plugin folder. Lets say, suppose I want to create Plugin called "Project Estimation Tracker"
For that I've used below code:

 ruby apps/redmine/htdocs/script/rails g redmine_plugin ProjectEstimationTracker  

Here,
g = Generate

ProjectEstimationTracker = Name of Your plugin.
apps/redmine/htdocs/script/rails = To create a plugin, rails script should be executed.

Step 3:
Now, we have to add our custom page to the plugin . For that, we need to create a controller first.

 ruby apps/redmine/htdocs/script/rails g redmine_plugin_controller ProjectEstimationTracker projecteffortstracking index  

Here,
ProjectEstimationTracker = Name of Your plugin.
projecteffortstracking = Name of Controller
index = action
As a result of above script, it will automatically create default view file in view folder .
In that view file ,we can apply our custom html code.

Step 4:
The most important step for creating a plugin is to configure a route. To configure a route, Go to your plugin folder, then go to Config folder which has routes.config file.
Example: For my plugin routes.config file path is:
"C:\Bitnami\redmine-2.5.1-1\apps\redmine\htdocs\plugins\project_efforts_tracking\config\routes.config"
Edit routes.config file.

 RedmineApp::Application.routes.draw do   
 get 'ProjectEffort', :to => 'projecteffortstracking#index'  
 end  

Here,
get = Name of Plugin (recommended) or any other name which you would like to show in URL.
Example: Here URL will b: http://localhost:90/redmine/ProjectEffort
To => Name of Controller

Step 5:
Final step is to change configuration setting. Go to your plugin folder which have init.rb file.
Example: project_efforts_tracking→ init.rb
Then apply following code:

 Redmine::Plugin.register :project_efforts_tracking do  
  name 'Project Efforts Tracking plugin'  
  author 'Author name'  
  description 'This is a plugin for Redmine'  
  version '0.0.1'  
  url 'http://example.com/path/to/plugin'  
  author_url 'http://example.com/about'  
  menu :admin_menu, :projecteffortstracking, { :controller => 'projecteffortstracking', :action => 'index' }, :caption => 'Project Estimation Tracker'  
 end  

Here, we can mention where we would like to show the plugin, e.g. In Admin menu or Top menu etc. For different type of menus visit : Redmine Menus
Now, your plugin is ready to use. Restart your server using Bitnami Redmine Stack.

 

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.