DEV Community: Subramanyam Rekhandar

How to Improve Your Search Rank for Google

Subramanyam Rekhandar — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 12:38:10 +0000

Money alone can’t buy Google rank, but with a little time and strategy you can improve your position on the search engine results page (SERP) without spending a dime. Here are 10 free ways to improve your Google search rank.

1.Improve your website’s user experience:

According to a study on ranking factors by SEMrush, the top four ranking factors are website visits, time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate. All four of those are directly related to the experience your website is providing your users, which Google recently emphasized with its Page Experience update. It’s pretty simple: If your website is easy and enjoyable to use and offers valuable information, you’ll get more visitors, who will stay longer on your site and visit more pages, and that will improve your search rank.

2.Write great content optimized for SEO

Having high-quality content on your website is one of the best ways to increase traffic and improve your search rank. In fact, Google itself said in a blog post on page experience that having great, relevant content on a page is more important for ranking than page experience. Make sure your content is mistake-free, keyword-rich, mobile-optimized, written to address the specific needs of your target audience, and includes valuable links to additional internal and external content.

3.Get more backlinks

Backlinks—links from other sites to yours—are one of the most heavily weighted Google ranking factors. Incoming links to your website content from high-authority domains show your site’s authority, bring in traffic, and improve your search ranking.

4.Improve your page speed

Load time is one of the key measurements in Google's recent Core Web Vitals upgrade, so it’s a good idea to make sure your site is as fast as possible—both to improve your search rank and provide a good user experience.

5.Fix broken links

Having quality links on your website is one of the best ways to boost traffic and establish the authority of your site, but links that bring up a 404 error hurt both your user experience and your search rank. Use a tool like BrokenLinkCheck or Dead Link Checker to find any broken links.

6.Optimize your images

Optimizing your images is crucial to boosting the speed of your site and making it easier for Google to identify the images on your web pages. Make sure all your website images are compressed, have descriptive filenames, and include alt text.

7.Use H1 and H2 header tags

Not only do headers make your content more readable and easier to understand for humans and search engines alike, there is a strong correlation between Google search rank and the use of header tags in the body of your content. Header tags are also a great way to show the structure of your content and emphasize your key points.

8.Optimize for local search

More and more people are using their smartphones to search for businesses “near me.” To improve your chances of having your business show up in relevant local searches, make sure you claim your Google My Business listing, provide relevant content in Google Posts, get your business listed in local directories, and improve your online reputation with great online reviews.

9.Optimize for voice search

According to a study by Perficient, voice search is no longer growing, but more than 60% of people surveyed still said voice search is their preferred method of asking questions on their smartphone. Make sure those voice searches find your business by incorporating likely voice search phrases into your website content—be sure to use full sentences phrased in a natural conversational style rather than single keywords.

10.Aim for “position zero"

When a user asks a question in Google Search, Google sometimes pulls content from a relevant website and displays it in a special featured snippet or answer box above the #1 search result. Getting content into a featured snippet is a great way to increase traffic (snippets include a link to the page where the content came from), as well as boost the credibility and visibility of your brand. To increase your chances of having your content selected as a featured snippet by Google, think of likely searches related to your business and pepper your site with clear, authoritative answers.

PuTTY – 30 Useful Putty Commands for Beginners to Advance.

Subramanyam Rekhandar — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 07:41:11 +0000

What Is Putty?

Putty is an open source SSH client used to connect to a remote server. Putty is basically a terminal for windows based operating systems. It supports several network protocols, including SCP, SSH, Telnet, rlogin, and raw socket connection. PuTTY was originally written for Microsoft Windows, but it has been ported to various other operating systems. To work with Putty you need to know few basic Putty Commands.

To connect to your server from your PC you can use Putty and type simple SSH commands to perform different basic actions such as creating folders, copying them and so on.

How to Use the SSH Putty Commands.

1) How to find out where you are, the pwd command shows you present working directory.

pwd

2) Change directory.

cd

The cd command is used to navigate into a specified directory on your server.

Example: cd /home (moves you into the home folder)

3) The same directory

   cd .

Using this command you will remain in the same directory you were.

4) Move me up one directory.

   cd ..

Above command will navigate two steps back from current directory.

5) Go to the previous directory.

    cd –

Above command will navigate to the previous directory.

6) Go to Home folder

    cd ~

Above command will navigate to the home directory on your server.

7) Go to root

   cd /

Above command will navigate to root.

How to List Directories and Contents

8) List files

   ls
   usage: ls [option] [file]

Using the ls command in a folder will display all it’s content.

Example: ls /home.

Will return all content of the folder /home.

9) Show me all files in a directory

   ls -a

10) Show contents with file size

     ls -h

If you wish to see a directory’s contents with file sizes just type ls -h

11) How to see sub-directories recursively

    ls -r

The ls -r command is used to see sub-directories recursively.

12) How to see files by file size

    ls -is

13) List all folders in directory with details

    ls -alh

How to Copy files/folders with Putty Commands

14) Copying a file

cp

To copy a file just use the cp ssh command.

Example:cp filename.js /home/filename.js

15) Copy a folder with all files

     cp -r

This one is used to copy the entire folder with all it’s contents.

16) Copy and rename

    cp filename.jd /home/filename2.js

How to Move files to different locations

17) Moving a file

mv

Example: mv page.js /home/page.js

18) Move and rename

    mv page.js /home/newpage.js

19) Move file up one directory

    mv filename ..

example: mv index.html/ ..

How to Create files/folders using Putty Commands

20) Create a folder

    mkdir

example: mkdir new-folder

21) Create a file

     touch

Use the touch command to create different files and file extensions

Example: touch index.js

How to Compress/Uncompress files?

22) Compressing folders

     zip -r foldername.zip foldername

Example: zip -r newfolder.zip newfolder

23) uncompressing folders

     unzip

Example: unzip newfolder.zip

24) Compressing folders using tar -czvf

    tar -czvf foldername.tar.gz foldername

Example: tar -czvf wp-content.tar.gz wp-content

25) uncompressing folders using tar -czvf

     tar -xvf foldername.tar.gz

Example: tar -xvf wp-content.tar.gz

How to Delete/Remove files?

26) Delete a file

rm

To delete a file on your server just use the rm command.

Example: rm index.js

27) Delete all files from a directory

    rm *

This command is used to delete all contents from a directory.

Example: rm * foldername

28) Delete a folder/directory

     rmdir

Use this command to remove directories.

How to change File permissions?

29) Change file permissions

     chmod

Example: chmod 775 newfolder

30) Change permissions of folder and all files inside

    chmod 755 folder name -R

How to Activate the ufw in nginx server

   Sudo enable ufw

Thanks for reading our article and we will keep updating the same articles with more useful commands in coming days. Keep checking this space for more Putty commands.

Certbot installation procedure for Windows

Subramanyam Rekhandar — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 16:32:16 +0000

Note::

Certbot is now officially available for Windows. If you find that Certbot is not the most suitable Let's Encrypt client application for your use case, there are many other clients written by other organizations and developers that you may be able to use to obtain a certificate from Let's Encrypt.

1.Important notes

This procedure follows the current Certbot implementation for Windows, in particular the fact that it installs as a system component, and requires administrative privileges. These instructions will be updated when a future version of Certbot switches to a different installation method. No installers for HTTP servers are supported for now (Certbot for Windows can currently obtain your certificate from Let's Encrypt, but not install it into your web server application).

2.Specific Windows system requirements and user knowledge requirements

1.The user needs to be familiar with the command-line interface
(CLI), because Certbot is a pure CLI program.
2.The user must use an account with administrative privileges to
install and run Certbot.
3.PowerShell and CMD.EXE are supported; both need to be started
with elevated privileges before invoking Certbot.
4.Path C:\Certbot must be writable by the current user.

3.Specific Windows limitations and configuration

1.All usual operations to create and manage an account, manage
existing certificates, or select the ACME server, are
supported.
2.Only standalone, manual and webroot authenticator plugins are
supported. DNS plugins will be available soon. This means that
Certbot for Windows is currently unable to automatically renew
wildcard certificates, since these require a DNS plugin in
order to be renewed without user intervention.
3.No installer plugins are supported. The Apache and Nginx plugins
will be available soon, and a plugin to install certificates
into IIS is under development.
4.Automated certificate renewals (using standalone and webroot
plugins) are supported.

4.Installation instructions (default)

1.Connect to the server.
2.Connect locally or remotely (using Remote Desktop) to the
server using an account that has administrative privileges for
thismachine.
3.Install Certbot.
4.Download the latest version of the Certbot installer for Windows
at https://dl.eff.org/certbot-beta-installer-win32.exe.
5.Run the installer and follow the wizard. The installer will
propose a default installation directory, C:\Program Files(x86),
that can be customized.)
6.To start a shell for Certbot, select the Start menu, enter cmd
(to run CMD.EXE) or powershell (to run PowerShell), and click on
“Run as administrator” in the contextual menu that shows up
above.
7.Run Certbot as a shell command.

To run a command on Certbot, enter the name certbot in the shell,
followed by the command and its parameters. For instance, to
display the inline help, run:

 ::C:\WINDOWS\system32> certbot --help.

5.Choose how you’d like to run Certbot

  ::Are you ok with temporarily stopping your website?

Yes, my web server is not currently running on this machine.

Stop your webserver, then run this command to get a certificate. Certbot will temporarily spin up a webserver on your machine.

::C:\WINDOWS\system32> certbot certonly --standalone.

Important Note:

::To use the webroot plugin, your server must be configured to serve files from hidden directories. If /.well-known is treated specially by your webserver configuration, you might need to modify the configuration to ensure that files inside /.well-known/acme-challenge are served by the webserver.::

6.Install your certificate

You'll need to install your new certificate in the configuration file or interface for your webserver. Certificates are located in

    ::C:\Certbot\live\[certificate_name].

where [certificate_name] is the name of your certificate (usually the first domain if the --cert-name flag has not been used on the certonly command). Currently, Certbot for Windows cannot automate the installation step; future versions will be able to automate it for specific webserver applications.

7.Test automatic renewal

The Certbot installation on your system comes with a pre-installed Scheduled Task that will renew your certificates automatically before they expire. You will not need to run Certbot again, unless you change your configuration. You can test automatic renewal for your certificates by running the command

  ::C:\WINDOWS\system32> certbot renew --dry-run

If you needed to stop your webserver to run Certbot (for example, if you used the standalone authenticator on a machine where port 80 is normally in use), you'll want to edit the built-in command to add the --pre-hook and --post-hook flags to stop and start your webserver automatically. For example, if your webserver is Apache 2.4, add the following to the certbot renew command.

  ::--pre-hook "net.exe stop Apache2.4" --post-hook "net.exe start Apache2.4"

8.Confirm that Certbot worked

To confirm that your site is set up properly.

9.Note for Windows Apache or Nginx users

As described in section 5 above, Certbot for Windows currently cannot install the certificate in Apache or Nginx for you. As of the most recent release, you will have to edit your web server application’s configuration to install the certificate yourself after Certbot has obtained it. If this limitation is acceptable to you, please start from the beginning of this document to learn more about installing and using Certbot on Windows.