Choosing the Right Format For Your Web Images
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Published on: Sunday 21st June 1998 By: Gary Ransom
If you've spent all that time, effort and energy on creating the best ever Home Page, it would be a shame if you were the only one that knew it was on the web. Is there anything more depressing than a page counter that never moves?
Most people that use the web are familiar with how to search for specific sites or subjects, but that experience will have shown just how big the web is. How can you ensure that your Home Page will be found?
Well, the answer is that whilst you can't guarantee that your Home Page is found by anyone looking for its subject matter, you can do a lot to maximise your chances.
The most obvious way is to register your Home Page with every appropriate search engine that you can find. Even better are reviews (good or bad!), awards, and listing services. But before you start this process, there are a number of key things to do.
First, check out the Finishing Touches article, then take a long, cool and objective look at your Home Page. Is the impression it gives the one you want the world to see - visually and content? It doesn't have to be complete - most Home Pages are always under construction - but it should be mostly complete. Is it easy to use and navigate around? Unless your Home Page content is truly unique there will be many other sites on the web offering similar content. Find a few via your favourite search engines and compare yours with the best that you can find. Incidentally, how easy/hard it was to find other similar sites will be very useful later when it comes to optimising your Home Page for specific search engines.
Next, when you're happy with any changes that you've made, show it to your friends and family. It can be very sobering to find that this gee-whiz feature or that nifty graphic is actually seen as completely naff by anyone that isn't wearing your brand of rose tinted glasses.
Once you've passed that hurdle it's time to try more professional critics. The company that provides your host server may well have an appropriate newsgroup that you could post a message to inviting people to visit your Home Page and offer advice or (constructive) criticism. If you can't find an appropriate newsgroup then you could always try emailing the authors of those similar sites that you found and make the same request. You might get ignored, but then again you might not.
Once you've taken on board the advice and criticisms and made any changes that you felt warranted, it's time to make a few adjustments to the invisible parts of your Home Page and possibly a bit of judicious sprinkling of key words within your document.
Most times you use a search engine it turns up thousands or even tens of thousands of matching pages. How often do you look beyond the first ten or twenty? How do you get your Home Page to appear near the top of the list rather than number 17,376?
The first clue is in the key words used to define the query for a search engine. What words do you imagine that someone would use when searching for your page content? If for example your Home Page is about football in europe then whenever anyone types "european football" or a similar phrase, you want your page to appear near the top of the list. Try to identify all the likely keywords that someone might use and make these the keywords for your page. Your main keywords should be two or more words long, as usually too many sites will be relevant to a one word keyword such as "football".
Make sure that your main keywords appear in several places in your Home Page. Failure to put as many of your main keywords as possible in the page title is a common reason for failing to get a good ranking. An index page that is all graphics and no HTML text is another (search engines can't read graphics - most of them can't understand frames either). Search engines also like pages where the main keywords in the main body of the page, are high on the page and not pushed down by tables and graphics.
If your page design is heavily dependant on graphics, image maps, frames and tables, there are ways to compensate. Make sure that your pages have HTML links to your other pages as well as image maps. That way the search engine spider will be able to follow the links and include all your content (this is also helpful to any visitors that are using old browsers). The only way around the frames problem is through the use of meta tags and/or noframes versions of your pages.
Meta tags? Well these special HTML tags are often viewed as a magic tool. They are and they aren't. Not all search engines can fully use them.
Meta tags are useful to help identify your main keywords and page description to the search engine. They can also boost the ranking. Of all the meta tags, the ones most useful for search engine indexing are description and keywords meta tags. The description tag provides the search engine with the words that you want to appear in the listing (rather than "no title" or a generated summary) and the keywords tag provides the main keywords to associate with your page. As an example of how meta tags can be used, view the HTML source for this page. This can be done by clicking on "view" then "page source" in Netscape or "view" then "source" in Internet Explorer. Look within the HEAD section near the top of the page.
Drop back to the Home Page Guides page and follow the links if you need a tutorial in HTML. If you want to know more about meta tags then try WDVL's META Tagging for Search Engines.
Once you've adjusted your pages it's time to submit them. How do you do it?
Well, to a large extent this is the easy part. The most common way is to use a free service called Submit it! This service will take your Home Page details and submit them to literally scores of search engines. If this shotgun approach doesn't appeal and you would like more direct control of the submission then you can visit each search engine in turn and manually enter your Home Page details by following the instructions on the search engine's main page.
So that's it? No, not quite. Firstly, as you might imagine, search engines get tens of thousands of new pages submitted every day and that can mean that it can take up to three months for your page to appear. Secondly, what many people think of as search engines are in fact listing and review services (Yahoo! is the most obvious example). These services are very selective and often decline to list pages. Using a tool such as Submit it! won't work here.
For search engines that are guaranteed to take your details, there are a number of techniques that you can use to check whether your page is listed yet and how well it has been ranked.
The equivalent to Submit it! is a free service called Rank This. To use Rank This you type in the address of your site, a phrase that might be used to search with (your main keywords) and the search engine that you would like to test. A few seconds later and you will know whether your site is listed and how it ranks. If you don't want to use a URL checking service then there's always the manual way. This is most commonly done by entering your URL (Home Page Address) and searching against that, or in the case of Infoseek, Lycos and WebCrawler, they offer a "check URL" link.
Taking Yahoo! as an example, you will have to manually submit your Home Page for review by a "Yahooer". The first step to take is just the same as with search engines in that the process begins with a search for other comparable/similar pages. In this instance though, you're looking to see what categories and descriptions have been used for your subject matter. The research bit over, return to the Yahoo! main page and follow the submission link. It is a fairly long winded process but the most important part for you is in the choice of category and your description. The Yahoo! process is then for a reviewer to look at the submitted site and judge whether it is "worthy" of inclusion. The selection criteria is based on it being a "significant contribution" i.e. the content must be good and if not unique, offer something new.
Recent research shows that the majority of submissions fail this test and so are not included. The research also suggests that professional (commercial) sites score much better and that sites hosted on "free web space" only account for 12% of successful submissions. Is it worth persevering and resubmitting if you don't get listed? Well, Yahoo! is arguably the most widely used search/review there is. If you get listed, or even better reviewed, you're likely to need a couple more fields on your visitor counter very quickly!
Another service you could try is Starting Point. This is basically a search engine with the difference being that they will feature your page in their new personal sites section. They also offer a button which you can put on your Home Page to make it eligible for a Hot Site Award. Visitors can then vote for your site by clicking on the button. Popular sites get a special promotion at the Starting Point site which inevitably results in a huge number of visits.
As you surf the web, keep a lookout for award and review buttons that people have put on their pages. Follow the links and if appropriate, submit your Home Page.
>Choosing the Right Format For Your Web Images
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JavaScript Guidelines and Best Practice
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