Goodies to Go ™
June 24, 2002–Newsletter #186
This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
Goodies Thoughts – Working with Search Engines
In last week’s issue we
took a look at search engines and how they catalog their wealth of information.
This week we’ll see what we as web developers can do to get noticed by those
ever elusive search engines.
So, what is that search
engines are looking for?
Well, each search engine
looks for basically the same things. They usually examine page titles,
descriptions, keywords, content and links. Of course, each search engine has its
own unique way of cataloging and prioritizing the information it takes in.
In order to get your
sites cataloged correctly and to have any chance at a high ranking, you will
want to take advantage of each element that search engines examine. Let’s take a
look at them:
Page Titles
– Page titles are often overlooked by web developers. Not only are page titles
helpful to your viewer by providing them with a brief description of the page,
they are also a very useful element to the search engine. In fact, some search
engines give the title more weight in the rankings than any other element.
Personally, I don’t think giving titles such weight is a good idea but I don’t
write the search engines. Be careful not to make your titles too long, though.
Many search engines have a cap on the number of characters or words they will
read in a title.
Content –
Content is what you would logically think to be the most important component in
cataloging a site since it constitutes the bulk of the the information on the
site. Most search engines use the content as a basis for cataloging a site by
eliminating all common words like "an" and "the" and indexing the rest of the
content. Some will even add a ranking weight to words in the content based on
the number of times the word is used. The logic is that the more times a word is
used in the content the more likely that word will be relevant to a web surfer
searching for that particular word. Be careful, though, most engines are clever
enough to spot ranking tricks like hiding a repeating word at the bottom of a
page. This trick used to be implemented by adding an entire paragraph of a
single word to the bottom of a web page and setting the color of the font equal
to the color of the background. Since the web crawlers read the actual HTML,
they would see the words and rank accordingly while the person viewing the page
only noticed a bit of unused space at the bottom of the page.
Hyperlinks
– Search engines will also catalog and index your hyperlinks. The cataloged
hyperlinks are usually used in a few different ways. First, they are used as a
"road map" for the web crawlers so they know where to search for new pages.
Second, they are used in the ranking system by giving more weight to pages and
sites that have the most links to them. Again, be wary of trying a similar trick
to the one described above. Most engines will sniff out "cheaters" that add a
bunch of hidden links to boost their rankings. In most cases, "cheaters" will
not be cataloged or indexed at all and are simply ignored. Obviously, you don’t
have much control over how many other sites reference yours, but it gives you an
idea of what is important to search engines.
The next few items are
in the form of meta data. Basically, meta data is the information about a page
that is purposely hidden from the viewer. Meta data is intended to be used by
search engines and browsers do not display it.
Description
– This is exactly what is says, a description of your web page. This is
primarily used to describe your page when it pops up on a search engine. If you
do a search on most any search engine you will notice that each page listed has
a description underneath the link. That description is taken from the meta data
description on the page. You also might notice that the descriptions are often
cut short. Most search engines will only dedicate a few lines to the
description. This doesn’t mean you should only write a short description but
rather quite the opposite. Your page descriptions should be as long as necessary
to be complete. Though they may not be completely displayed on a search engine,
their content is used for both indexing and cataloging. The two best rules for
writing a description are:
-
Be thorough. Write a
complete summary description of the page. -
Make your lead sentence
a short easy-to-read summary of the page. Since you only get a short space for a
description on most search engines, make good use of that first sentence. It may
be the only one that viewers see. You have the rest of your description to go
into more detail.
Keywords –
Keywords are a very important meta data component. They allow you to
specifically define words that apply to your web page rather than relying on the
search engine to figure it out. Here are some good basic rules for determining
your keywords:
-
Come up with a complete
list that describes your web page and then prioritize it. List first the
keywords that you would like to have the highest rankings and then work your way
down to the least important. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be
ranked high under the first keyword that you list but it does mean that the
search engine will definitely catalog and index it. Also, many search engines
put a cap on keywords. Since we don’t know for sure what the cap is with each
search engine, prioritizing your keywords is a must. -
Allow for misspellings.
If you want your site to appear consistently for a keyword, be sure to include
any common misspellings of words. Consider possible typos as well. -
You don’t need to really
worry about plural words, like listing computer and computers. Most search
engines will ignore the plural when both searching and indexing anyway. -
No need to duplicate
words. For example, if you have three phrases that best describe your site and
the all contain the word "computer", you don’t need to spend time entering
"computer" into each phrase. Most search engines break up keywords by the word
and not the phrase anyway which means that duplicating a word in a phrase won’t
do anything for you except take up unnecessary space.
That’s all there is to
it. Here’s an example of where to put your meta data:
<HEAD>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="This s a description of my web page. You
should come visit sometime!">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="computer,web,home,personal,John,Doe">
<TITLE>Welcome to my personal web page!</TITLE>
</HEAD>
Using the elements
outlined above will help you get noticed by most search engines. Spending time
to prepare your pages well before registering them with search engines will go a
long way towards getting and holding those high rankings.
What about those
services that promise high rankings?
While some of those
services are well worth the money, many are not. If your site’s success hinges
on a high search engine ranking, then a search engine optimization service is
probably going to be just what you need. Just be wary that the service you are
paying for is not a "take-your-money-and-run" scam. The internet is full of
them.
If a high ranking is not
that important to you then optimizing your pages yourself and waiting for the
web crawlers to come your way will probably be good enough. You might also try
registering your site with the just the major search engines. That will often
get the ball rolling and get you listed on the more minor search engines.
Should I take the time
to prepare each page for search engines?
That depends on your
situation. Many sites want all visitors to funnel through their home page and
will therefore only optimize that one page. If your site is one that has
multiple semi-independent sections you might want to optimize other pages within
your site. Optimizing every single page of a site is usually unnecessary,
though.
Thanks for reading!
Quiz Goodies
Let’s say you wanted to
place some kind of media viewer on your web page like QuickTime or RealMedia.
How would you do it?
Read answer below.
Q & A Goodies
Questions are taken from
submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going
to
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/.
Q. I have a
question about backgrounds. I think it’s a fairly unique one and I scoured the
site for an answer to it first. First of all I think the use of CSS to make a
background image stop repeating itself is great. Here is the code I’m talking
about. I copied this from "CSS and Backgrounds, Huh?" :
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
BODY {background-image:
url(background.gif);
background-repeat: attribute; }
<!–attribute would be
"no" for my purposes>
</STYLE>
Now the actual question: I would like to use that kind of effect in a table.
That’s the tricky part for me, if it can be done.
A. You can use
the same style declarations and attributes for the table tag. If you want the
same styles for all your tables, then just change the BODY definition to TABLE:
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
TABLE {
background-image: url(background.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat; }
</STYLE>
If you just want to use those styles for one specific table, then set up a
class, and use that instead.
<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
.tableBgImg {
background-image: url(background.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat; }
</STYLE>
Then just add the class to the table you want:
<TABLE CLASS="tableBgImg">
<TR><TD>Here’s the table!</TD></TR>
</TABLE>
You can also set up the style class and apply it to any HTML element that can
handle background images: BODY, TABLE, TR TD, etc.
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by Andrea Piernock, one of our CSS Mentors.
Q. There are
sites on he internet that have their site like this:
http://word.domainname.com
But their domain name is really like this:
http://www.domainname.com
How do they get the word in front of their domain name?
Is it a new domain name or is it within the original domain name?
A. The word that
you refer to is known as a sub-domain. While domain name.com is their "parent"
or registered domain, they can make any number of sub-domains that they wish to.
If you were looking to get sub-domains in your domain, you will have to talk to
your hosting service.
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by C.L. Smith, one of our JavaScript Mentors.
Q. I have a form
that you input numbers and it will do a calculation. My calculation formula gets
the numbers by using:
if(eval(f.expr.value)<=a number)
f.result..value=(the calculation)
However, before it does the calculation, I need to make sure that the input is
in fact a value. If it is not a value, I really would like for it to just make
the value 0. For example, if someone has put in a space or a letter for the expr
box, I would like it to automatically change to a 0 for the calculation. If this
does not get changed, my result shows as "NaN".
A. You could use
isNaN (is-Not-a-Number) to check if the value is a number. It would go something
like this:
if(isNaN(f.expr.value)) // if it is not a number
{do something}
else
{do something else}
If they enter anything else but 0 through 9 then this would catch it.
*** This question was submitted to our Mentor Community. The answer was provided
by Jim Young, one of our JavaScript Mentors.
News Goodies
Been thinking about buying PhotoShop
7.0 or getting the upgrade? This review might help you decide.
Click here to read the article
Do you send out legitimate email
newsletters and promotions to your clients? Are you worried about competing with
blanket SPAMmers to get your message read? Here is some helpful insight.
Click here to read the article
Since we’ve been talking about search
engines lately I thought you might be interested in how one of the biggest
search engines, Ask Jeeves, keeps getting bigger.
Click here to read the article
Quiz Answer
Most media objects are placed on web
pages using the OBJECT and EMBED tags. The OBJECT and EMBED tags are very
simple. They tell your browser that you are going to use and object and to embed
it here. The hard part is usually finding the particular parameters for using
your chosen media object and plugging them in to your OBJECT and EMBED tags.
Here is an example of the OBJECT and
EMBED tags in use for the QuickTime player:
<OBJECT
CLASSID="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B"
WIDTH="320" HEIGHT="149"
CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">
<PARAM NAME="kioskmode" value="false">
<PARAM NAME="bgcolor" value="#000000">
<PARAM NAME="AUTOPLAY" value="TRUE">
<PARAM NAME="pluginspage"
value="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/indext.html">
<PARAM NAME="src" value="http://www.myweb.com/mymovie.mov">
<PARAM NAME="controller" value="TRUE">
<PARAM NAME="target" value="myself">
<EMBED width="320" height="149" controller="TRUE" target="myself" src="http://www.myweb.com/mymovie.mov"
bgcolor="#000000" border="0"
pluginspage=
"http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/indext.html">
</EMBED>
</OBJECT>
Because of space limitations I had to
break up this code a bit more than we would have liked but I think you’ll get
the idea. As you can see both the OBJECT and EMBED tags have many different
parameters and attributes that must be set in order for your movie to play
correctly.
Here are some of the highlights of
the QuickTime player:
The first parameter that you see is
the "classid" which contains the unique identification number of the type of
player that you are using. Each player has its own unique identification number.
There are several parameters that
involve how the player is displayed. There are the size specifications within
the EMBED tag (height and width) and the mode and background color in the OBJECT
tag ("kioskmode" and "bgcolor").
You can also determine how the player
functions with parameters like "autoplay" and "controller".
You’ll also notice that the "pluginspage"
parameter is set equal to a URL. This is used to automatically direct users that
do not have the appropriate plug-in (in this case QuickTime) to the page where
they can download it.
Lastly, and most importantly is where
to find the particular movie that you are wanting to show, which is set with the
"src" parameter.
That’s just a quick overview of the
QuickTIme player. Each media player out there has its own special
characteristics and functionality, so no two players are alike. Be sure to take
a good look at the documentation and reference books to learn how to effectively
use your media player of choice.
And Remember This . . .
Flying Saucer Sighted!
On this day in 1947 was the first
recorded sighting of not just one flying saucer but nine of them. A man by the
name of Kenneth Arnold reported sighting the saucer over Mount Rainier in
Washington state. And thus began a series of sightings of alien craft, alien
visitors, abductions and other phenomena that are still being reported to this
day.
Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!
