Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

* Google Maps - the first of these that offered a satellite view of any part of the earth. You can use it as a map, get directions or search for web listings in a certain geographical area.
* MapQuest - my personal favorite for mapping and directions - and getting better all the time.
* Yahoo! Maps - also getting better all the time. I find the ads more annoying though.

* Froogle - part of the Google family, this site is still under development.
* MSN Shopping - a Microsoft company where you can compare over 36 million products from over 8,000 stores, all in one place.
* MySimon - owned my CNET offers shopping recommendations, buying advice, and side by side price comparisons.
* NexTag - is the leading comparison shopping site for products, financial services, travel, automobiles, real estate, education and more
* PriceRunner - was designed to provide consumers with easy online access to specifications and prices.
* PriceGrabber
* TheFind.com - Our unbiased “Product Ranking Engine” crawls over 500,000 stores to find over 150 Million products web-wide. (Still under development in Jan 2007.)
* Shopping.com - this eBay company pioneered online comparison shopping and today is one of the fastest growing shopping destinations for a comprehensive set of products from thousands of trusted stores from across the Web.

You can use the asterisk (*) character to indicate a wildcard search. This is useful when you are trying to match a term that may or may not be plural or might use one of several verb tenses. For example chemi* will find results containing words that begin with ‘chemi’ (e.g. chemical, chemistry, chemist). You must have at least four non-wildcard characters in a word before you introduce a wildcard. This is not necessary for plurals because a search on cat will also return results containing the word cats, and a search on cats will return results containing the word cat.

Some search engines support two wildcards. The asterisk (*) is used to replace multiple characters and the percent (%) symbol is used to replace only one character. For example psych*ist will find all results which contain words that begin and end with ‘psych’ and ‘ist’ (e.g. psychologist, psychiatrist), and gene%logy will return sites containing words beginning with ‘gene’ and ending with ‘logy,’ separated by a single letter (e.g. genealogy and geneology) which is useful for commonly misspelled words. You can also use multiple wildcards within a single word.

Search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. Search engines crawl through the web. Search engines eventually find your site and index the pages they find. Page titles, body text (ie, great content), META tags and other elements all play a role in what gets indexed. People then review the results of what was found by the search engine, based on keywords they type into the search engine.

A directory such as Yahoo! Directory depends on human editors to create its listings. You submit a description of your site to the directory for editors to review. A good site, with good content, will be more likely to get reviewed than a poor site. A search of a directory looks for matches only in that directory’s index.

Yahoo! also has a search engine that includes spidered websites along with their directory listings and “Sponsor Results” which are pay per click ads, similar to Google’s Adwords. Originally Yahoo! displayed only listings from their directory. Then in 2002 they added search engine listings from Google. In 2004 they started using their own search engine based on AltaVista’s technology. A few years later they acquired Overture (formerly GoTo) which was the first pay per click program.

The Page Title is one of the most important areas Google and other search engines use to determine what is on a particular web page. Google uses your Page Title as the name of your link in search results (Google even makes the matching keywords bold) so these words have a big impact on search results. Put your keywords or phrases in the title, and keep it short.

The base case is that spiders crawl the entire Web, starting from known pages and following all links, and also crawling pages that are hand-submitted.   Google is pretty much like that still.  If a site has high PageRank, it is spidered more often and more deeply.

However, search engines are trying to encourage site owners to pay for the privelege of having their pages spidered.   Teoma’s index is very hard to get into without paying money, and Inktomi’s isn’t that easy either.   And even if you do get into Inktomi for free, they’ll take a long time to respider, while if you pay they respider constantly.  One advantage of being respidered often is that you can tweak your page to come up higher in their relevancy rankings, then see if your changes worked.

Finally, you can also pay to appear on a search page.   That is, your link will appear when someone searches on a specific keyword or keyphrase.  Google does a good job of making it pretty clear which results (at the top or on the right of the page) are paid; others maybe do a not-so-good job.

Paid search results are typically all pay-per-click, based on keyword.   The advertiser pays the search engine vendor a specific amount of money each time an ad is clicked on, this fee having been determined by an auction of each keyword or keyphrase.

It’s a best practice. One of the most common problems is with Title tags when companies create web sites and put the exact same information or nothing at all. Title tags are the first and most important indication of what the web page is about. Title tags should be a short summary of the page with important keywords to the left.

The meta description tags are used in the search results. It is important to use them if you want some degree of influence over what search engines display in the search results of when your web page ranks for a particular keyword query.

As a guideline, in a press release that’s 500 words, we’ll use the phrase 2-4 times. We’ll also use variations of that keyword phrase. Search engines are smart enough that when documents are identified as being authoritative for a particular concept, the presence of an exact match keyword phrase will often be accompanied by related phrases. Keyword research will give insight not only on the phrases people are actually searching on but also related phrases.

The two biggest search engines worldwide are Google (used by Google / AOL) and Overture (used by MSN / Yahoo). Google fills it’s database mainly by letting robots automatically crawl and index the web. The Overture database is mainly filled through affiliate programs. That will cost you, so let’s focus on Google for now. Google is the cooler one anyway…

Here’s tutorial on how you can use frames on your website for search engine optimization benefits when you need to hide something from Search engines but you still want your visitors to see it.

Never thought that I could use frames on a webpage as an SEO tactic. I probably would have never even tried it but my recent project has shown me that it is not just possible but it is a good option in certain situations. I had one of those exceptional situations recently so I decided to share.