Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

Think back to the library card catalogue analogy.  In the old card files, and even in today’s computer terminal library catalogues, you find information by searching on either the author, the title, or the subject.  You usually choose the subject option when you want to cover a broad range of information.

Example:  You’d like to create your own home page on the Web, but you don’t know how to write HTML, you’ve never created a graphic file, and you’re not sure how you’d post a page on the Web even if you knew how to write one.   In short, you need a lot of information on a rather broad topic–Web publishing.

Your best bet is not a search engine, but a Web directory like the Open Directory Project,  Google Directory or  Yahoo.  A directory is a subject-tree style catalogue that organizes the Web into major topics, including Arts, Business and Economy, Computers and Internet, Education, Entertainment, Government, Health, News, Recreation, Reference, Regional, Science, Social Science, Society and Culture.  Under each of these topics is a list of subtopics, and under each of those is another list, and another, and so on, moving from the more general to the more specific.

Example: To find out about Web page publishing from Yahoo, select the Computers and Internet Topic, under which you find a subtopic on the Wide World Web. Click on that and you find another list of subtopics, several of which are pertinent to your search: Web Page Authoring, CGI Scripting, Java, HTML, Page Design, Tutorials.  Selecting any of these subtopics eventually takes you to Web pages that have been posted precisely for the purpose of giving you the information you need.

If you are clear about the topic of your query, start with a Web directory rather than a search engine.  Directories probably won’t give you anywhere near as many references as a search engine will, but they are more likely to be on topic.

Web directories usually come equipped with their own keyword search engines that allow you to search through their indices for the information you need.

Important note:  Search engines and  Web directories are being integrated in interesting ways.    For example, if you use the Google search engine and one of the results happens to be found in the Google’s Directory (which is based on the dmoz directory), Google will offer you a link to that section of the directory. Meanwhile, if you conduct your search in the Google directory, Google will order the results according to PageRank, which is   Google’s all-important measure of  “link popularity.”

VIA CELLPHONE  <google.com/sms>: Send text message to GOOGL (46645) to receive Google results on your phone.

VIA E-MAIL: Send an e-mail to google@6url.com with a search term in the subject line - get top 10 Google results via e-mail. Useful from a Blackberry or similar device.

Staggernation.com offers three tools based on the Google API. The Google API Web Search by Host (GAWSH) lists the Web hosts of the results for a given query (www.staggernation.com/gawsh/). When you click on the triangle next to each host, you get a list of results for that host. The Google API Relation Browsing Outliner (GARBO) is a little more complicated: You enter a URL and choose whether you want pages that related to the URL or linked to the URL (www.staggernation.com/garbo/). Click on the triangle next to an URL to get a list of pages linked or related to that particular URL. CapeMail is an e-mail search application that allows you to send an e-mail to google@capeclear.com with the text of your query in the subject line and get the first ten results for that query back. Maybe it’s not something you’d do every day, but if your cell phone does e-mail and doesn’t do Web browsing, this is a very handy address to know.

You can create an HTML mailto email link that will automatically fill in an email subject line when clicked on. Add the following code to your HTML.

<A HREF=”mailto:you@yourdomain.com?subject=Your_Subject”>

This is the most common form of text search on the Web.  Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.

What is a keyword, exactly?  It can simply be any word on a webpage.  For example, I used the word “simply” in the previous sentence, making it one of the keywords for this particular webpage in some search engine’s index.   However, since the word “simply” has nothing to do with the subject of this webpage (i.e., how search engines work), it is not a very useful keyword.   Useful keywords and key phrases for this page would be “search,” “search engines,” “search engine methods,” “how search engines work,” “ranking” “relevancy,” “search engine tutorials,” etc.  Those keywords would actually tell a user something about the subject and content of this page.

Unless the author of the Web document specifies the keywords for her document (this is possible by using meta tags), it’s up to the search engine to determine them.  Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that appear to be significant.  Since since engines are software programs, not rational human beings, they work according to rules established by their creators for what words are usually important in a broad range of documents.  The title of a page, for example, usually gives useful information about the subject of the page (if it doesn’t, it should!).  Words that are mentioned towards the beginning of a document (think of the “topic sentence” in a high school essay, where you lay out the subject you intend to discuss) are given more weight by most search engines.   The same goes for words that are repeated several times throughout the document.

Some search engines index every word on every page. Others index only part of the document.

Full-text indexing systems generally pick up every word in the text except commonly occurring stop words such as “a,” “an,” “the,” “is,” “and,” “or,” and “www.”  Some of the search engines discriminate upper case from lower case; others store all words without reference to capitalization.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the hyper-linked text that allows the user to move around web sites.

Anchor Text Relevancy

From a search engine stand point it is important that the anchor text be relevant to the information that it points to. If it is it can improve your ranking in the search engines. So for example if your web site is dedicated to selling exercise videos and the page that you are going to point to has numerous articles on exercise videos then you have a high relevancy.

To achieve even higher relevancy make sure that the integrity of the document that your pointing to has been marked up with those same anchor text phrases. I.E. The page title of the page you are going to is called “exercise videos” and your anchor text is the same.

What Not To Do:

It is a common mistake to see people use “click here” in anchor text. In doing this you are loosing many possible users. Instead use descriptive anchor text phrases that are relevant to the subject matter.

Link building is a targeted way of building a web sites link popularity. You may ask why is link popularity important and why does my site need it? Good Question. And the answer is because search engines like Google put a lot of emphasis on inbound links that come into a web site. The anchor text that is used to point to that inbound web page should also match the optimized phrase for the page, but that’s a different topic. Link building will over time get you to place better with the major search engines.

You can start your link building efforts by doing a search for your desired keyword or keyphrase on Google for example and contact some of the top results to see if they would be interested in exchanging links with your site. Have the code that you would like them to use to point to your web site ready to give to them when you contact them. Make sure that you have an area of your web site that is devoted to posting your relevant link exchanges. That’s right you want to exchange links with sites that have relevancy to what they will be pointing to.

Building inbound links to your web site is very powerful and if done correctly it will:

Increase web traffic to your site

Save you advertising money and time

Make you more of an authority on your subject matter

Increase your visibility in the search engines

Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowedging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that’s as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you’re already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it’s posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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