Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

If your web site gets trapped within someone’s frames, you can create a link to help your visitor escape. Place the following code within your HTML where you would like the link to appear.

<A HREF=”http://www.blog.tryangled.com/” TARGET=”_top”>Escape From Frame</A>

You’re actually just creating a link to your own website with the TARGET set to “Top.”

At one time, there were many sites designed with frames. However, as more and more people have realized that frames are not a good choice for designing a web site, the number of sites designed in frames has dropped considerably. For this reason, the chance of your site being trapped within someone’s frames is slim. However, you may still want to include this link at the bottom of your site.

Using doorway pages or a doorway page system is the lazy man’s way of building a website. A doorway page system involves the use of hidden text and graphic links, creation of a bunch of doorway pages all separately optimized for different keywords, and a hidden site map that links to all of the doorway pages.

The doorway pages themselves are filled with optimized text and function primarily to get visitors to go to your other pages on your website. One of the problems with this hidden doorway system is that it smacks of trickery. The doorway pages don’t provide real content to the visitors, but provide a means to navigate to the other pages on your site.

If this were a legitimate system of navigation, why hide the text and graphic links, the site map and the doorway pages in the first place?

Here is one way to create a system of hidden doorway pages. First, you research relevant but relatively low ranking keywords for your site that don’t have much competition. Second, you create a bunch of these doorway pages that are optimized for these keywords. Third, you build a sitemap containing links to all of these hidden doorway pages. The doorway pages are not directly linked to your homepage or any other of your main pages. The sitemap, however, does contain links to all pages on your site including your homepage and main pages AND your hidden doorway pages.

This hidden sitemap, once completed, is the only page you link directly to your homepage. You do this with a hidden text or graphic link. Creating a hidden graphic link is easy. You simply create a .jpg or .gif file that has the same color as the background of your home page. Search robots cannot distinguish colors inside a pixel-based file. You link this graphic to your sitemap and you are done. The only telltale signs that this exists is in your source code and if you happen to run your cursor over the area it will change to the hand.
Creating a text link is a bit trickier since some search engines will penalize sitesthat have link text color that is too close to the background color (especially if it is the same as the background color).

Some sources suggest you create your pages with a white background (color code #FFFFFF) and that you create your hidden link text with an almost white color #EDFAE6 that is almost invisible to the eye and will not get your penalized with the search engines.
Now, instead of creating a tricky, hidden doorway page system filled with no real content for your visitors, why not make your homepage and other main pages your doorway pages? Instead of picking a bunch of low-ranking keywords and optimizing your pages for these keywords, why not pick the highest-ranking relevant keywords for your business and optimizing all or most of your pages towards these keywords?
With this method, the trick is to create content-rich, keyword-optimized pages that serve the dual purpose of informing your visitors and serving relevant information to the search engines. This is not the lazy man’s approach since this method takes quite a bit of skill and expertise in writing these pages with both purposes in mind.

The benefit of making all of your pages content-rich doorway pages and not hidden doorway pages is threefold. First, you avoid the ethical gray area of the hidden doorway page approach. Second, you pick the highest-ranking relevant keywords, build your website around these words, and make these pages content rich for your visitors and keyword rich for the search engines which keep visitors interested in your site (and buying your products) and when they rank well with the search engine will bring in more traffic than the lesser ranked, hidden pages. Third, when you develop content-rich doorway pages you don’t run the risk of the search engines finding your ethically questionable hidden doorway page system, realizing this is what is going on, and penalizing your site, burying it deep within the rankings of the search engine.

Now, you may ask, why not create a content-rich doorway page system AND a hidden doorway page system? You can, but you run the previously-mentioned risks plus when you develop a hidden system, you are taking time away from developing the rest of your website that could go into other, more productive areas such as rewriting your pages in respect to content and keywords or developing new pages. Remember, not all pages have to do well in the search engines. Some of your pages are just for your visitors to enjoy like Flash or Shockwave game pages, streaming audio or video or a product picture page with very little text on it.

In order to get visitors to come to your site, you may also want to work on your reciprocal linking with other sites, buy or trade traffic with other sites, develop your own newsletter, buy or trade for advertising in other sites’ relevant newsletters and other marketing methods to bring visitors to your site. Doorway pages may have been the “in” thing a couple of years ago, but now they have gone out of fashion. But if you keep your site focused and direct your energy in productive marketing methods, you site will see significant gains in traffic. At this point it will be up to you to find ways to convert your visitors into customers and reap the profits from your efforts.

Search engines come in two varieties, human-edited and spider indexed. The two major human-edited search engines (or directories as they are properly called) are the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) and Yahoo. Search engine optimization is lost on the human-edited directories. Because humans will write your title and description for your site when they place it in their directories, using both objective and subjective methods, you have no control in the SEO-world over how your website will rank in these directories.

In both DMOZ and Yahoo, you can suggest a title and description, but most often your words will be rewritten by an editor and placed in their directories according to criteria of which you will not be privy to knowing. One of the big differences between DMOZ and Yahoo is that DMOZ is free and Yahoo is a paid inclusion. With both search directories there is the possibility of not being included, but as stated before DMOZ is free and with Yahoo, if you are not included, no refund will be given.

The only types of search engine in which you have some control are the search engines, which use spiders (sometimes called robots) to read, index and rank your site. The robots (and this is plural because some search engines like Google have several) are basically software applications that travel the Internet by following links and finding websites to read and add to their databases. These robots will travel to your website if you submit your site directly to them (hand-submit) or indirectly submit (through another software submission service or application) or fail to submit (they will follow incoming links to your sites also).

Once the robot finds your site and indexes it, it will move along to other sites from your outbound links. When you site is indexed, then another process takes place and this is the process of determining your ranking for specific keyword or key-phrase searches performed upon the search engine. All of the major search engines that use robots to index websites also use complicated algorithms for determining the page rank of your site. The search engine algorithm software looks at the title and description of the website along with keyword density and prominence to name a few to see which keyword or phrase your site is optimized for (if any). Certain weight is given for each of these components and the page is ranked accordingly.

The advantages of the spider-driven search engines over the directories are that first, search engine robots will continue to index your site on a regular basis whereas the directories basically will stick with the same title and description for the life of the website. Second, a webmaster or SEO professional has control over the optimization process in relation to the search engines, whereas in the directories, optimization is mostly irrelevant. Third, the volume (and popularity) of people using the search engines far outweighs the volume using the search directories. This means that yes, the major search directories are important places to submit your website to, but the major search engines are an absolute necessity.

Choosing the right hosting company is a must in achieving top search engine rankings for several reasons. First, you want to choose a reputable company that has 99.7% uptime or better so that when the search engine spiders and robots make it to your website, your website will be up and operating. If you hosting company tends to have a considerable amount of downtime, then these spiders and robots may just visit your website when it is down and not come back to it for weeks or months.

This is a huge price to pay for being cheap! In this case, being cheap will cost you more money. It is better to choose a hosting company will give you, say 100mb of disc space for your site (most websites come nowhere near to this size and if they do, they are either a major mega website or they have not been optimized for size or speed properly) and the most bandwidth you can get - 30 or 40 gigs, for instance.

If you go with a cheaper hosting site you may get only 10mb of disc space for your site and 1gig bandwidth. The problem with this scenario is that if you go over the disc space or bandwidth limitations, your hosting company will most likely charge you lots more dough. Sometimes a cheaper hosting company will shut your site down if immediate payment is not made. Once again the search engine spider or robot may just pass your by. So it is better to buy more than you need and not have to worry about limitations.

It is also generally a better idea to purchase your domain name at a different place than you have host your website. Some web hosts will do both, but the problem is if you wish to change hosts some website hosts will charge you a hefty transfer fee for you domain name and may take more time than desirable for the transfer. Having your domain name hosted separately gives you more flexibility.

Free hosts can cost you when it comes to search engine rankings. If you have a company like geocities host your website, most likely your website is called www.geocities.com/yoursite.html or some variation. This is not optimal for two reasons. First, if you exceed your bandwidth for the month, this host will shut down your website and put a fancy little splash screen in place of your website stating you have exceeded your bandwidth.

So, if you website is popular, which most likely is your goal, you will spend more time with your website down to customers and search engine spiders and robots. Second, search engine spiders and robots generally give more weight to your homepage than to your subordinate pages. In this case, your homepage is actually geocities.com and your main page is a subordinate page to this homepage. Most search engines will give your subordinate homepage less weight than someone else’s homepage at yoursite.com.

What to watch out for with some SEO companies

First of all, when you are choosing a search engine optimization company you want to find one that has a website with up-to-date information. If you are on a website and see a company stating that Yahoo charges $199 per year to index your site, this is old information. Yahoo now charges $299 per year. If the SEO website you are on states Alltheweb.com or Altavista.com have a basic free submit service, this is out-of-date information. These two search engines have gone over to the “dark side” and have joined Overture in the pay-per-click business model.

Of all of the websites on the Internet that should display the latest information, the SEO companies should be at the top of this list. This is our game. Old information on any website is bad news (except for archived information that is).

Some search engine optimization companies will guarantee that you see significant results within 15 days for a new website. This is an unrealistic statement that no reputable SEO company would make. Most significant results from search engine optimization and submission will occur in months, not days. Some search engines like Google and MSN may index your site within 30 days, but if you have a new site, your search engine placement will be in a sort of “holding tank” for a while and may be buried in the search engine database for another 30-60 days. Sure, your site may be listed, in short order but it will take additional time to gain prominence in the search engine rankings.

Also, some search engine optimization companies will guarantee newbies high-ranking results on low-traffic keywords that have little competition in the search engines. If you are an SEO company who is not concerned about your customer, this approach makes sense. There are fewer high-traffic keywords than low-traffic keywords and the high-traffic keywords generally have much more competition.

There is an SEO scam on the Internet that consumers need to be aware of called the “I’ll host your optimized pages” scam. In the “I’ll host your optimized pages” scam you do not have control of your own web pages and basically pay ransom to the host company on an ongoing basis. Once you miss a payment your web pages may disappear or the optimization you had previous paid for will be wiped clean.

Have you been unfortunate enough to receive the SEO spam scam? This is the email scam that starts out, “I’ve noticed you are not listed on some search engines.” You may have gotten this email even though you are listed number 1 on all of the major search engines. First, any reputable SEO company will not spam you to gain business. The first quest of any SEO company is to try to get to the top of the search engines, not send out spam. Second, this email is not specific to you or your company. Like all spam, the spammers send out thousands of emails hoping a small percentage pay off for big profits. Many of the reputable SEO sites now have ethics statements on their sites. Ethical website optimization includes no cloaking, no deceptive practices and no spamming.

This list is not comprehensive so it is a good idea to ask your SEO company questions upfront and that you receive answers to your satisfaction before you jump onboard. Also, if you have had any bad experiences with some SEO companies not covered here, please send us an email so that we may include what to watch out for in this section and warn other consumers.

All blogs should have an RSS feed. An RSS feed will allow for your blog posts to be easily syndicated. The syndication will result in links back to your blog from RSS directories or others who display the feed. Blog entries should be available via an RSS feed. Website visitors who subscribe to the feed will receive notification when new blog posts are added. If the title is of interest, they will click through to your website. This gives subscribers an easy way to know when a blog has been updated.

By far the easiest top 10 SEO tips you will ever do as it relates to search engine optimization is include a robots.txt file at the root of your website. Open up a text editor, such as Notepad and type “User-agent: *”. Then save the file as robots.txt and upload it to your root directory on your domain. This one command will tell any spider that hits your website to “please feel free to crawl every page of my website”.

Here’s one of my best top 10 SEO tips: Because the search engine analyzes everything it indexes to determine what your website is all about, it might be a good idea to block folders and files that have nothing to do with the content we want to be analyzed. You can disallow unrelated files to be read by adding “Disallow: /folder_name/” or “Disallow: /filename.html”. Here is an example of the robots.txt file on this site:

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
2. PPC (Pay Per Click)
3. Affiliate Marketing
4. Social Marketing
5. DM (Direct Mail)
6. Email
7. Word of mouth

It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don’t be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and Yahoo!. Because Yahoo! has a man-made database that truncates plurals, I prefer to use WordTracker (WT).

Below is a screenshot from WT that shows the results you’ll get when doing a query for “putter”. Notice that “golf putters” has the highest search volume with 100 searches in the last 24 hours, yet there are over 100,000 websites to compete against. Using the tool’s Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), you’ll be able to see that “custom putter” would have a better chance at higher ranking, since there are only 2,640 competing.

Here’s a key part of the top 10 SEO tips: When using any SEO tool for doing keyword research, start by keeping your searches ambiguous like we did in the example above for “putters”. The results will always return suggestions, sometimes surprising ones that you may not have thought of.

You can get less comprehensive results by using DigitalPoint’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. This SEO tool will give you a summary of information without the KEI. Personally, I like to know how many people are competing before I design a web page.

Before getting a web site on line you need to have a domain name. These are the familiar web addresses such as mywebsite.com that most browsers use to find a particular web site. Domain names, in fact, are pointers to a particular IP address and we use them because they are easier to remember than a series of numbers.

All websites have an IP address in the form 123.456.78.9. The domain name system translates these numbers into names such as mywebsite.com. All domain names are registered in a central registry maintained by InterNIC, a subsidiary of ICANN — the organization which certifies domain name registrars. Domain names are filtered through Domain Name Servers (DNS) which link IP addresses with domain names. Each web site usually has a primary and a secondary DNS – duplicates that increase reliability.

The first step in registering a domain name is to choose it. The name can be almost anything you want, but to be most effective it should reflect the nature of your website. If you are selling watches, for example, it helps to have a domain name that has some reference to watches – A1-Watches.com for example.

The rules for domain names are simple – only letters, numbers or hyphens are allowed. Other than that, a domain name is limited to 70 characters, but you are advised to keep it as short as possible. Domain names can be upper or lower case – case is ignored by DNS but you can use a combination to make the name more recognizable. MyWebSite.com is easier to read than mywebsite.com, but both are identical to the DNS.

There are several extensions available. The most common is .com — it has even entered common vocabulary as a way to express Internet activity – (I own a dot com business). Other extensions include .biz (for commercial sites), .org (for non-commercial organisations), .net (for organisations involved in Internet infrastructure) and .name (for personal names). There are also extensions with more specialized uses such as .museum, .aero, and .coop and are used exclusively by members of certain organizations. In addition to these common extensions, there can also be a country code extension such as .us (United States) or .de (Germany). The rules for using country extensions vary, so you need to check with your registrar to see if they are available to you.

All domains must be registered with a registrar that has been certified by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). There are hundreds of registrars and their prices vary considerably. The full list of registrars is available at the InterNIC website (http://www.internic.net/regist.html). Although registrars are closely regulated, they are permitted to offer their services through third parties, so many web hosts offer a domain name registration service even if they are not a registrar. The price of a domain name will usually be higher when dealing with these third-party services.

Domain names are usually registered for a minimum of one year, although you are permitted to buy up to a 10-year registration contract. Usually the longer the registration contract, the lower the price, so if you are sure you will be on the web for a considerable length of time you can benefit from a longer registration period. Most registrars also offer a discount on bulk purchases. If you own a number of domain names you can save money by transferring them all to the same registrar.

You have selected a domain name, registered it and signed up with a web host. What’s next? Your web host has to provide you with details about how to get your site up and running. This information includes passwords to get into your account, paths to directories where your files should be uploaded, and most importantly, what your domain name servers are.

Domain name servers (DNS) provide the link between your domain name (mywebsite.com) and your Internet Protocol (IP) address. The IP address is a series of numbers like this: 123.456.78.9. Every web server has a unique IP address which, in the case of dedicated servers hosting a single domain, is equivalent to the domain name. A site hosted on a dedicated server will respond to either 123.456.78.9 or mywebsite.com by serving the requested webpage.

Most websites, though, are hosted on shared servers. This means that one server is home to many different websites, but they each have the same IP address. If you type in a shared IP address you will get an error page or will be redirected to the web hosting company’s web site. So DNS is necessary for websites on shared servers. Domain names are the only way to request these websites – they cannot be requested by IP address.
Configuring DNS

When you first purchase a domain name, it will be registered on the DNS of the registrar. Until you arrange for a web host, the registrar company will usually redirect requests for your domain name to an error page or an ‘Under Construction’ page. Note that there is no time limit between buying a domain name and finding a host. Some people purchase domain names without ever intending to build a website on them. Most people, though, buy a domain name with the intention of using it. To do that, you need to open an account with a web host and prepare to transfer your site to their server. Part of the process of preparing your site for publication on the World Wide Web is to alert your domain name registrar of the DNS of your new server.

A DNS configuration looks something like this:

Primary Name Server: NSA.NEWDAYDNS.COM (204.50.14.2)
Secondary Name Server: NSB.NEWDAYDNS.COM (204.50.22.2)

This information is available from your hosting company either in their informational package that they email to you, or on their website. If you can’t find the DNS it’s best to contact your web host and ask for it. Once you have the DNS information you can usually enter it into your account on the website of your registrar. If you have purchased your domain name from the hosting company, they will usually make the necessary changes for you when they set up your account.

When the DNS is registered or modified (when changing web hosts) it can take up to 24 hours for your site to be accessible from everywhere in the world. This is because domain names are registered in a distributed data base that is maintained on thousands of computers around the world. Each computer has a small part of the database in cache, and if they receive a request for an unknown domain that request has to be forwarded to another computer until the information is found.

After you have opened an account with a web host and set the DNS you can start uploading your web pages. The most common way to do this is to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software but there are also some other options.

FTP is an Internet Protocol (like HTTP) that allows data files to be transferred from one computer to another. Your web host will provide information about how to connect to your site using FTP. Usually you use FTP software such as WS_FTP or FileZilla to connect to the FTP server on your website. The address of the FTP server is usually ftp.mywebsite.com (where mywebsite.com is the domain name).

Your host will also tell you the location where files should be uploaded. Your account will probably have two main folders in the root directory – public_html and www. Your web pages should be uploaded to the public_html folder. The www folder is a mirror folder which allows people to find your site by using either www.mysite.com or mysite.com.

You may have to adjust a few settings in your FTP software to upload files correctly. For example, if you are using a firewall on your computer you should set the transfer method to passive. If you are using a proxy you will have to adjust the proxy settings.

Files can be sent or received in either binary or ASCII mode. If they are transferred using the incorrect mode they may end up with errors on completion of the transfer. Your FTP software may try to determine which mode to use by examining the contents of the files, or you may have to manually specify the transfer mode. Files that should be sent in ASCII mode include HTML (and variants like HTM, SHTML, DHTML, etc.) TXT, CGI, C, ASP, JS etc. Basically, any file that can be viewed in a text editor should be transferred in ASCII mode. Binary mode, on the other hand, is used to transfer everything else – graphics, compiled programs, and media files.

Using the FTP software, make a connection to your web server. Browse to the folder where you want to upload files (usually by clicking on the folder icons) and then find the local files you wish to upload. Whole directories or individual files may be uploaded.

You can name most of the pages of your website anything you like, but there is one essential file in each directory – index.html or a variant (index.htm, index.shtml etc). This means that your home page has to use this name. The home page can be viewed by typing http://mywebsite.com or http://mywebsite.com/index.htm. In the first case, if there is no file named index.htm the contents of your root directory will be shown. Without an index file in each directory, anybody who browses to that directory can see all the files there. This presents an enormous security risk as well as exposing private information to public view.

FTP is the most common way to upload files to your website but is by no means the only way. Some web authoring packages have built in transfer methods to automatically upload your entire site or individual pages. Microsoft FrontPage is an example of this type of transfer method. In order to take advantage of it you need to have FrontPage extensions installed on your website. You can request this feature from your web host. Other authoring packages have built-in FTP software so that you can build your site and upload with one familiar interface.

You can also build sites online. Some web hosts give you access to browser controlled software that allows you to lay out web pages. Once you are finished the page is automatically saved to the proper location on your server. This type of web builder is usually available through the control panel of your hosting account.