truter.biz - London news + IT in London

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truter.biz Build a website :: Building a website from scratch ::

:: MENU :: -------- About -------- IT -------- Photos -------- Reviews -------- London -------- Visa and Embassy Info -------- Games & Web Tools -------- Forex --------

If you wish to build a website from scratch some of the following guidelines below could prove useful:

Design

Before sitting in front of the PC, get pen and paper and notate the:

Aim of the website
Determine the target audience
Highlight the main areas the content will cover
Draw a rough layout of how you want the site to appear
Surf the web for similar sites and don't be afraid to steal ideas or concepts (Do not steal code without consent)

DO NO USE Frames and Framesets

When I started building websites, the idea of having a fixed area on the left of the screen for menu/navigation which did not need to be refreshed as the user navigates the site, seemed like a good idea. After all, the user would spend less time downloading pages from the website , where the navigator was repeated.It also meant that coding time was reduced. However, when search engines eventually added the site to their databases, I found that frames/pages with the actual text were isolated from the menu when linked.Where a frameset is made up of more than one frame (otherwise you would not need a frameset!), the search engines are not intelligent to know how the frames should be linked to each other. Certainly for corporate intranets, using framesets can be beneficial. Avoid it where you can. (As further proof , notice that of the most active websites on the web do not use frames.)

Cater for non-javascript enabled browsers

For this website, I use a javascript applet developed by Softcomplex to display the menu. It's a brilliant menu, but won't work on older browsers or on browsers where javascript has been disabled for security reasons.

You need to cater for this scenario as it is quite common. By using the code below, immediately after the javascript code, a simple text menu is displayed.

<NOSCRIPT>
 .

:: MENU :: -------- <a href="../About/index.htm">About</a>
-------- <a href="../Images/index.htm">Photos</a> -------- <a href="../IT/index.htm">IT</a>
-------- <a href="../Reviews/index.htm">Reviews</a> -------- <a href="../LondonNews/index.htm">London</a>
-------- <a href="../SouthAfricanNews/index.htm">South Africa</a> -------- <a href="../Forex/index.htm">Forex</a>
-------- </h6>
</NOSCRIPT>

SEARCH ENGINES

Search Crawler or Spider:
The search crawler or spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being "spidered" or "crawled." The spider is programmed to return to the site on a regular basis. The more frequently the sites are crawled, the more up-to-date the search results are.

Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of a search engine, the index. The index is like a database that contains the information the spider found during it's crawl. Whenever a user enters a keyword or keywords into the search box, the search engines searches through the index to find the word(s) or phrase and returns the matching results.

Examples of Search Engines:

AltaVista
Excite
Google
Directories:
Directories are created by a person who actually creates your website's listing on the search page, as opposed to a 'robot' or 'spider' to do this automatically. A short description and the url to your website is submitted to the search engine owners. If approved, the search owners then assigns your website to an appropriate category or categories within the large search website.

Directories often provide much more targeted results than search engines. A search for the directory site looks for matches only within the descriptions submitted -- not information found on your web pages. To update your web sites description, you typically submit an online update to the search engine's webmaster.

Examples of Directory Searches:

Yahoo
AOL
AltaVista

Meta Search Engines
In a meta-search engine, you submit keywords in its search box, and it transmits your search simultaneously to several individual search engines and their databases of web pages. Within a few seconds, you get back results from all the search engines queried. Meta-search engines do not own a database of Web pages; they send your search terms to the databases maintained by search engine companies.

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How to get your site ranked
Not all search engines work the same. Each may use a different criteria to 'rank' web sites in a search result. Each set of criteria is unique to that search engine and can be based on a complex mixture of different elements. The three common criteria that many search engines use are listed below. Coding your web site for each of these elements can increase your ranking in a search result:

TITLE Tag:
The content of the TITLE tag is often used as one of the criteria for ranking a page. For some search engines, pages with keywords appearing in the title are assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic and are then ranked higher.

The text returned by many search engines comes from the TITLE container on your HTML page. Title tags should always be included on every page. Every page should have a unique title tag that accurately describes the page's content.
TITLE tags should always:

be included on every page of your website
uniquely describe each page
describe webpage content accurately
be concise with 10 words or less

------------------------------------------------------------------
META Tags

Meta tags are used to define meta data. Meta Data means information about a document.

There are several meta tags, but the most important for search engine indexing are the description and keywords tags. The description tag returns a description of the page in place of the summary the search engine would ordinarily create. The keywords tag provides keywords for the search engine to associate with your page.

META tags should be placed on every page of your web site, not just the home page. If Frames are used, each page in a frame set should have its own META tags. If you only index the framing page, none of your content will show up in the search engine.

All META Tags must be placed within the HEAD portion of an HTML page.

Example:

<html><head>
<meta name=description
content="A short description about
this UA Web Site">
<meta name=keywords
content="News">
<META NAME="rating" CONTENT="General">
<title>News Services at</title>
</head>

------------------------------------------------------------------

Keywords:
The Keywords tag holds a list of words and phrases that search engines use to cross reference your site with user searches. You should include your department name, products, services, location, common misspellings, caps variations and plurals. Use individual words as well as phrases. If you are indexing a page in an art gallery, you would include the name of the image, the author, the software used to create it and anything else you think web users might type in on a search for your content like yours. When writing your keywords separate each word or phrase with a comma.

You are allowed up to 1000 characters (approximately 150 words) of information. Include all words and phrases that a searcher might use to find the information on the page.

Description:
This will be displayed along with the title of your document in the index listing. It should enable the person looking at it to easily determine the site's content.

Example:

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After google, this is the most-important site to submit the URL to: http://dmoz.org/add.html

Once you are in google and dmoz, you should be picked up by most search engines, but you can cover most bases by submitting the URL to the following sites:

http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156221

http://www.submit-it.com/