Friday, February 24, 2006

Search Engine Optimization some Mistakes

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves making Web pages more search engine friendly to give them a better ranking in search engines.
SEO is important because over 80% of Internet users reach Websites through search engines. If your Website is not ranked at the top of the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, HotBot, and Lycos, you will be losing a lot of traffic.
Search engine optimisation is basically about following search engine rules. If your Web page fits the criterias that a search engine considers the most important factors in terms of relevance, then it will reward you with a top ranking.
Search Engine Optimization involves optimizing the title, keywords, description, headings and alt tags. You can get better rankings for your site if you use good keywords.
Right now I will be explaining the mistakes that anyone can make while optimizing their site.
There are several things, considered “spamming”, that you can do to get your pages listed higher on a search engine results page. If you ever do something to trick a search engine, then you risk being blacklisted by them. It is easy to spam a search engine by accident especially since the rules keep changing.
Below is a list of the common things I recommend that you should never do while optimizing your site for better rankings:

1.Do not use the same color for your text and background. This is one of the common methods used by people to stuff keywords on a web page. Stuffing keywords can help your page get listed higher for the keywords you use BUT search engines can detect this and will blacklist your site.

2.Do not use multiple instances of the same tag. For example, do not use more than one title tag.

3.Do not submit identical pages to search engines. For example, do not duplicate another web page that has good ranking and resubmit it to search engines.Search engines can detect this.

4.Do not exchange links with any site that is blacklisted by any search engine.

5.Do not submit the same page to any search engine more than once within 24 hours.

6.Do not use any keywords in your keywords meta tag that are not related to the content of your page.

Search engines can detect all of the things I have mentioned above and view your site as spam if you have applied any of these tricks.

Also never create identical websites. An indentical website is a dulpicate copy of another web site with the same content but a different domain.
Also do not create a site with a domain that is an improperly spelled version of another domain. For example, www.lissaexpalins.com for www.lissaexplains.com

I have heard that Search Engines can detect this also.
general

  posted by Smile Community @ 6:27 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Free directory submission links :

 

http://www.dmoz.org http://www.jayde.com
http://www.dirone.com http://www.gimpsy.com
http://www.canadopedia.com http://www.haabaa.com
http://www.somuch.com http://www.chiff.com
http://www.americasbest.com http://www.illumirate.com
http://www.webworldindex.com http://www.mavicanet.com
http://www.allthebizz.com http://hoppa.com
http://www.smallerbizz.com http://www.greenstalk.com
http://www.clickey.com http://www.smartlinks.org
http://www.yeandi.com http://www.myallfish.com
http://www.josh.nu http://www.cantufind.com
http://www.superpages.ca http://www.earthstation9.com
http://www.re-quest.net http://www.web-beacon.com
http://www.clearleadinc.com http://www.click4choice.com
http://www.emfind.com http://www.turnpike.net
http://www.allfreethings.com http://www.webs-best-directory.com

  posted by Smile Community @ 7:34 PM 0 comments

Free web submission links :

 

http://submit.gsign.biz - Free web submission to over 36 top search engines.

http://www.searchengineoptimising.com - Submit your website URL to over 100 search engines, for free.

http://websitesubmit.hypermart.net - 1 2 3 Submit PRO's Free Site Submission.

http://www.1hideout.com - Increase traffic on your site for free. Promote your small business or even larger business.

http://www.submitcorner.com - Free online website submission


  posted by Smile Community @ 7:33 PM 0 comments

Free web templates links :

 

http://www.zymic.com - Over 70 high quality free web templates

http://www.zerodollartemplates.com - Free and premium templates.

http://www.steves-templates.com - Steve's templates.

http://www.interspire.com - Free templates and logo design.

http://www.freelayouts.com - Free web templates and flash movies.

http://www.mastertemplates.com - MasterTemplates provides professionally designed website layouts for free.

http://www.freewebtemplates.com - We have a collection of thousands of free templates available for download created by designers from around the globe.

http://www.designload.net - Free web templates, logo, designs, icons, graphics and much more.

http://www.htmltemplates.in - 100% free HTML templates - Over 100+ free HTML Templates to download instant.

http://www.adesdesign.net - Some free html and psd templates.

http://www.zeroweb.org - Free website layouts and templates, clipart, graphics and website tools.


  posted by Smile Community @ 7:27 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Free web hosting links :

 

http://www.batcave.net - 50 mb, traffic 5 gb, ftp, php support.

http://www.domaindlx.com - 100 mb, traffic 1 gb, ftp, asp support.

http://www.100free.com - 25 mb, unlimited traffic, ftp.

http://www.555mb.com - 50 mb, traffic 1 gb, ftp, php / perl / mysql support.

http://www.aushost.org.uk - 50 mb, traffic 5 gb, ftp, php / cgi support..

http://www.netfirms.com - 25 mb, traffic 1 gb, perl / cgi support.

http://www.doteasy.com - 100 mb, traffic 1 gb, ftp, php / cgi / perl / mysql support.

http://www.onestop.net - 10 mb, traffic 1 gb, ftp.

http://www.100webspace.com - 100 mb, traffic 3 gb, ftp, php/perl/mysql support.

http://www.globalweb.com.ru - 100 mb, traffic 1 gb, ftp, php/perl/mysql support.

http://www.hostingeveryone.com - 500 mb, traffic 5 gb.

http://www.webhostfree.net - 100 mb, traffic 1 gb, ftp, php/perl/mysql support.

http://www.x10hosting.com - 100 mb, traffic 3 gb, ftp, php/perl/mysql support.


  posted by Smile Community @ 5:55 PM 0 comments

Free scripts links :

 

http://www.hotscripts.com - One of the best resources for scripts: php, asp, javascript...

http://www.phpfreaks.com - Free collection of all kind of scripts

http://www.regretless.com - Little collection of useful scripts.

http://www.scriptsearch.com - Big collection of scripts.

http://www.needscripts.com - Visit us and you will find all the scripts you need.

http://www.devscripts.com - Asp, php, javascript, perl, java, delphi and other kinf of scripts.

http://www.chipmunk-scripts.com - A free collection of all kind of scripts.

http://www.free-php.co.uk - Php resource directory of free and commercial PHP scripts. Also PHP tutorials.

http://www.free-php.org - Collection of snippets written in PHP which covers all predefined PHP functions

http://www.free-php.net -Free PHP scripts with support forums, including Contact Form, Daily Pic, Gallery Generator, Mailing List, Random Popup, Simple Gallery, Simple Member, Simple Poll, Simple Referer, Spider Log.

http://freshmeat.net - A directory of open source PHP scripts and projects.

http://www.hot-php-scripts.com - A categorized PHP script collection rated free and commercial scripts

http://www.onlyscripts.com - Categorized PHP scripts


  posted by Smile Community @ 5:54 PM 0 comments

Free webmaster tools links :

 

Meta tag analyzer - The Meta-Tag Analyzer checks syntax, size, etc. for your titles & meta code.

Meta tag generator - Create META Tags for your site without having to write any code.

Search engine position - Find your website position in top search engines.

Link popularity - The Link Popularity Check analysis tool will search Google, Yahoo! , AltaVista, MSN, HotBot, Lycos, AllTheWeb to determine how many pages are linking to your web page.

Keyword Density Tool - The keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters/SEO's achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms/keywords.

Seo collection - Free meta tag analyzer , keyword density analyzer , free search engine ranker and free site submission.

Keyword Density Tool - Analyze the keyword density of your website

Search Engine Spider Simulator - It is always wise to check a webpage to see what a search engine robot can see. Below a couple of tools that allow you to do this.

PageRank Checker - Check the PageRank of your website

CSS Navigation Menu Generator - Use this simple tool to create awe inspiring, graphical menus for your website.

HTML Valididation / Link Check Tool - You cant really beat getting your page validated from none other than the W3C consortium themselves...

Link Checker - Check your site for broken links.

Search Engine Saturation - Check the number of pages a given search engine has in its index for your website.

Search Term Suggestion Tool - Not sure what search terms to bid on? Enter a term related to your site and Overture will show you.

Domain Check - Domain Check will simultaneously check .com, co.uk, .net, .org, .biz und .info for domain name availability. In addition there is a built in whois function to check domain registration details.


  posted by Smile Community @ 5:53 PM 0 comments

Monday, February 20, 2006

How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking on Google

 

It's been some time since the last article on Google appeared in thesitewizard.com's newsletter, giving tips on how you can improve your search engine rank on Google. This article updates the Google search engine promotion tips given in that issue and extends it with new Google search engine positioning tips.

Background: Google's Page Ranking Algorithm

As many of you are probably already aware, Google ranks a page according to the number and quality of links leading to that page. For example, if your page has 100 quality links leading to it, it will rank higher than another page that has only 20 links pointing at it. Quality links come from pages that are themselves "important" (Google's own terminology).

Note that this is not a secret. Google actually publishes information about their ranking algorithm on their website. You can read it for yourself at http://www.google.com/technology/.

Improving Your Page Rank on Google

There are numerous tips floating around in webmaster circles about how to improve your ranking in search engine results on Google.

1. Get Those Inbound Links

Since Google ranks your pages according to the number of links pointing at your page, it stands to reason that you should try to get as many links pointing at your pages as possible. This is so obvious that I'm only mentioning it for completeness sake.

2. Your Title Tag

tags in the Google seems to give weight to the title of your page. By title, I mean the text that is sandwiched between the HTML section of your web page. If you use a Web editor that automatically inserts a title like "New Page", remember to change it to some meaningful text with your keywords inside to reap the benefit of this feature.

3. Content-Laden Pages (Keyword Density)

It has often been observed that Google considers keyword density a large factor in ranking pages in search engine results, more so than many other search engines. You can read more about keyword density and how you can improve it on your pages from my other article, Improving Your Keyword Density for Search Engine Positioning, at http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/keyworddensity.shtml

4. Keyword-laden Links?

According to a paper published by one of Google's founders, if the links pointing to your page has the relevant keyword text in them, it will cause your page to be ranked higher in search engine results. For example, a link with the text "Cheap Shoe Store" pointing at your site will cause your site to be listed earlier if a visitor searches for "cheap shoe store" than if the link simply said "click here". You can find a copy of the paper online at http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm.

Other Google Tips


1. Will Disabling Caching of Your Page Affect Your Page Rank?

Some time ago, it was claimed that Google would penalise pages that forbade it from caching their pages. As you know, Google caches the pages it indexes unless otherwise instructed. To avoid problems with people who feel that this is a copyright infringement (and other reasons), they allow sites to instruct the Google spider not to cache those pages using various means. One such method is outlined in my article on using META tags to manage the search engine spiders and listings, at http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/metatags.shtml

Google has apparently publicly denied that disabling caching would affect the page's ranking in any way. I tend to believe their claim.

2. Dynamic Pages and Google

Unlike some other search engines, Google is able to index dynamically generated pages, so long as a link exist to those pages somewhere. For example, a page like "http://yoursite.com/showstuff.php?id=stockprices" can be indexed by Google.

So if you have a dynamically generated page that you think should be indexed, make sure you put a link to it somewhere on your site.

3. ALT tags on Images

If you have been placing images on your website without bothering to place ALT tags, now is a good time to add ALT tags. Google apparently indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images.

4. META Keywords Tag is Ignored

Google ignores the META keywords tag, so, optimising of this tag is not going to help you any with Google.

The Google Toolbar

If you use Internet Explorer, you can get an idea of what Google thinks of how important your site is in general, by downloading the Google Toolbar. The latter is an ActiveX control that installs into IE, and shows the Page Rank of any page that you visit. The toolbar can be obtained from http://toolbar.google.com/

Unfortunately, to obtain the page rank of the pages you visit, the toolbar actually transmits information about the pages you visit to Google. Thus if you are worried about people tracking your Internet activity, you might want to restrict its use to times when you check your site's ranking.


  posted by Smile Community @ 10:16 PM 0 comments

How to Set Up a robots.txt to Control Search Engine Spiders

 

When I first started writing my first website, I did not really think that I would ever have any reason why I would want to create a robots.txt file. After all, did I not want search engine robots to spider and thus index every document in my site? Yet today, all my sites, including thesitewizard.com, have a robots.txt file in their root directory. This article explains why you might also want to include a Robots.txt file on your sites, how you can do so, and notes some common mistakes made by new webmasters with regards the ROBOTS.TXT file.

For those new to the robots.txt file, it is merely a text file implementing what is known as the Standard for Robot Exclusion. The file is placed in the main directory of a website that advises spiders and other robots which directories or files they should not access. The file is purely advisory - not all spiders bother to read it let alone heed it. However, most, if not all, the spiders sent by the major search engines to index your site will read it and take cognizance of the rules contained within the file.

Why is a Robots.txt File Important?

1. It Can Avoid Wastage of Server Resources

At the date of this writing, as far as I know, many of the search engine spiders do not bother to index the scripts on your site (such as your CGI or PHP scripts). However, there are those that do, including one of the major players, Google.

For robots or spiders that actually index scripts, they will actually call your scripts just as a browser would, complete with all the special characters. If your site is like mine, where the scripts are solely meant for the use of humans and serve no practical use for a search engine (why should a search engine need to invoke my site-navigation script? - it can just crawl the direct links), you may want to block spiders from the directories that contain your scripts. For example, I block spiders from my CGI-BIN directory. Hopefully, this will reduce the load on the web server that occurs when scripts are executed by removing unnecessary executions.

Of course there are the occasional ill-behaved robots that hit your server at high speed. Such spiders can actually bring down your server or at the very least slow it down for the real users who are trying to access it. If you know of any such spiders, you might want to exclude them too. You can do this with a robots.txt file. Unfortunately though, ill-behaved spiders often ignore robots.txt files as well.

2. It Can Save Your Bandwidth

If you look at your website's web logs, you will undoubtedly find many requests for the robots.txt file by various search engine spiders. If, like me, you have a customized 404 document (which loads each time a visitor tries to retrieve a page that does not exist on your site), you will find that the robot will wind up requesting for that document instead, if you don't have an existing robots.txt file. My site has a fairly large 404 document, with the result that the spiders wind up loading it repeatedly throughout the day, adding to my already large bandwidth problems. In such a case, having a small robots.txt file may save you some bandwidth (yeah, I know, it's not that much).

Some spiders may also request for files which you feel they should not. For example, one search engine requests for graphic files (".gif" files") on my sites. Since I see little reason why I should let it index the graphics on my site, waste my bandwidth, and possibly infringe my copyright, I ban it (and in fact all spiders) from my graphic files directory in my robots.txt file.

3. It Removes Clutter from your Web Statistics

I don't know about you, but one of the things I check from my web statistics is the list of URLs that visitors tried to access, but met with a 404 File Not Found Error. Often this tells me if I made a spelling error in one of the internal links on one of my sites (yes, I know - I should have checked all links in the first place, but mistakes do happen).

If you don't have a robots.txt file, you can be sure that /robots.txt is going to feature in your web statistics 404 report, adding clutter and perhaps unnecessarily distracting your attention from the real bad URLs that need your attention.

4. Refusing a Robot for Copyright Reasons

Sometimes you don't want a particular spider to index your site because you feel that it that particular search engine infringes on your copyright or some other reason. For example, Picsearch (found at http://www.picsearch.com/ ) will download your images and create a thumbnail version of it for people to search. That thumbnail image will be saved in their web server. If, as a webmaster, you do not want this done, you can actually exclude their spider from indexing your site with a robots.txt directive (the spider apparently obeys the rules in that file).

How to Set Up a Robots.txt File

Writing a robots.txt file could not be easier. It's just an ASCII text file that you place at the root of your domain. For example, if your domain is www.yourdomain.com, you will place the file at www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt.

The file basically lists the names of spiders on one line, followed by the list of directories or files it is not allowed to access on subsequent lines, with each directory or file on a separate line. It is possible to use the wildcard character "*" instead of naming specific spiders. When you do so, all spiders are assumed to be named. Note that the robots.txt file is a robots exclusion file (with emphasis on the "exclusion") - there is no way to tell spiders to include any file or directory.

Take the following robots.txt file for example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

The above two lines, when inserted into a robots.txt file, inform all robots (since the wildcard asterisk "*" character was used) that they are not allowed to access anything in the cgi-bin directory and its descendents. That is, they are not allowed to access cgi-bin/whatever.cgi or even a file or script in a subdirectory of cgi-bin, such as /cgi-bin/anything/whichever.cgi.

If you have a particular robot in mind, such as the picsearch robot, you may have lines like the following:

User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /

This means that the picsearch robot, "psbot", should not try to access any file in the root directory "/" and all its subdirectories. This effectively means that psbot is banned from the entire of your website.

You can have multiple Disallow lines for each user agent (ie, for each spider). Here is an example of a longer robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /

The first block of text disallows all spiders from the images directory and the cgi-bin directory. The second block of code disallows the psbot spider from every directory.

It is possible to exclude a spider from indexing a particular file. For example, if you don't want Google's image search robot to index a particular picture, say, mymugshot.jpg, you can add the following:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/mymugshot.jpg

Remember to add the trailing slash ("/") if you are indicating a directory. If you simply add

User-agent: *
Disallow: /privatedata

the robots will be disallowed from accessing privatedata.html as well as privatedataandstuff.html as well as the directory tree beginning from /privatedata/ (and so on). In other words, there is an implied wildcard character following whatever you list in the Disallow line.

Where Do You Get the Name of the Robots?

If you have a particular spider in mind which you want to block, you have to find out its name. To do this, the best way is to check out the website of the search engine. Respectable engines will usually have a page somewhere that gives you details on how you can prevent their spiders from accessing certain files or directories.

Common Mistakes in Robots.txt

1. It's Not Guaranteed to Work

As mentioned earlier, although the robots.txt format is listed in a document called "A Standard for Robots Exclusion", not all spiders and robots actually bother to heed it. Listing something in your robots.txt is no guarantee that it will be excluded. If you really need to protect something, you should use a .htaccess file (if you are running your site on an Apache server).

2. Don't List Your Secret Directories

Anyone can access your robots file, not just robots. For example, typing http://www.google.com/robots.txt will get you Google's own robots.txt file. I notice that some new webmasters seem to think that they can list their secret directories in their robots.txt file to prevent that directory from being accessed. Far from it. Listing a directory in a robots.txt file often attracts attention to the directory! In fact, some spiders (like certain spammers' email harvesting robots) make it a point to check the robots.txt for excluded directories to spider.

3. Only One Directory/File per Disallow line

Don't try to be smart and put multiple directories on your Disallow line. This will probably not work the way you think, since the Robots Exclusion Standard only provides for one directory per Disallow statement.

It's Worth It

Even if you want all your directories to be accessed by spiders, a simple robots file with the following may be useful:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

With no file or directory listed in the Disallow line, you're implying that every directory on your site may be accessed. At the very least, this file will save you a few bytes of bandwidth each time a spider visits your site (or more if your 404 file is large); and it will also remove Robots.txt from your web statistics bad referral links report.


  posted by Smile Community @ 10:13 PM 0 comments

Keyword Density in Search Engine Ranking

 

Some years ago, back when Alta Vista was still the search engine of choice, I tried to find one of thefreecountry.com's most famous pages, The Free C / C++ Compilers page, on Alta Vista using the search term "+free +c++ +compilers". I must have scanned at least 20 pages of the search results, but could not find that page listed anywhere.

I went back and looked at my page again, and realised that in the interest of brevity, the phrase "C++ compiler" occurred on the page only once. I had listed every compiler on the page without the words "C++ compiler". For example, the entry for "Borland C++ Compiler" was simply listed as "Borland". While this kept my page size down, it did not help the search engine realize that my page was about C++ compilers. I did a simple change to the page so that every compiler was listed under its full name (with the "C++ compiler" bit), and resubmitted the page to Alta Vista.

After nearly a month, I checked Alta Vista again, using the same search terms. The page was now listed on the first page of the search results. Incredible!

(I don't know if it's still on the first page though, these positions change everytime someone submits a site.)

What is Keyword Density?

One of the simplest ways to improve your site's placement in the search engine results is to work on the keyword density on your page, which was what I did.

For my purpose here, I will refer to a "keyword" as a word that the user searches for when using the search engine. Generally speaking, keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for (the keyword) against the total number of words appearing on your web page. If your keyword occurs only (say) once in a page of one thousand words, it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that occurs (say) four times in a page of similar length.

If a particular keyword has a higher density on your web page, then the likelihood of your page obtaining a better search engine ranking increases. Note that not all search engines bother with keyword density and indeed even those that do have their own algorithm for computing the density of a keyword. However, the principles described in this article is general enough to help your page improve its ranking in the engines that take keyword density into account.

How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking

How do you improve your keyword density?

1. When planning a page, think about which search terms a user is likely to use when searching for the information your site provides. For example, a visitor who is looking for information on "Search Engine Ranking" may search for things like "search engine positioning", "search engine ranking", "search engine placement", "keyword density", "top ranking", and the like.

2. After you have collected your list of keywords, do NOT simply dump those keywords into a senseless list on your web page. I've seen some websites do this in an attempt to influence search engine listings. This may not work with all search engines. Some of the engines attempt to be smart when processing keywords and if it sees keywords occurring together in a senseless sequence, it may penalise your website.

3. Instead, try to form sentences that use those keywords. If you are a good writer, you may have to kill some of those good habits you previously used in writing documents: for example, many good writers have an aversion to repeating a particular word too often, choosing instead to use alternative terms that mean the same thing. This makes for a more pleasant reading, but it will not help you get your site listed with a top rank in search engine results for that particular keyword.

For instance, if you want your page to have a high ranking when someone searches for the phrase "search engine ranking", keep repeating the phrase "search engine ranking" in your document instead of substituting with pronouns like "it" and the like. Do likewise for the other keywords that you want a high density on the page. You'll of course have to use your discretion with this, or your page will be unpleasant to read.

You can see an example of how this is done by examining this article itself, and see how often I have repeated keywords and phrases like "keyword", "keyword density", "search engine ranking" and "search engine positioning".

4. In days of old, some people tried the trick of having a very short page for a particular keyword. For example, the page may only have the following one sentence: "Keyword density is important in search engine ranking." Since there were so few words on the page, the page was actually easy to draft and the keywords "keyword density" and "search engine ranking" have a very high density on that page.

This method is not very useful nowadays. For example, at the time I wrote this, it no longer appears to work with Alta Vista, which seems to rank pages that are bigger than 4K more favourably.

Conclusion

When I increased the keyword density of certain keywords on one of my pages on thefreecountry.com, my page ranking took a big leap upwards. Improving the density of keywords on your pages may also do the same for your site's search engine position.


  posted by Smile Community @ 10:11 PM 0 comments

How to Use Meta Tags In Search Engine Promotion

 

If you view the HTML sources for the web pages on the thesitewizard.com, you would have noticed that they all contain META tags. META tags influence the way some search engines list and index web pages.

There are at least three META tags that you will want to use to make sure your page is search engine ready.

1. What are Meta tags good for?

For search engines that support them, META tags are used in at least three ways:

  1. They are used to describe your site in the search results. For example, if you do not have a META Description tag for your page, some search engines will simply grab the first few lines of your page to serve as the description of your site. This description is more important than you may think. If you were searching for "nosuchwordasthis", which of the following two items listed would you be more likely to click?

    • Nosuchwordasthis.com: Ridiculous and Impossible Words
      Home About Example.com Contact Us Links Download FAQ
    • Nosuchwordasthis.com: Ridiculous and Impossible Words
      Some of the incredible words that netizens have come up with this year, along with their supposed meanings.

    The first item above had a snippet from what appears to be its top menu in the lines below the website title. The second item has a description which tells the person searching exactly what the site is all about.

    If you do not put a description tag, what appears in the listing would be likely to be whatever first appears on your page, usually the alt text of some graphic or banner or perhaps your top menu.

  2. There are search engines which also look for a META Robots tag to determine how they index your site. For example, if Google (a search engine) does not encounter such a tag, it will only index the page but not follow the links on it (at least that was its behaviour the last time I checked). If you want it to index the pages linked from your main page, you will need to place a META Robots tag.

  3. In the old days, they were used to determine which keywords your page will be listed under. So if you want your page to be listed in a search engine when the user searches for the term "nosuchwordasthis", the latter should be present in your META Keywords tag as well as in your document. I'm not sure however if any search engine still uses this tag today.

There are other META tags, which individual search engines recognize. However, the tags listed here are the main tags relevant to most search engines.

2. How to Use the META Keywords Tag

The Meta Keywords tag used to be an important way to get your page listed under specific keywords under the search engines. Nowadays, however, major search engines like Google and Alta Vista ignore this tag, and the keywords tag no longer has the significance it used to have in the early days of the web. You can read specific details about what is important to these search engines in their ranking of your page in the following articles:

Google Search Engine Positioning Tips
http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/google.shtml

Alta Vista Search Engine Placement Tips
http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/altavistaranking.shtml

I still use this tag in most of my pages out of sheer habit. However, I rarely put in any effort to choose keywords to list in the tag since it's mostly useless nowadays.

The META Keywords tag should be placed in the portion of your web page. If you are using a WYSIWYG editor, there is usually some way for you to enter the keywords on the page using a separate dialog box. If you are typing it yourself into your web page, the tag looks like the following:

In place of the phrase "put your keywords here", you should of course give a list of your keywords. The keywords should be comma-delimited. That is, if you want to your page to be listed when the user searches for "medical help" and "free diagnosis", you should use the following tag:

Each search engine has its own limit to the number of characters in your keyword list. The general advice given is not to make your list longer than you need it to be. Some search engine experts recommend that you do not exceed 1000 characters in your list. In the days when it still recognized the keyword tag, Alta Vista did not use anything beyond 500 characters.

A word of caution. Although you might think that this is a good place to put in common misspellings of keywords that you spelt correctly on your page, you should probably note that some search engines penalize web pages that contain keywords that cannot be found on the page itself. They are probably trying to guard against abuse by people trying to "spam" the index. The latter have been known to dump every conceivable keyword they can think of even if it is unrelated to their web page. Unfortunately, this policy also penalizes legitimate site owners who really want to catch those common misspellings of their page content.

You can read more information about this in the article Your Website's Spelling and the Search Engines at http://www.thesitewizard.com/sitepromotion/spellingerrors.shtml

You should also not repeat a particular keyword too many times in your tag. Again, some engines make a note of such things and penalize your site. Note that it is possible to accidentally repeat a keyword multiple times when you use a word in different phrases: eg, a tag that has the following keyword list, "search engine promotion, search engine ranking, search engine placement", would have repeated the words "search engine" three times even though they occur in different phrases. Some repetition is apparently acceptable (possibly even up to three times); excessive repetition is regarded as "spam".

3. How to Use the META Description Tag

A META Description tag, for those of you who write your web pages using raw HTML code, looks like the following:

Give a brief description of your page in this tag. Bear in mind that this description (or part of it) will be displayed in the search engine results so try to make sure you phrase it in such a way that the person searching can tell at a glance that he's found the correct page for his search. Minimize irrelevancies and put the essentials near the beginning of the description so that if the search engine only accepts the initial (say) 150 characters, the essential parts of your description will still be displayed.

Not all search engines use this tag. For example, Google normally only displays the text surrounding the matching keyword that the searcher used.

4. How to Use the META Robots Tag

Although this Meta tag is seldom mentioned in search engine promotion guides, it is important if you want certain search engines to crawl through your website using the links on the page you submit. Since adding it involves little additional effort, you might as well do it while you add the other tags.

In general, you will add the following line to your web page if you want the search engine to index your page and follow the links on it.

In cases where you do not want it to index your page simply use "noindex" instead of "index". Likewise if you don't want the engine to crawl through the links on your page, use "nofollow" instead of "follow".

Google and search engines that use the Inktomi engine, like HotBot, apparently recognize this tag.

Furthermore, if you do not want the search engine to keep a cache of your page on their servers, you can affix a "noarchive" value to the "content" attribute, such as in the example below:

Google, for example, will see the "noarchive" value and not keep a copy of your page in its cache.

5. So how important is the Meta tag?

Although the benefits conferred by using the various meta tags on your page is not substantial, they are nonetheless useful in controlling how the search engines index and list your page. Since tags like the description and robots tag require very little effort to add to your page, it is probably a good idea to add at least these tags to your pages.


  posted by Smile Community @ 10:06 PM 0 comments

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Improving Your AltaVista Search Engine Ranking

 

AltaVista actually publishes their criteria for ranking sites. While I am not sure how much of it reflects the actual practice to date, it is instructive to look at their documented criteria.

Ranking Tips

The AltaVista FAQ suggests a few things you should do in order to improve your web page's ranking. Here are a few of the important ones:

  1. Your title tag should hold keywords that meaningfully describe your page. Note that this "title" refers to the one in the section of your document, not the one displayed in your browser window.
  2. The description meta tag, that is, a tag like , is used as the description of your site in AltaVista's listings, and may "also influence the ranking of your page for specific search terms". This means, presumably, that if someone searches for a particular keyword, and it appears in your description and title tags, AltaVista will accord that page a higher rank than if it did not occur there.
  3. The proximity of one keyword to another, and their keyword density is important to AltaVista. This probably means that if someone searches for "search engine optimization" and your page has many instances of those three words in sequence, your page is considered more relevant than another page with those three individual words scattered all over the page. For more information about keyword density, see my other article on Keyword Density in Search Engine Ranking at
    http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/keyworddensity.shtml
  4. Although not mentioned in the current version of their FAQ, it is usually held among webmasters that links to your site containing the keyword that the visitor is searching for improve your site's ranking on AltaVista. For example, if a visitor is searching for "CGI scripts" and there are many links to your site with those words in the anchor text, your site will be ranked higher.

How About the Ubiquitous Meta Keywords Tag?

Back in the year 2000, there was an article on AltaVista describing how the keyword meta tag was rated by the search engine spider. That document has since been removed (or at least, I can't seem to find it any more). The document mentioned that the words in the keyword meta tag has the same value as the other words on the web page itself, except for one very important case: if your meta keyword tag contains keywords that do not occur in your main web page, your page will be penalized. The document went on to say that your ranking may improve if you use both the title tag and relevant first few lines in your web page without any meta keyword tag.

Today, that document has disappeared. What's left of it, a general FAQ, no longer even mentions the meta keywords tag. I have a suspicion that the keywords tag is no longer even indexed by the spider.

Things to Avoid with AltaVista

AltaVista mentions a few practices that it considers as search engine spam. You might want to avoid these on your page since AltaVista says that it will block sites practising such tricks. Here are some of the items mentioned in their FAQ.

  • Extremely small text, hidden text, etc: these are typically used by webmasters to inflate the number of occurences of keywords appearing on a page.
  • Pages with excessive keywords: presumably if your keyword density is above a certain threshold, AltaVista will consider your page to be spamming the index.
  • Duplicate content: this includes mirrors of your site as well as identical content appearing from different domain names. If you need a mirror from different domains to distribute your bandwidth around, you may need to create a robots.txt file to forbid the AltaVista spider from indexing your mirror sites.

Conclusion

AltaVista used to be one of the most popular search engines around in the late 1990s. Today, it's popularity has diminished somewhat, and is probably overtaken by Google. Nonetheless, since submission to the index is free, and many of the documented ranking criteria mentioned above are common criteria used by other search engines, it is still a good idea to take note of them when you design your site.


  posted by Smile Community @ 6:48 PM 0 comments

How to Make Money From Your Website

 

Now that you've got a website, how do you make money from it? There are at least two ways in which sites can make money:

  1. Advertising Revenue
  2. Selling Goods and Services

I shall deal with the second case, "Selling goods and services", in another article. In this article, I will address the issue of how your site can actually make money from advertising.

Making Money From Advertising

If you look at many websites, you will probably notice that there are banner advertisements displayed on most pages. If you are a newcomer to the scene, you might think that you must either be a company or that your site must be famous before you can get advertisers, just as it is the case in hardcopy publications.

In reality, anyone with a website can get advertisers. While it is true that if your site is well-known, you may get companies contacting you to offer to advertise on your site, you can get advertising revenue even if you are just starting out and your site is relatively unknown.

The way to do this is to join as an "affiliate" of various sites, either directly, or through an affiliate network. An affiliate network is simply an intermediary where you can select from a variety of advertisers.

Payment Schemes

Before joining any program, you should probably be aware of the different payment schemes available.

  1. Pay Per Impression

    Here, you are paid according to the number of times the advertiser's banner is displayed on your site. The amount you earn is typically calculated based on the number of thousand impressions of the banner (impressions = number of times the banner is displayed), often abbreviated CPM (cost per thousand, with the M being the Latin numeral for thousand). That is, $5 CPM means that you get paid $5 for 1,000 displays of the banner. In general, the amount paid is usually small, but it is easy to earn since everytime a visitor loads the page, you earn. This is known as a "high conversion rate". Needless to say, this method will allow you to automatically earn more if your site attracts a lot of visitors.

  2. Pay Per Click

    When you are paid per click, you are only paid when visitors click the advertiser's banner on your site. The amount paid is usually higher than the pay per impression scheme. Whether you get a high conversion rate here depends on the banner (whether it attracts people to click it), although in general, it has a higher conversion rate than the pay per sale method. A high traffic site will probably enjoy a higher click rate than a lower traffic site, although you will probably get better results if your banners are carefully selected to suit the target audience of your site.

  3. Pay Per Sale or Lead

    While you will probably get the highest payment rates with this method, it has the lowest conversion rate of the three schemes. You will only earn if your visitors click through the banner and either purchase an item from the advertiser or take some other prescribed action (eg, sign up for a service). Like the Pay Per Click method, you get much better results if you carefully select your advertisers to suit the target audience of your site.

In general, to avoid wasting resources in issuing cheques for very small amounts, advertisers will usually accrue the amount owing to you until it reaches a certain level (such as $25) before they pay you.

Where to Find Affiliate Programs

You can find a list of affiliate programs and affiliate networks on thefreecountry.com's Affiliate Program page at http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/affiliate.shtml

To join an affiliate network or program, simply go to the site and complete their online application form. Some programs will give you instant approval while others require a human to check out your application before it is approved. Once it is approved, you'll be given some HTML code which you can cut and paste into your web page. Note that some affiliate networks and programs will not accept you unless you have a domain name.

How To Choose An Affiliate Program

How should you choose an affiliate program? My suggestion is not to choose a program according to the payment scheme, but rather according to the kind of people who are likely to visit your website. For example, if you are targeting parents on your site, links to affiliates with educational software, books and the like may generate more revenue than banners that link to web hosting companies. The most important rule of choosing an affiliate program is to know your target audience.

Another point to consider is whether you really want to join every single affiliate program that comes your way. Some studies suggest that sites that make the most money from affiliate programs are affiliates of only a small handful of programs. Furthermore, concentrating your advertisements from one network may allow you to be paid faster. If you advertise for hundreds of different affiliate networks on your site, you may wind up earning only (say) a few dollars per month from each network. If your advertiser's minimum payment amount is higher than what you can earn each month, it may take you a long time before you accrue enough to be paid.

On the other hand, that formula does not necessarily hold true for every site (or every page on your site, for that matter). For example, if your site has a particular theme, and an affiliate network only supports one or two suitable advertisers, you might want to sign up for a few affiliate networks so as to get a greater number of relevant advertisers. After all, advertisements that are relevant to your audience are more likely to be taken up than general advertisements. (What's the point of putting banners from only one affiliate if nobody is going to click them?)

Get Started

Advertising revenue is one of the most effortless way to earn money from your site. You merely have to put the banner there and wait for the money to roll in. (Well, okay, not quite. You will still need to have some visitors first before you can make anything.)

Why wait? If you already have a website, let it earn even while you sleep (literally). Every day you let your site "idle" without advertising is a day of lost opportunity.


  posted by Smile Community @ 6:46 PM 0 comments

How to Choose a Web Host

 

What are some of the things you should look for when choosing a web host? The criteria for choosing a free web host and a commercial web hosting solution are slightly different although they do overlap. Since thesitewizard.com caters to people who might be looking for either of these types of hosting, I will deal with each of these in turn. If you are only interested in one of these types, you can simply skip to the appropriate section. I have written these sections to be as independant of the other as possible.

Choosing a Free Web Host

  1. Advertising

    Most free web hosts impose advertising on your website. This is done to cover the costs of providing your site the free web space and associated services. Some hosts require you to place a banner on your pages, others display a window that pops up everytime a page on your site loads, while still others impose an advertising frame on your site. There is really no hard and fast rule which is to be preferred: some people hate a pop-up window, other webmasters dislike having to stuff banner codes onto their pages, and many people cannot stand an advertising frame (which may cause problems when you submit your website to search engines). Whichever method is used, check that you're comfortable with the method.

  2. Amount of web space

    Does it have enough space for your needs? If you envisage that you will expand your site eventually, you might want to cater for future expansion. Most sites use less than 5MB of web space. Indeed, at one time, one of my other web sites, thefreecountry.com, used less than 5MB of space although it had about 150 pages on the site. Your needs will vary, depending on how many pictures your pages use, whether you need sound files, video clips, etc.

  3. FTP access

    Some free hosting providers only allow you to design your page with their online builder. While this is useful for beginners, do you have the option to expand later when you become experienced and their online page builder does not have the facility you need? FTP access, or at the very least, the ability to upload your pages by email or browser, is needed. Personally, I feel FTP access is mandatory, except for the most trivial site.

  4. File type and size limitations

    Watch out for these. Some free hosts impose a maximum size on each of the files you upload (including one with a low of 200KB). Other sites restrict the file types you can upload to HTML and GIF/JPG files. If your needs are different, eg, if you want to distribute your own programs on your pages, you will have to look elsewhere.

  5. Reliability and speed of access

    This is extremely important. A site that is frequently down will lose a lot of visitors. If someone finds your site on the search engine, and he tries to access it but find that it is down, he'll simply go down the list to find another site. Slow access is also very frustrating for visitors (and for you too, when you upload your site). How do you know if a host is reliable or fast? If you can't get feedback from anyone, one way is to try it out yourself over a period of time, both during peak as well as non-peak hours. After all, it is free, so you can always experiment with it.

  6. CGI-BIN access / PHP

    This is not particularly crucial nowadays for a free web host, since there are so many free CGI hosting services available that provide counters, search engines, forms, polls, mailing lists, etc, without requiring you to dabble with Perl or PHP scripts.

    However if you really want to do it yourself, with the minimum of advertising banners from these free providers, you will need either PHP or CGI-BIN access. Note that it is not enough to know they provide PHP or CGI-BIN access: you need to know the kind of environment your scripts run under: is it so restrictive that they are of no earthly use? For PHP scripts, does your web host allow you to use the mail() function? For Perl CGI scripts, do you have access to sendmail or its workalike?

  7. Bandwidth allotment

    Nowadays, many free web hosts impose a limit on the amount of traffic your website can use per day and per month. This means that if the pages (and graphic images) on your site is loaded by visitors beyond a certain number of times per day (or per month), the web host will disable your web site (or perhaps send you a bill). It is difficult to recommend a specific minimum amount of bandwidth, since it depends on how you design your site, your target audience, and the number of visitors you're able to attract to your site. In general, 100MB traffic per month is too little for anything other than your personal home page and 1-3GB traffic per month is usually adequate for a simple site just starting out. Your mileage, however, will vary.

Choosing a Commercial Web Host

  1. Reliability and speed of access

    Not only should the web host be reliable and fast, it should guarantee its uptime (the time when it is functional). Look for a minimum uptime of 99%. In fact, even 99% is actually too low - it really should be 99.5% or higher. The host should provide some sort of refund (eg prorated refund or discount) if it falls below that figure. Note though that guarantees are often hard to enforce from your end - the host usually requires all sorts of documentation. However, without that guarantee, the web host will have little incentive to ensure that its servers are running all the time.

  2. Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth)

    Data transfer (sometimes loosely referred to as "traffic" or "bandwidth") is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site.

    Don't believe any commercial web host that advertises "unlimited bandwidth". The host has to pay for the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, they will not silently bear your costs. Many high bandwidth websites have found this out the hard way when they suddenly receive an exhorbitant bill for having "exceeded" the "unlimited bandwidth". Always look for details on how much traffic the package allows. I personally always stay clear of any host that advertises "unlimited transfer", even if the exact amount is specified somewhere else (sometimes buried in their policy statements). Usually you will find that they redefine "unlimited" to be limited in some way.

    To give you a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website, most new sites that are not software archives or the like use less than 3GB of bandwidth per month. Your traffic requirements will grow over time, as your site becomes more well-known (and well-linked), so you will need to also check their policy for overages: is there a published charge per GB over the allowed bandwidth? Is the charge made according to actual usage or are you expected to pre-pay for a potential overage? It is better not to go for hosts that expect you to prepay for overages, since it is very hard to forsee when your site will exceed its bandwidth and by how much.

  3. Disk space

    For the same reason as bandwidth, watch out also for those "unlimited disk space" schemes. Most sites need less than 5MB of web space, so even if you are provided with a host that tempts you with 200MB or 500MB (or "unlimited space"), be aware that you are unlikely to use that space, so don't let the 500MB space be too big a factor in your consideration when comparing with other web hosts. The hosting company is also aware of that, which is why they feel free to offer you that as a means of enticing you to host there. As a rough gauge, thefreecountry.com, which had about 150 pages when this article was first written, used less than 5MB for its pages and associated files.

  4. Technical support

    Does its technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (often abbreviated 24/7), all year around? Note that I will not accept a host which does not have staff working on weekends or public holidays. You will be surprised at how often things go wrong at the most inconvenient of times. Incidentally, just because a host advertises that it has 24/7 support does not necessarily mean that it really has that kind of support. Test them out by emailing at midnight and on Saturday nights, Sunday mornings, etc. Check out how long they take to respond. Besides speed of responses, check to see if they are technically competent. You wouldn't want to sign up for a host that is run by a bunch of salesmen who only how to sell and not fix problems.

  5. FTP, PHP, Perl CGI-BIN access, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH crontabs

    If you are paying for a site, you really should make sure you have all of these. Note that some commercial hosts do not allow you to install PHP or CGI scripts without their approval. This is not desirable since it means that you have to wait for them before you can implement a feature on your site. ".htaccess" is needed if you are to customise your error pages (pages that display when, say, a user requests for a non-existent page on your site) or to protect your site in various ways (such as to prevent bandwidth theft and hotlinking, etc). Telnet or SSH access is useful for certain things, including testing CGI scripts, maintaining databases, etc. Cron jobs may be needed for programs that you need to be run periodically (eg once a day). Check to see if these facilities are provided.

  6. SSL (secure server), MySQL, Shopping Cart

    If you are planning on doing any sort of business through your website, you might want to look out to see if the host provides these facilities. These facilities normally involve a higher priced package or additional charges. The main thing is to check to see if they are available at all before you commit to the host. You will definitely need SSL if you plan to collect credit card information on your site.

  7. Email, Autoresponders, POP3, Mail Forwarding

    If you have your own site, you would probably want to have email addresses at your own domain, like sales@yourdomain.com, etc. Does the host provide this with the package? Does it allow you to have a catch-all email account that allows anyname@yourdomain.com to wind up being routed to you? Can you set an email address to automatically reply to the sender with a preset message (called an autoresponder)? Can you retrieve your mail with your email software? Can it be automatically forwarded to your current email address?

  8. Control Panel

    This is called various names by different hosts, but essentially, they all allow you to manage different aspects of your web account yourself. Typically, and at the very minimum, it should allow you to do things like add, delete, and manage your email addresses, and change passwords for your account. I would not go for a host where I have to go through their technical support each time I want to change a password or add/delete an email account. Such chores are common maintenance chores that every webmaster performs time and time again, and it would be a great hassle if you had to wait for their technical support to make the changes for you.

  9. Subdomains, virtual hosting

    For those who are thinking of selling web space or having multiple domains or subdomains hosted in your account, you should look to see if they provide this, and the amount extra that they charge for this (whether it is a one-time or monthly charge, etc).

  10. Server

    Is the type of operating system and server important? Whether you think so or not on the theoretical level, there are a few practical reasons for looking out for the type of server.

    In general, if you want to use things like ASP, you have no choice but to look for a Windows NT/2000/XP machine for your server.

    Otherwise my preference is to sign up for accounts using the often cheaper, more stable and feature-laden Unix systems running the Apache server. In fact, if dynamically generated pages that can access databases (etc) is what you want, you can always use the more portable (and popular) PHP instead of tying yourself down to ASP. Another reason to prefer Unix-based web hosts (which include web hosts using systems like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc) using the Apache web server is that these servers allow you to configure a lot of facilities that you typically need on your site (error pages, protecting your images, blocking email harvesters, blocking IP addresses, etc) without having to ask your web host to implement them. Knowledge about configuring Apache servers is also widely available, and can be found on thesitewizard.com's Configuring Apache and .htaccess pages as well.

  11. Price

    I was actually hesitant to list this, but I guess it's futile not to. However, I would caution that while price is always a factor, you should realise that you often get what you pay for, although it's not necessarily true that the most expensive hosts are the best.

  12. Monthly/Quarterly/Annual Payment Plans

    Most web hosts allow you to select an annual payment plan that gives you a cheaper rate than if you were to pay monthly. My current personal preference is to pay monthly with all new web hosts until I'm assured of their reliability and honesty. Paying monthly allows me to switch web hosts quickly when I find that the current host does not meet my requirements: this way, I'm not tied down to a bad web host because I have prepaid for an entire year. I do this even if the new web host guarantees that they will refund the balance if I'm dissatisfied, since at the point I sign up, I have no assurance that they will honour their guarantee. Later (usually after many months or even more than a year), when I'm satisfied with the host, I often change payment plans to the discounted annual plans.

  13. Resellers?

    Not all hosting companies own or lease their own web servers. Some of them are actually resellers for some other hosting company. The disadvantage of using a reseller is the possibility that you are dealing with people who don't know much about the system they are selling and who take longer to help you (they have to transmit your technical support request to the actual hosting company for it to be acted upon). However, this also depends on both the reseller and the underlying hosting company. It is thus wise not to rule out all resellers; there are a number of reliable and fast ones who are actually quite good and cheap. In fact, a number of resellers sell the same packages cheaper than their original hosting company. If you find out that a particular company is a reseller, you will need to investigate both the reseller and the real hosting company.

  14. International

    If you don't stay in the USA, you have the option of hosting your site with some local provider. The advantage here is the ease of dealing with them (they are after all easily accessible by phone call or a visit), your familiarity with the local laws and easy recourse to those laws should it be necessary. It should be your choice if your target audience is local (eg a local fast food delivery service). On the other hand, hosting it in USA has the advantage of faster access for what is probably the largest number of your overseas visitors (particularly if you have an English-speaking audience). You also have a large number of hosting companies to choose from, and as a result, cheaper prices too.

  15. Others' Reviews

    You should make it a point to check out what others have to say about the web host. Some of the places you can do this include:

    • The newsgroup news:alt.www.webmaster. As you should always do when reading reviews (of anything), read the reviews posted here with a pinch of salt. Some glowing reviews may come from people working for the web host itself, disguised as multiple satisfied customers. Likewise, negative reviews of a particular host can sometimes come from unscrupulous competitors of that host.
    • thesitewizard.com's review, "Which Web Host Would You Recommend? (FAQ)", found at http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/webhosting.shtml
    • Although not often, I sometimes make comments about a particular web host in my Budget Web Hosts page on thefreecountry.com as well.

    Don't skip this step, or you might find yourself being suckered by a host that everyone else is steering clear of.

The Myth of the Perfect Commercial Host

In general, I doubt that there are any "perfect" web hosting companies around. Note that even if you are prepared to pay a huge price for your hosting needs, it does not guarantee that your host is any good. This is an interesting industry where a high price does not necessarily yield quality hosting and support.

On the other hand, one thing you can probably be sure of is that you will not get top-notched support if you only pay (say) $10 a month. At that price, which company can afford to hire enough good help to cater to all its users?

Like me, you'll probably wind up settling for a trade-off between price, reliability and features that you're willing to live with.


  posted by Smile Community @ 6:38 PM 0 comments

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Webmaster Freebies

 

  • SiteGadgets.com
    A welcome addition to the ranks of Webmaster freebies, this site offers loads of free, ad-supported interactive gadgets that you can easily add to your site. Gadgets here include such useful site features as a links page, a jump box, a spam fighter, a random image, a random link, a simple counter, a password protection feature, a voting booth, a guestbook and more.


  • Mike's World
    Back in action after a three-year hiatus, this site offers a handy roundup of free goodies for Web site designers. Here, you'll find clipart and font resources, as well as Webmaster tutorials.


  • Webmasters Cavern
    This site serves up a collection of free Webmaster goodies to help you build and promote your Web site. Webmasters Cavern offers free Web design and development tools, code generators, menu creators, DHTML tools and more.


  • Adsense Tips
    This free E-book offers suggestions and advice for making the most of Google's popular AdSense text ad program on your site. This book, in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) format, includes AdSense tips and case studies for Webmasters.


  • Logo Maker
    This free online service lets you easily create a custom logo, suitable for private or business usage. A similar service for creating banner images is also available here. If you need a free, custom button image, go here. And at this site, you'll find a free, easy-to-use Web site creation service.


  • Viewstep.com
    Here, you will find a directory of free resources to help you build, promote and earn revenue from your Web site. Viewstep.com offers free Webmaster tools, templates, tutorials, search engine tools, and more.


  • ChoiceWebTools.com
    At this site, you'll find a nice collection of tools, services and articles to help you build, enhance and promote your Web site. Although some of the items require a fee, most of the content here is free.


  • SiteBuilderNews
    Here's an excellent free weekly newsletter aimed at Webmasters that offers loads of useful information about making the most of your Web site. Each issue offers articles, tips, helpful links and news.


  • ScriptDungeon.com
    This site offers many helpful free resources for Webmasters and network administrators, including scripts, utilities and tools. The free code here includes PHP, Active Server Pages (ASP), JavaScript and more.


  • WebDesignHelper.co.uk
    Looking for a quick and easy way to build a new Web site from scratch--or give your existing site a facelift? WebDesignHelper.co.uk offers loads of free, ready-to-use Web page templates. Here, you'll also find menu graphics, table templates, style sheets, scripts, icons and more.


  • AdWords Wrapper
    Do you use the Google AdWords system? AdWords Wrapper is a free, time-saving tool that helps you convert and manage keyword phrases for use in Google AdWords campaigns.


  • 2bone LinkChecker
    This free service gives you a quick and easy way to check the links on your Web pages. Just enter the URL of the page you want checked and the program will notify you if there are any dead links.


  • Marketing Forum Watch
    Are you involved in Web marketing? This handy service offers free, searchable headlines from over 65 major Web marketing and search engine discussion forums and message boards. If you're involved in E-commerce, be sure to check out the E-commerce Forum Watch, which offers a similar service.


  • Free-Webhosts.com
    Are you looking for free Web space? This regularly-updated directory lists over 800 free hosting services on the Web. Free-Webhosts.com offers reviews, ratings and a searchable database.


  • JavaScript Kit
    A regularly-updated resource for free JavaScript and Java, this site offers over 300 free scripts and Java applets and a very active JavaScript forum where developers can meet and discuss their script projects. There are also handy tutorials here, where you can learn JavaScript, DHTML and Webmastering. (Note: this site was formerly known as Website Abstraction).

  posted by Smile Community @ 7:56 PM 0 comments

Free Web Site Enhancement Services

 

  • TongueWag
    This nifty free service lets you easily add community and blogging features to your Web site by simply adding a snippet of coding to your pages. This content management system lets you add all sorts of features to your site, including a poll, a search engine, a comments page, etc. TongueWag also lets you easily syndicate your dynamic content onto affiliate sites, as well.


  • HotPlugins.com
    Looking to make your Web site sticky? Here, you'll find a powerful suite of free plug-and-play Web applications that you can use to enhance your pages. HotPlugins include E-mail service for your site, a guestbook, a poll service, a search engine, online forms, and more.


  • Message Spy
    This is a handy free Webmaster's tool that lets you view and control the actions of visitors on your site. Using Message Spy, you can send message alerts, chat with your visitors, view details about your traffic, etc. The service is easy to implement; just paste a snippet of code to your site.


  • Scope Web Templates
    Are you aiming to improve the look of your Web site? Here, you'll find a nice selection of free, ready-to-use Web page templates.


  • eFestivals.biz
    Here, you can sign up for free holiday-themed content that you can customize for your Web site. Site content here includes greeting cards, crafts & activities, party ideas, wallpapers, screen savers, and more. The site also offers a free banner exchange, with a 50:50 ratio.


  • Crazy Monkey Game Rotator
    This site offers customizable games content that you can offer your site's visitors. The game content changes every time your page is refreshed. Easy to set up; all you need to do is copy and paste a snippet of coding.


  • Freedback.com
    This nifty, pioneering service is perfect for Webmasters who'd like to add interactive forms to their site, but don't know a scripting language. Just follow the easy instructions here and Freedback.com will generate a custom form for your site. Note: the basic version of this service is free; you can also sign up for a free 30-day trial of an enhanced version of the service, with added features.


  • 012WebTools.com
    A helpful resource for Webmasters, this site offers a roundup of various free tools and services you can use to build (and enhance) your Web pages. Here, you'll find message boards, counters, chat rooms, guestbooks, HTML help, templates, graphics, and more.


  • WebSiteGoodies
    A handy resource, WebSiteGoodies offers loads of free items for Webmasters. Here, you'll find freebies ranging from guestbooks to promotion tools to link checkers and more.


  • DaysToGo.com
    This site offers a free customizable pregnancy countdown calendar, suitable for use either on Web site or on a forum posting. DaysToGo.com automatically counts down the days until your due date and displays how many weeks pregnant you are.


  • FreeRegistration.tk
    At this site, you can sign up for a free domain, with a .tk extension. This service is handy if your site has a lengthy, cumbersome URL (as is usually the case with many free Web hosters). FreeRegistration.tk also offers E-mail forwarding and traffic stats. Note: you need to have an existing Web site to use this service. You can get free hosting here.


  • FreeFind
    With this helpful free service, you can easily add a local search engine to your Web site, thus making it far more appealing and useful to your visitors. You can add search capabilities to your site, without CGIs or server modifications. Visitors to your site will see a search entry form that looks like part of your site, because it can be customized with your own background and logo.


  • FreeTemplateSite.com
    This useful Webmaster's resource offers quality free Web site templates. Just follow the tutorial here to create your own customized template, (suitable for either personal or business Web sites).


  • Best-templates.net
    A useful resource for Webmasters, this site offers lots of free, ready-to-use site templates that can instantly give your Web pages a high-quality, professional look. Categories here include corporate, E-commerce, portals, frames, Flash, themed, and more.


  • WebDesignHelper.co.uk
    Looking for a quick and easy way to build a new Web site from scratch--or give your existing site a facelift? WebDesignHelper.co.uk offers loads of free, ready-to-use Web page templates. Here, you'll also find menu graphics, table templates, style sheets, scripts, icons and more.

  posted by Smile Community @ 7:54 PM 0 comments

 

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