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| 05 Jun 2006 02:28:47 pm |
 Little things are important - ALT tags and their uses. |
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ALT tags or 'alternative tags' are basically labels that describe the images in your web pages, or give further details about them or the destination of a hyperlinked image. You can see them when you pass your mouse over an image, and sometimes they are visible before the image appears as the page downloads. ALT tags are very often missed out of pages altogether, but these tags are more important than you think. The two main areas where they come into their own are, (1) with the search engines, and (2) with the accessibility of your website.
1. ALT tags and search engines.
Search engines need to recognise the content of your web pages in order to be able to categorize them, and return information about them in searches. Search engines are unable to index the images on your web pages, because they are a solid files not made of text. To get around this, ALT tags should be added to the images. Better still, these ALT tags should be made up of 2 or 3 important keywords which reflect the subject matter of the text content on that particular page. In this way, search engines will more easily be able to index the page contents, and the contents will be less likely to fall fowl of the search engine algorithms (rules/decision tree).
2. Accessibility
Your web pages now have to be accessible to people with various disabilities. Visually
impaired people use text readers on the Internet. These text readers also cannot read
images, unless they have ALT tags attached to them.
It's also possible that some visitors to your website may have their browser's graphics
turned off, or they may be visiting the site with a text-only browser. The inclusion of ALT
tags will provide much needed information to them.
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Category : General
| By : mklink |  Comments [0] |  Trackbacks [0] |
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| 31 May 2006 01:20:00 pm |
| New software deals – what do they mean to us? |
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The big players have been at it again this month – Google have struck an important deal with Dell, also Yahoo and eBay have joined forces.
Google’s deal with Dell seems to be push toward challenging Microsoft’s dominance. Roughly 90% of the world’s computers have Microsoft’s products on them, which the computers automatically default to. Google’s new deal with Dell means that a range of Google’s programs will come as standard on Dell’s computers, more importantly, Google’s search engine will be set as the default on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. For Google, this means that potentially millions of us will use their products whereas we may otherwise have used Microsoft’s products.
The other Google programs included with Google’s desktop will include Adobe’s PDF reader, the Firefox browser, Norton anti-virus software plus Google’s earth mapping and instant messaging programs.
Yahoo and eBay have also joined forces this month. Yahoo will now be the exclusive provider of the branded advertising on eBay’s website, and in return, Yahoo can let customers pay for its services using eBay’s ‘Paypal’ payment system. The real meaning of this deal is that 80% of the US Internet audience will be now reached by Yahoo and eBay. The business possibilities for both companies are huge, and the effects are bound to be felt here very soon.
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Category : General
| By : mklink | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 23 May 2006 03:38:55 pm |
| Google PageRank - is it important for your website? |
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PageRank is system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It is intended to be an indicator of a page's value on the web. What Google decides are high quality pages, receive a higher PageRank. This is shown as a mark out of 10. If you download Google's toolbar (which is free), the PageRank of each site that you visit is diplayed as a green band, then by passing your mouse over it, the ranking number is displayed.
PageRank is certainly not the only important factor where Google is concerned, because there are over 100 other factors involved in ranking your website / web pages.
However, the 2 main ways in which PageRank can affect your web pages' positions in Google are:
1) The number of incoming links to your page
2) The number of outgoing links from the page that points at yours. The less links it has, the better the PageRank for your page.
Whatever the situation, there are two important rules of thumb that you can apply to your web pages which will make it
difficult for them not to get high rankings:
1) Make sure you have plenty of good web page content which can easily be crawled by search engines.
2) Make sure you have plenty of inbound links that come from relevant and reputable websites.
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Category : General
| By : mklink | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 08 May 2006 02:54:01 pm |
| META TAGS and their uses in your web pages |
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Getting a high ranking for your website from search engines is not achieved by just adding 'Meta Tags' to the head of your web pages. Meta Tags are basically code inserted into a part of your web page which is not visible to visitors. They can influence how your web pages are described by some search engines, and can prevent pages from being indexed at all.
The most common types of meta tags you may have in your web pages include TITLE, META DESCRIPTION & META KEYWORDS.
Whatever text is in the title tag will appear in the reverse bar of someone's browser when they view the web page - the reverse bar in the Explorer Browser is the blue horizontal bar at the top. The contents of this tag also display in browser 'favourites' or 'bookmarks' when details of your site have been saved by somebody. The text you use in this TITLE tag is in fact, a critical factor in deciding how a search engine will rank your web page. Its contents will also display in the listings of 'crawler' search engines.
You can influence the description of your web pages by some crawler search engines, if you use the META DESCRIPTION tag.
Google however will actually ignore this tag, and will generate its own description for a page.
Most crawler search engines now ignore the META KEYWORDS tag. It's main use at the moment is allowing you to provide extra text to your pages for search engines to index. The text in the META KEYWORDS tag should also be mentioned in the text of the page below to make it useful for some crawler search engines. Using the same keywords too often in the META KEYWORD tag can damage your web pages chances of ranking well in the search engines.
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Category : General
| By : mklink | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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| 26 Apr 2006 09:52:02 am |
| Questions you can ask when choosing a Web Management Company |
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When choosing a web management company, there are a number of important questions you can ask to enable you to make a more informed decision. Here are some of the ones most likely to help you - basing your decision on price alone could be a mistake.
1. Do they have particular skills, qualifications or references?
Questions around this subject include, How long have they been around? (and, will they pass a credit check for example?). Also, can they provided examples of similar work they have undertaken or some good references/testimonials?
2. Will they build a template or bespoke website?
Will they also be able to host the site? (i.e. can it sit on their webservers?).
3. Will they keep a back-up of your files?
You never know - things can go wrong (especially where technology is concerned) and you may need a copy of your website. This can be helpful should you choose to move your site to another web management company.
4. Who will the Domain Name actually be registered to?
All to often, domain names are registered in the name of the web management company, and not you. This will lead to difficulties should you wish to move away from them.
5. Will they (in writing) waive intellectual property rights and copyright i.e. will you actually own the website?
If the website needs to be moved at any time, will that be possible? (e.g. if they go out of business, what will happen to the website?)
6. Will you be able to change elements of the website?
How much, how often, will they change it for you, or will you change it yourself?
7. How visible will your site be to search engines such as Google?
Search engines are the single greatest source of traffic for most web sites. Will your web management company register it the site for you with the search engines? Do they offer optimisation & others erach engine related services?
8. Can they provide an online shop, and how much will this cost?
9. What are the hosting and management fees and what do they cover?
It's best for both parties to be clear on this from the start.
10. What means are there for you to monitor and measure i.e. are stats or analytical packages available?
Web marketing needs to be managed, and in order to manage things properly, your online efforts need to be measurable.
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Category : General
| By : mklink | Comments [0] | Trackbacks [0] |
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