Point Clear Websites

Style Sheets

pointclearwebsites — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:55:16 +0000

There is a distinction in classical education between Content and Form. A simplified way of making the distinction is that “Content” is what you are saying and “Form” is how you say it. In web design, we use the coding languages HTML or XML to create web content. To change the the form, or way that the HTML or XML is displayed on your computer monitor, we pass the code through a “style sheet.”

Two common types of style sheets are XLST and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). XLST is used when the XML content needs to be changed dynamically and mathematical functions are involved. CSS is much more common in basic web design, and that will be mostly what is discussed in this article.

Imagine you have two websites: one for girls and one for boys. You want to give them the exact same textual information, but for the girls you want the site to be pink with pictures of dolls and for the boys you want the site to be blue with pictures of racing cars. You don’t have to create the textual content twice – you only have to create it once and employ a different CSS for each site.

This is the way it works:

In the section of the web page you add this line of code:

replacing “name-of-stylesheet” with your own title.

Then in the root of your web domain, create a folder called “CSS” (e.g. www.name-of-your-site.com/css). Then in your HTML editing program or any text editor like Notepad create a file and save it as “name-of stylesheet.css.”

Then, within the CSS file you are to describe all of the attributes of different tags within the HTML. For example, in your HTML code you will create paragraphs in between the

and

tags, you will create hyperlinks within the and tags, and images using the tag. With the CSS you can define how those tagged items are treated. Something like this:

p { color: #000000; margin-top: 10 px; text-alignment:left; }

a { text-decoration: underline; font-size: 12 px; color: #eeeeee; }

img {

border:none;

padding: 5 px;

}

This CSS code will make your paragraph text justified to the left, the color black, and with 10px of blank space above each paragraph. It will make your hyperlinks grey, 12 pixels high, and underlined. It will make your images not have a border and be padded with 5 pixels of empty space around each side.

You can change the style sheets to fit your needs, or switch them out to give your site a new theme for a holiday or special event. It really is a powerful tool that will help your websites be lighter, cleaner, and more compatible with mobile devices, printing functions, and data storage.

A really good reference sheet for all of the CSS attributes you might need to get started can be found here.

What is Single Sourcing?

pointclearwebsites — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:07:13 +0000

XML is Not a Hard Concept to Understand

If you have a website, internal business documents, marketing papers, brochures, or any other types of business information in print or online, a lot of the same information might be found in all of them. When details of that information change, you have to go to the source file of each document one-by-one and make your edits. Depending on how many documents you have and how many edits you have to make, this can take a considerable amount of time.

Single sourcing is a way to keep all of your company information in one file that can be used by multiple types of media and presentations. The content of the information is written using a computer language called XML. The XML file is then extracted by any one of the forms in which you want to present it such as your website, your print documents, your company communications software, and any mobile devices that need to display the information.

XML is a very simple concept to understand. Your company information is ordered and identified with descriptive “tags” that look like this:

Company Picnic

2008

May

The tags can be any words of your choosing. Then, you can make the information searchable so any time (sticking with this example) you are looking for an event that has a date that happens in the month of May, or more specifically on May 8, you can easily and quickly find that information to edit.

Once the XML file with the desired information is chosen, it has to be combined with the information that tells how it is to be presented. This other file that displays the XML file’s information as colorful or artistic or outlined form is called a “style sheet.”

Simple SEO Tips

pointclearwebsites — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 02:49:57 +0000

Spend a Little Time Making Your Website Better

You’ve created a great website, and you’ve told all your current customers about it. But now you’ve noticed that it hasn’t brought you any new business in a while. You search for it on Google and Yahoo! but it’s nowhere to be found. What can you do?

If you want to quickly freshen up your website there are a few simple, high-priority steps that can be taken. This generally takes about 5-10 minutes per page and will probably boost your search engine rankings at least a little.

Titles. In the section of your web page code in between your title tags [ ] you will find your title. Every page has to have a unique title. Period. There can be some shared words, but no two pages should have the exact same title. Generally, only the first 65 characters are indexed by search engines, and the words at the beginning (the left) are weighted heavier than the words that get tagged to the end. Mix the titles up too if you have a brick-and-mortar business with a specific geographical location (neighborhood, city, state, etc.), don’t always put the location first in the title. Put it first in some titles, in the middle of others, and at the end of your 65 character limit on other pages.
Remove any duplicate content. If your website has the same paragraph on two or more pages, remove the paragraph from all but one of the pages.
Replace any vague or fluffy expressions like “happy day” or “good times” with specific details about your business or website.
Remove any duplicate META data. Look at your keywords and descriptions in the sections of your pages. No two pages should have identical keywords or duplicate descriptions. If you really don’t want to spend any time, then on any less important page that has the same META tags as another page, just remove the and tags altogether. It is better to have no META data than to have duplicate META data.
Keywords are really of lesser importance, but if you want to clean them up, make sure you only use commas to separate whole phrases, not as you would normally use them (i.e. separating city and state abbreviations). Also, there are so many websites out there in cyberspace, that you will want to be as detailed as possible with your keywords. Instead ofit is better to have.Only the first 265 characters are indexed by search engines. Capitalization does not matter one way or another.
Place ALT tags inside all of the image tags. This means wherever you see something like this:Add a descriptive tag such as:
This is especially important if the image is part of the navigation menu.
Continuously add new content and new pages.

If you want to take SEO seriously, there are a couple of conditions whereby you might want to reconsider rebuilding your site from scratch:

Your whole site and/or the navigation system is built in Flash
Your whole site and/or the navigation system is generated by automated scripts
Your site uses frames to navigate from page to page.

The next step would be to get backlinks.

Contact me if you want your site to perform better in the Search Engine Results Pages. I can provide you with ways of driving more traffic to your site as well as ways of measuring the ROI of these procedures.

If you prefer to learn more on your own, you will be interested in buying Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.

Website Backlinks

pointclearwebsites — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:00:41 +0000

Get Other Websites with Topical Relevance to Link to You

No matter how much you optimize the content and META tags of your website to be search engine “friendly,” the best way to increase traffic to your website is to get “backlinks”- incoming links from other websites that link to yours. There are two reasons why:

The obvious reason is that the more pathways there are to find your site, the more people will find it.
The non-so-obvious reason is that the major search engines monitor how many links out there on the Web are pointed at your site. Consider the backlinks like votes. More links pointed at your site = More votes. The more votes you have, the more likely your site will rank high when someone is looking for your products or services on Google or Yahoo!.

Backlinks are not all the same variety, though. In other words, not all votes are equal. A link from a site that has a similar topic or related industry as yours has more value than a link that comes from an unrelated website.

I once helped develop a site for a law firm that wanted to put a link to one of the partner’s wife’s art gallery. I advised them that this would not help their search engine rankings, nor would it help out the site visitors who needed an attorney, but they wanted it anyway. The customer is always right, at least the paying ones.

The search engines not only want relevant sites to link to you, they want relevant sites to link to the relevant sites that link to you – a two-layer padding of security that there is some topical relevance involved in all of this backlinking.

One way to get backlinks is to trade them with other sites – “You link to me, and I’ll link to you.” There are a lot of people who are willing to do this, but make sure the links are from topically relevant sites or directories that have some geographical significance.

Also, make sure the site with which you trade links doesn’t have a lot of pop-up ads or pages that redirect to another page.

Make sure, too, that no links are bought or sold – this is penalized by Google.

Link exchanges are good, but one-way links to your site are better. One way to actively create one-way links is to find blogs that are relevant to your website and leave comments that include a single link to your site. Do not abuse this, however, and do not spend too much time doing it – the blog’s webmaster can set it up so your backlinks hold no value. Besides, there are no guaranteed metrics for this process, and the amount of time spent might be an opportunity cost wasted.

In the next article I will discuss how to make your links better with what is known as “anchor text.”

Contact me if you want your site to perform better in Search Engine Results Pages. I can provide you with ways of driving more traffic to your site as well as ways of measuring the ROI of these procedures.

If you prefer to learn more on your own, you will be interested in buying Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.

Tracking Website Visitors

pointclearwebsites — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:08:02 +0000

Google Analytics Provides Important Marketing Metrics

Wouldn’t you like to know data about the people visiting your website? A lot of times websites offer freebies in exchange for receiving voluntary visitor info. This is a good idea – it gives you names and email addresses of possible future customers. But what about the people who don’t want to fill out a form or give up their names? You can’t violate your site visitors’ privacy, but you can learn a lot about them – like geographical location, how long they viewed the site, what specific pages they viewed, and how they arrived at your site. In general, this type of data is known as “web analytics.”

Google provides a great web analytics tool for free called Google Analytics. For example, on my music website, www.burkeingraffia.com, I was able to discover that between Jan. 12 and Feb 12, 2008, there were 396 visits from 218 Cities.

I know the content people saw and the way they navigated through the site. I can narrow the data down to the timeframe of a single day. This information will become invaluable if I ever decide to market more of my music.

As a business, you need to be able to measure your ROI, and your marketing budget can only be validated with some sort of quantitative analysis. With Google Analytics you can set up goals and how many “conversions” of those goals occurred – like how many people filled out a form or how many people purchased an item. You can also cordinate it with your Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign for even more useful detailed data..

Contact me for more help with Google Analytics. It will give you relevant, meaningful data and the confidence to either continue with your online marketing campaign or to abandon it for something more effective.

Anchor Text

pointclearwebsites — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 02:56:33 +0000

A Word is Worth a Thousand Images

When a website URL is underlined or displayed in a different color than the text around it (i.e. http://www.intelligentwriting.com) it is generally understood that this is a link to the website that is written out. Sometimes when you see a link from one web page to another, the link simply reads, “Click Here,” so it is quite clear that it is a link to click.

Other times you will be reading a sentence, and for what seems no reason at all a word in the middle of a sentence will be underlined or displayed as a link. For example, instead of “Click Here” you will click on a link that reads, “The Best Technical Writer in the Gulf South,” and when you click on the link you are hopefully taken to such a technical writer.

The words used to create the link are what is known as “anchor text.”

The proper use of anchor text can improve your search engine rankings for specific terms.

Using the words “Click Here” can be considered a waste of an opportunity to use beneficial anchor text. However, if you know your viewers are not very web-savvy, then using “Click Here” might be a smart way to hold their hands through your website.

Inbound, External Anchor Text

When other sites link to you, make sure that the anchor text they are using contains search terms for which you want to rank high in search engines.

There is a famous example of a small group of webmasters using the anchor text, “Miserable Failure,” and linking it to George W. Bush’s website. Then when someone searched on Google for “miserable failure” they were taken to the president’s home page. Although this type of manipulative “Google Bombing” can now be better detected by the search engines, anchor text is still a very important part of SEO.

Internal Links

The website Wikipedia.com ranks well for many search phrases not only because of its massive size but because it uses a large percentage of its text as anchor text to other pages on the site. The use of accurate anchor text in the HTML body text of your website will tie your site together nicely.

This is also true of the navigation menu system on your site. It is much better to use HTML text (instead of images or Flash) as the links that direct your internal traffic through your website. There are easy ways of using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to format the text to make it look just as aesthetically pleasing as any .gif image can.

If you prefer to learn more on your own, you will be interested in buying Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.