Master the Web

8 Simple SEO Techniques Every Webmaster Should Know

2008-09-21T00:28:00.000-07:00

Every webmaster should have some basic understanding of these simple SEO techniques if they want to achieve Top Rankings for their site. The more you know about these Search Engine Optimization techniques; the better your web pages will fare in the different search engines, especially Google.

Optimizing your pages for the search engines should be your main priority because conquering and dominating your chosen keywords is often cited as one of the major determining factors in the success of your online site or business. You must have a rudimentary grasp of how SEO can work for you and your site.

These simple SEO Tips will help you understand the basics and help you reach your online goals

1. Title Tag

The Title Tag is located at the top of your html page and it tells the search engines what your page is about. When you open your page in a browser these are the words at the very top of the screen. Despite its simplicity, the title tag is crucial to 'on-page optimization'; it should include your main keywords and it should be 63 characters or less if you want your title to appear in full on Google.

Many SEO experts create web pages in a three-prong approach. They place the title in:

the title tag
on the webpage itself
and in the URL for that page.

Sometimes they will just pick the main keywords from the title and place them in the anchor url instead. For example: www.yourwebsite.com/keywords.html

2. Meta Description Tag

The Meta Tag contains the description for your web page. Your description will show up in all the search engines so you have to be careful to write precisely and objectively. It should be about 140 characters or around 20 words. Make sure to include your keywords but don't spam; don't repeat your keywords more than twice, using variations is helpful.

Keep in mind, successful webmasters make their descriptions stand out from the crowd and entice the surfer to click their link. It is also the first contact with your potential visitor or prospect so make a good first impression.

3. Anchor Tag or URL

The anchor tag is used to form links within websites or from site to site. This tag should have your title or the main keywords from your page title to be the most effective.

Anchor text is also important to know, these are the underlined, clickable text or words in a link. <*A HREF="url"> anchor text <*/A>

If you want to check Google for all web pages containing your keywords in the anchor tags.

Just type into Google Search:

allinanchor:yourkeywords

4. Finding Backlinks

One of the keys to higher rankings is building quality links from relevant related quality sites. The search engines, especially Google, counts each link as a "vote" for your site or content. Many experts suggest you include your main keywords in the anchor text of these inbound links in order to rank high.

If you want to find the number of backlinks your site has.

Just type into Google Search:
link:yourURL

and it will give you the number of backlinks you have.

Google doesn't give you all your existing backlinks, so you can try Yahoo! to find a more exact number.

Just open Yahoo! and type in:
linkdomain:yourURL

5. Checking Indexed Pages

If is very important for you to know what content the search engines have indexed from your site. You can also check to see how your links are displayed and to see if any titles or descriptions are missing from your pages.

You can see how many of your pages are indexed in Google by using the site command.

Just type into Google Search:
site:yourURL

Another way to look at your pages in Google is to type in "http://yoursite" and "www.yoursite" with the quotation marks to see the exact number of listings for each.

6. Checking Google Cache

You can also check to see the Google Cache of your site by using the cache command. You will also discover when it was last retrieved.

Just type into Google Search:
cache:yourURL

7. Finding Associated Keywords

Keywords are the heart of the Internet, you must dominate the search engines for your chosen keywords if you are to succeed online. You must be able to find variations of your keywords to completely conquer your targeted niche. To find what other keywords Google has associated with your main keywords, just use the tilde ~ command to find associated phrases in Google.

Just type into Google search:
~keywords

Variations will be highlighted in bold print.

8. Finding Titled Keywords

If you want to find competing sites that have your keywords in the title just use the allintitle command.

Just type into Google search:
allintitle:yourkeywords

In summary, if used consistently, these basic SEO techniques should help improve your rankings and keep you in the picture with regards to your standings in the search engines. Your site's stats or raw traffic logs will also confirm the rise or fall of your keyword rankings. You must have complete knowledge of both your site and your keywords in the search engines, especially Google. Since Google will deliver most of your quality traffic, you must optimize for it and be aware of what is happening to your site and keywords within Google. This is yet anotherexample where knowledge equals success.

The author is now a full-time web marketer who regularly sells 1000's of dollars worth of affiliate products/services online each day. He runs two sites on Internet marketing. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools or Marketing Tool Guide

Copyright © 2008 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely
distributed if this resource box stays attached.

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Common Mistakes

2008-06-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

HTML validators can verify the syntax of the HTML in your file, the thing that it can't do is apply a little common sense to make sure that no inadvertently mistakes have snuck into the HTML while we have worked on it. Here are some of the most common web design mistakes you may run into.

Custom Fonts
First off, there is the mistake of using a font that is not likely to be available by default in the browser of the people viewing your page. Some people say that if you use a font that not everyone has you can always post it on your web site as a download so that your visitors can install it and then view your site. The problem with this thinking is that hardly anyone will want to bother with downloading and installing a font. And for most browsers even if you install the font you will have to close the browser and go open the page again or even restart your computer.

This means your page will just end up being viewed in the default font of whatever browser is being used by the person viewing it, and your result will vary as to how much it messes up your design. If you have a font that you really think would be great to incorporate into your web design, you can use an image editing software to create a picture of the words you want to display using that font and use that instead of plain text in your HTML. Keep in mind though that even this method should be used sparingly, as search engines can only search text and not pictures of text. Internet users are also used to seeing the internet using the default web safe fonts, and a different font is more likely to drive web surfers away from your site rather than draw them to it.

Horizontal Scroll
Another big, big mistake that is classified as bad web design is having a web page that is too wide for a browser to view it. The reason this is considered bad is because internet users are willing to scroll down a web page, but almost none will ever scroll to the right or left. The result is that anything on the web page that is out of site past the left or right edge of the screen is also out of mind, and is basically just wasted space and content.

Often times, if an internet user see's that your page can scroll right he immediately thinks your page is broken, a big strike from the start against your web design and the content and information your site is trying to convey.

On the same note of page scrolling, it is also a good idea to keep your pages short so that if a user needs to scroll down they don't have to go too far. The internet is a big place, and if a person wandering into your page thinks that there is too much information there, he will just keep on surfing to find a page that will better meet with his attention span.

Non-Standard Hyperlinks
The next common web design mistake is using hyperlinks that do not look like hyperlinks, and if you feel the urge to make your links some non default color, just remember this: you can't educate people with your one site. For most everybody, links are blue when you can click them, and they are purple when you have already been to that page. You can modify these colors slightly, but if you push them to far no one will even realize that they are link and it won't even occur to them to click on it.

If you want to see what colors will work for your links, the best ways to find out is by checking the web sites of your favorite Fortune five-hundred companies and see what colors they use for links on their web sites. Those big companies have paid big money on focus groups to find our what colors an internet user wants to see when they visit their sites, so if you don't see the colors here, then you should really consider not using it.

Flash Overuse
Another thing to avoid is the overuse of Flash files on web pages. Flash files can be slow to download and slow to render. Even though Flash can create some cool animation and effects, you may want to use it judiciously.

And now you know some of the basic pitfalls when designing a great looking web page.

A Brief History of the Internet

2008-06-12T22:54:00.001-07:00

About fifteen years ago, the Internet was only used by universities and the department of defense. Then, the powers that be, decided to commercialize the net. What this meant was that anyone, you, I, or a business could use the Internet. But what was this Internet?

Originally the Internet was limited e-mail and file sharing. What didn't exist was a convenient way to locate files since there was also no common way to view files.

But because the Internet had come from the university environment there was a wonderful desire to share with everyone. It was unheard of to create something on the Internet and then try to lock it up. There was a man in Switzerland who was going around telling everyone about what he called hypermedia. His name is Tim Burners-Lee. When he presented his ideas at conferences, people would listen politely and then argue that it could never happen. His ideas sounded like little more than a fantasy.

But then a wonderful thing happened, a college student named Marc Andreessen in Illinois came up with the idea of taking hyperlinks and the internet and welding them together. Marc helped invent the browser and nothing would ever be the same again.

Marc was partially responsible for creating a language to display information that you found on the internet. This was the real core of the browser. A simple language anyone could use to create a document with words and pictures. A language simple enough anyone could learn it in just a few hours. That is what we are going to do, teach you that language. A language called HTML.

And of course every good acronym has words to go with it; in this case HTML is hyper text markup language.

Now Available on Amazon

2008-05-22T23:21:00.000-07:00

We are proud to announce that our award winning training DVD, Master the Web - Learning Basic HTML will now be available on Amazon.com.

Master the Web goes beyond simply telling the viewer what to do. Instructors explain each concept -- from HTML fundamentals to more advanced concepts like file management and preformatted Web pages -- then walk the viewer through every step before explaining exactly what they just did, and why. No stone is left unturned, and the viewer walks away from Master the Web with a thorough understanding of HTML.

"Master the Web demystifies Web site design and publishing, using
easy-to-understand language that anyone can follow," stated producer Daniel L. Baldwin. "We are confident that these HTML training videos will take the viewer from HTML novice to creating a well designed Web page quickly and easily."

You can learn more about the DVD at our web site at http://www.htmltutorialdvd.com/.

5 Things To Consider In Website Design

2008-05-19T13:33:00.000-07:00

By John M Mahoney

If you think that it's practically easy to do website design, then you're probably wrong. The process actually requires more than perfect combination of colors, use of animation and Flash, as well as perfect structures of every web page.

What Should You Keep in Mind in Website Design ?

If you have an online business, or if you are trying to promote your services and products through the World Wide Web, then you must know that your website will be your mode of connection to your Internet users. Hence, the website design being implemented will determine if you are going to be successful or not.

To help you out, you can remember these website design considerations:

1. Know the purpose of your website. Most definitely, you cannot build a website just for the sake of having one. Otherwise, you are not making the most out of your investment. You need to know the reason behind its creation so, you can also determine what kind of website design you are going to utilize. For example, if you are simply providing information to your target market, then you may want to make sure that articles are easy to scan. If you are selling products or offering services, meanwhile, you should have your own Products and Services page, with accompanying photos and descriptions that are both convenient to look at.

2. Make sure that all links are clickable. Dead links, or those that lead users and search engine spiders to removed or non-accessible pages, will definitely not become too pleasing to both Internet users and search engines. Basically, your target customers would not like to feel deceived or waste their time on dead links. Your website will also be getting supplemental pages, which can hinder your chances of getting excellent page ranks. Hence, when you are doing web design, check the links first before uploading the pages. They should lead you to the page with the right contents.

3. Strike balance among the different elements in your website. Though usability and accessibility will be two of your foremost consideration in creating a website, you should also make sure that your pages appear professional. Internet users still go for websites where contents are properly laid out, there are a number of photos or videos that accompany them, and that the right colors are chosen.

4. Website should be easy to navigate. There are only few people who implement the static Home button technique. This is when Home appears in every web page of your site. Normally, when you have too many pages, users can get lost while browsing. The Home button can help them start from scratch.

5. Site maps and proper headline tags do count. One of the goals in website design is to make all pages of your website easy to index. Hence, you need to add a site map, so it becomes convenient for search engine spiders to index your various web pages. Headline tags will also make you convenient to search in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

John Mahoney is a freelance author who writes about various technology related subjects including Website Design. For more information about John visit his website: http://www.techstore.ie

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Adding Color to Your Webpage

2008-05-10T11:31:00.000-07:00

Want more HTML tutorial videos? Check out the DVD at www.HtmlTutorialDvd.com

Your First Web Page

2008-05-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

Let’s get our hands dirty and begin writing a simple HTML web page.

First, start by opening Notepad. And now that we are ready to type, let's add our first HTML tags to our file.

• Type < H T M L >
• Hit "Enter", five times. This gives us some space to add the following tags
• and then type < / H T M L >

The HTML tag is the very first tag that you will make in every new web page. The opening HTML tag tells the web browser to start looking for more markup tags in the following text, and the closing - HTML tag tells the browser that there is no more HTML in the file, and that the page is all finished.

The HTML tag is not the only tag that every web page must have, there are two more we need to add before a browser can view our web page. The first one we need to add is called the 'Head' tag.

• We are going to add this tag between the HTML tags we just created
• Between your HTML tags, type < H E A D >
• Hit "Enter" twice
• and then type < / H E A D >

The head tag will not contain any HTML that will be displayed on our web page. Instead, the HTML inside of the Head tag is used to reference other files that help control how the browser will display our page, and also to set any special options that the browser supports.

For now we do not need to worry about putting any HTML inside of the head except for the Title tag.

• Bellow the head tag, type < T I T L E >
• Then next to the title tag, type MY FIRST WEB PAGE
• and then type < / T I T L E >

The text that we put inside of the title tags will show in the title bar of the web browsers. When I say title bar, I mean the blue bar at the very top of your browser window.

So now that we have a head and a title for our file, lets add the other required tag needed to finish our web page, which is called the 'Body' tag

• Underneath your the HEAD end tag and the HTML end tag, type < B O D Y >
• Hit "Enter" five times
• and type < / B O D Y >

The body tag is where we will put our entire HTML that we want the browser to show on the screen when it loads our page.

To finish our web page, let's add some text inside of the body so that we have something to see when we open our page in a web browser.

• Between your BODY tags, type HELLO WORLD

And now our HTML file is finished, and ready to be displayed in a browser. All that's left to do is save the file to disk.

One thing to remember when you save your file is that you will need to give it an extension of .HTM or .HTML

If you don't give your file a dot HTM or dot HTML extension, that's still okay, but when you browse to the directory where you saved the file and double click on it, it will probably open in note pad and not your web browser.

So now our file is saved to disk. At this moment our file is a completely finished web page, and we could upload it to an Internet web server so that anyone on the internet could view our web page.

Congratulations, you have just created your first web page.

Note: In order to publish this post, we added spaces between each character in our HTML tag examples. When typing your actual html tags, be sure there are no spaces bewteen the characters.

And the Winner Is...

2008-05-04T22:12:00.000-07:00

Master the Web wins at the 7th Annual Horizon Interactive Awards Competition!

The Horizon Interactive Awards, a leading international interactive media awards competition, announced the 2008 award winners to highlight this year’s “best of the best” in interactive media production.

Master the Web - Basic Web Design was recognized for their excellence with a Silver award. You can learn more about the DVD at www.htmltutorialdvd.com

The seventh annual, international competition saw just over 1000 entries from 20 countries around world including: Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Croatia, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Spain, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand Turkey, Taiwan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and nearly all 50 of the United States of America. An international panel of judges, consisting of industry professionals with diverse backgrounds, as well as an end user panel evaluated 18 different categories ranging from online advertising to video games. The 2008 winning entries showcase the industry’s best interactive media solutions including web sites, CDs and DVDs, online ads, video and more.

“The 2008 competition was the most competitive to date. The work in this year’s competition is at such a high level that the judges really had their work cut out for them,” said Mike Sauce, founder of the Horizon Interactive Awards. “All of the winning entries displayed a high level of sophistication, aesthetic creativity, technical excellence and clear purpose.“

The Horizon Interactive Awards holds the annual competition in early spring of each year with the winners being announced in May. For more information visit the Horizon Interactive Awards at www.horizoninteractiveawards.com.

Getting Noticed

2008-04-28T21:25:00.000-07:00

One of the great challenges of web design is attracting people to your shinny new web site. In the past, common wisdom was search engine optimization or SEO for short.

So you got excited and dropped a bunch of cash on a fancy consulting firm or did your homework to come up with your own SEO strategies. But after all this time and money, you’re still dead and buried on page 12 of Google. After trying everything and pulling your hair out, you give up on traditional site optimization and investigate alternative strategies.

You then discover Pay Per Click advertising, or PPC. This is perfect! For a few bucks you are guaranteed that people show up to your site. So you beg, barrow, and steal to cobble together a small advertising budget. Your PPC campaign is off and running! Problem solved. Right?

You abruptly discover that the key words you selected will cost you $5 a click. After some simple math, you discover that your paltry $150 a month budget equates to a whopping 30 clicks a month. Hardly the stellar traffic you were projecting when you started this project.

So what’s the magic bullet of web marketing? The answer is…there is no magic bullet. Perhaps in the past you could have implemented a few simple tweaks to your HTML and you were all set. This just doesn’t work in today’s ultra competitive environment.

You need to master multiple techniques to get noticed in the digital ocean. You need to master SEO, PPC, Blogging, Social Networking, and anything else you can think of to attract that precious click. And if someone does take the time to check out your site, make sure it is the absolute best site you can imagine. Because if someone comes through the door to discover broken links and crappy design, your toast.

To read more about this topic, check out “New SEO, success and a new approach!” on iMedia Connection.com

Web Page DNA

2008-04-26T11:10:00.000-07:00

So, what exactly makes up a web page? What does our web browser retrieve from the Internet when we visit an Internet address?

The answer is, files. A web page is just a text file, and inside that text file there are HTML tags, that reference other files on the internet for the browser to retrieve and show as part of the web page.

And nowadays there are many different kinds of files that make up an ordinary web page. It is not uncommon for a web page to be comprised of text, image files, video and sound files, and animation files.

Since a web page is just text, an HTML file does not look any different in our web browser than if we had viewed it in an ordinary text editor, except for the fact that we cannot change the text, because the web browser is meant to view data, not change it.

WYSIWYG vs Notepad

2008-04-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

In our HTML training DVD, we demonstrate writing HTML code using Notepad which is an easy to use and free software widely available on all Windows computers. Or if you are a Mac user, you could use either Simple Text or Text Edit.

But you might be wondering, “Why would I use the simplest text editor on my computer to create a killer web page? Hasn't someone already made the best HTML editor on the planet?”

The answer is yes they do exist. There have been many WYSIWYG HTML editors created since the start of the World Wide Web, and yes their creators make good money off of them, but that does not mean that they are right for you. If you're not sure what the acronym WYSIWYG means, it stands for "What you see is what you get". But what I really think it should stand for is "What you wish you saw is what you hope you got", but that's just my opinion.

There are many open source HTML editors, and many small utilities available that can generate HTML code, but the two most used applications in this area are Microsoft Office Front Page and Adobe Dream Weaver. Front Page and Dream Weaver generate HTML by using drag and drop WYSIWYG interfaces.

So why not use one of these programs to create my web pages? Wouldn't it save me a lot of time, and when I was done I would still have a great looking web page?

The difference is like finger paints compared to an artists brush. In general, HTML is meant to be human readable; that means that if you open an HTML file you can usually tell how the final page will look when viewed in a browser. The only thing in common between all of these WYSIWYG designers is that all of them create bad code, and I mean bad code; and while that may sound a little harsh, it is no secret. The code is difficult to comprehend and hard to maintain. But while all of these faults are bad individually, most of them you could live with if the program just generally worked well, and exported a web page that looked like what you expected.

Again these programs provide an experience that is less than perfect, and if you manage to invest enough time to design a fairly complex web page using one of these editors, I suggest you save your file often, because they tend to crash and burn and take your hard work with them.

If you are interested in learning more about our HTML tutorial DVD, you can check it out at http://HtmlTutorialDvd.com.

The Perfect HTML Color

2008-04-08T22:14:00.000-07:00

Trying to find the perfect color to use for your web page or trying to determine a color's hex code can be a real hassle. Unless you are using a WYSYWIG editor that has a color picker, it is practically impossible to determine the exact hex code for your desired color.

Fortunately, W3 Schools has posted a very helpful and comprehensive chart of 150 HTML colors and their associated hex code. You can check out the chart on thier web site at www.w3schools.com.