Adding a web site to your online presence... RTV 453 Adding a web site to your online presence...

About a web site One of the most important things to remember when designing a site is that the wheel has already been invented What is Usability? Look at what others have You’re less important / interesting than you think

Basic site design Start Looking at WordPress 420 class vs. our use Designing and managing an Interactive Media site Using Social Media to reach an audience Breadcrumbs

Basic site design Use Corresponding Labels Make sure your crumbs are called the same as the corresponding location, for example do not call a crumb “Personalize” if the page is called “Settings.” Aid Navigation, Not Replace It Your crumbs should act as a way for users to locate themselves on your site when they arrive and not as a replacement for navigation. Don’t Link to Current Page The very last crumb in your breadcrumbs should not be clickable. It should simply serve as an indication of where you are within the site.

Other site design terms Tabs -- The tab metaphor is one of the only metaphors from the office that work really well on screen. Lots of guidelines about tabs URL shortening (tinyurl) URL usability stay away from in-page linking (anchor tags) Avoid the mailto link unless the title of the link is an email address

We have a web site, now what? SEO For many people, search engines are the starting point for information on buying decisions. There are billions of searches done every month and that number is growing. It’s tough to buy traffic. Ad Age, 2007: the click through rate of search engine advertisements is 11.5 percent.

Initial SEO guidelines Surefire way to great search rankings is to create great, original content. Search engines do not need, nor do they reward, duplicate content. Be focused. Try to have a page dedicated to each keyword or phrase that you’ree trying to rank well for. Use your keywords frequently in the body tags of your pages.

Initial SEO guidelines While you should include your keywords frequently in the body tags, do not spam a page by placing text in the same color as the background or hiding keywords in places that people can’t see. This is a way to get banned from a search engine or be placed in the supplemental index.

Initial SEO guidelines Avoid using frames because they don’t allow content to be indexed properly in most cases. Load times are important both for search engines and for visitors. So, avoid using excessive JavaScript.

Initial SEO Guidelines Page titles are extremely important for both search engine optimization and for click through rate. Page titles should contain no more than 5 words that are keyword-centric and directly relate to what is on the corresponding page. Using more than five words in a page title dilutes the strength of each word. Place important keywords early in the page title. The first word receives the highest reward.

Other SEO items to read... URLs Header Tags Link Structure Internal Links Images Keywords Meta Tag Description Meta Tag Sitemaps

Site Maps Sitemaps are typically XML files that diagram how a Web site’s content is structured. Creating a sitemap and submitting it to search engines is a good way to point out how your site is structured and where pages are located. Sitemaps ensure that all of your pages are found and indexed.

Where to submit your sitemap? Google Webmaster Tools - http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Yahoo! Sitemap Submission - https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit Ask.com - place the url of your sitemap into the link in the article and it will ping Ask.com. http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml Bing Webmaster Tools - http://www.bing.com/webmaster

Tools Web site Grader - Submit your URLs and it will tell you how well your site is optimized. Submit Express- Meta Tag Analyzer - This tool will tell you how well your meta tags relate to each page’s content, pointing out SEO flaws in your meta tags. Submit Express- Keyword Suggestion Tool This free tool utilizes data from Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery to suggest keywords related to the words you provide. XML-Sitemaps - Sitemap generator. SEO Chat’s Dynamic URL Converter - This tool converts dynamic URLs into static URLs, but it only works with Apache servers.

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