Rowan Cottage : Favicons

Rowan

Cottage

About

iWeb

Favicons, Meta Tags, Google

Gadgets, Google and Goodies

Phew, after all that technical wizardry, how about a more low key article, this time on getting your site some global attention, refining your site with cool gadgets, and even generating income from your non-commercial site! OK, so I’m no web expert at all, but this is just to share some of the information and tips I've gained during my journey of discovery towards having my very own website. I didn’t know any of this until a few months ago.

Getting Noticed by the Search Engines

Submit your site to Google.

Submit your site to Yahoo.

Some tips and information on indexing and ranking are available directly from Google here.

Bear in mind that even after you have submitted your site, it can take weeks before your site is effectively crawled by the search engines. It helps if you are linked from elsewhere on the internet. Also note that some people have not needed to submit anything to Google, and have found their site indexed within weeks.

Tips on Search Engines

Depending on who you speak to, meta tags may or may not be important for you. Once you have been listed, meta tags do however provide your site with a nice description that you have defined yourself. But not all search engines will use it, and will provide a description based on what text your page contains.

Anyway, here are some tips before you even consider using meta tags:

Tip#1 - “Content is King”

By far the best way to get good ratings in search engines is to have good content, with relevant text and linkages. People searching for relevant items will then find your site. By the way, don’t forget to submit your site to the search engines first (links above)! See below for more information on Content.

Tip#2 - Make sure Text is Text

Make sure your text is not rendered into an image. Search engines cannot find text in images.

Use standard web safe fonts, like Arial, Times New Roman etc. To see what web safe fonts you have on your system, go to Font Inspector > Collections > Web.

Also a quick way of seeing if text has been rendered as an image in your published site, is to open the suspect page in a browser, and see if you can select any text. If you can’t, and in fact end up dragging the image of the text of the browser page, then unfortunately, you can say for sure that your text has been rendered as an image.

If you make links or text out of unusual fonts, but embedded within web safe fonts, the whole paragraph will be rendered as an image. If you still want to do this, use separate text boxes for each type of font.

Tip#3 - Site Connections

Make sure all links work and that your site is fully interconnected. Search engines will then have an easier time crawling your site.

Tip#4 - Get a Tracker

Like statcounter below. You will then be able to tell what people are searching for when they find your site, which pages they land on, and which pages they miss out. You can then tailor your site to suit the type of visitor you want.

Tip#5 - Title your Pages Appropriately

iWeb by default titles your pages with the name that the page carries in the site organiser. The title of the page is what appears at the top of the browser. Unfortunately if you call your pages Home, Photos, Blog, this is what will be displayed as a link when it appears in a search engine listing. They are not very descriptive, so not very helpful to the search engine user. Just as an example - the picture above shows the page www.rowan-cottage.co.uk/index.html, but what appears in the search engine is ‘Welcome to Rowan Cottage’, the title of the index.html page.

You can either change the names your pages in iWeb (but with the limitation that your navigation bar space is limited), or you can change the title of the page by modifying the HTML of the page. You will see that each one of my pages has a title that is different from the actual page name. To change the title of the page, change the HTML text between <title> and </title>.

Meta Tags

After reading all that, you still want to use meta tags, here are some brief instructions:

You put meta tags within the <head> section of your page. These are the basic ones:

The format of a meta tag is two attributes, name and content. I am providing my own meta tags here as an example of what you can do. Other attributes are available - see here for more information.

What iWeb adds itself

Description - used to define the description of the page

Keywords - used to define keywords for search engines, use comma-delimited list

Robots - used to define how a search engine will behave when it finds your page

Meanings of indexing options

index - read the content (default)

noindex - do not index (e.g., for a page just full of links)

follow - read links and subdirectories (default)

nofollow - do not follow links

noarchive - search engine will not cache page

How to use Meta Tags

As a minimum if you are going to use meta tags, you should have a description and keywords. You don’t need to use the robots meta tag - pages are indexed and links followed by default.

Put this code in the <head> section of your site. To do this easily you can set up a MassReplaceIt search to find

and replace it with

Add a favicon to your site

A favicon is a little icon shown in the address bar of your browser. You will see

a favicon for the majority of mainstream sites. Why not have your own favicon

for your site instead of Safari’s generic globe?

Instructions and plug-ins for Photoshop

Create a favicon from an image

Instructions to add the code to load a favicon here

Generate a little income on the side

with Google Adsense and adverts on your site - just set them up then sit back!

Add dynamic and clickable content to maintain interest. Some examples here:

TECHNOLOGY HEADLINES

MUSIC CHARTS

NEWS

SALES CHARTS

MORE HERE!

* Visit our iWeb resources page for more links to resources and other iWeb hints sites.

* Visit our Links page for some of our favourite links.

* Visit our Articles page for more hints, tips, tricks and help on iWeb.

www.rowan-cottage.co.uk

How to add HTML gadgets and extras?

Check out my PayPal Button article here for an explanation of the technique and general princiiple of cut and pasting HTML to add extra content to your site.

For simple and repetitive replacement of code in HTML pages, check out the fantastically useful and free utility, MassReplaceIt from HexMonkey Software.

For a popular free HTML editor, try Taco HTML Edit from Taco Software.

Sitemaps

Google’s Sitemaps site - improve Google’s crawling of your site

Free XML sitemap generator - for submitting to Google Sitemaps

Free sitemap generator here as well

Xenu’s Link Sleuth (for the PC but works fine with any ‘virtual’ PC) - for finding broken links and generating HTML or text sitemaps

Make your own sitemap page - useful for keeping your site organised and for visitors to easily see the structure of your site.

Finally...

If you’ve not already seen this page, check it out now for links to more iWeb resources. And don’t forget to sign our guestmap!

Put referral adverts like the above on your site - income is generated when someone signs up.

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on this browser

Put adverts like the above on your site - content is generally optimised to the content of your page.

Make it easy for people to bookmark your site or pages - add an email gadget (see bottom of right hand column)

to allow visitors to send themselves a link of the address of the page.

Add a form to your site to allow people to sign a guestbook, or email feedback using their own email client.

Learn how to incorporate the form here. Alternative email free method is described here.

Make navigation easy by producing a sitemap page, and use text and image links to improve navigation. Dropmenus may also help. Article here on another form of dropmenu.