| From
the Desk of
Robyn Harton, Owner & Designer, Robyn A Harton Creative
"Happy Labor Day weekend to our friends here in the US. If
you're not up to reading the Ezine just now, save it and read it
next week. The information in the articles will still be useful
then. Have a great holiday, and a great September to the rest of
the world, too.
Until next time, Yours,
Robyn"
HTML Ezine Link: http://rahcreative.com/articles_tips/ezine/ezinevol8.html
Article:
Search Engine Strategy - Image ALT Tags
by Robyn Harton
When you're getting your website ready to submit to search engines,
there are a things you can do to help your site get better rankings.
Proper use of image ALT tags.
First off, what is an image ALT tag anyway? It is a bit of code
that you can use to enter information about an image on your website.
It looks like this in the code for an image: <img src="button.gif"
alt="This is a button">
Have you ever held your cursor over a photo and seen a little text
box pop up? That's an image ALT tag.
Originally the image ALT tag was created as an alternative to the
image, for people whose web browsers couldn't show images. Now that
virtually all browsers can handle images, the tag is still there.
So what do you do with ALT tags to help out with search engine
ranking? Why, you fill them with pertinent text!
Search engines use spider robots to read your web page's HTML and
rank it. The image ALT tag that has relevant text in it is read
by these spider robots. Thus, if you put keywords and pertinent
information in your image ALT tags, to the spider robots you will
have more for ranking purposes.
Use your keywords and keyword phrases in your image ALT tags and
it can significantly increase your ranking on some search engines.
Fun Stuff:
The
CAT User's Manual http://www.andreas.com/catman.html - A very
funny look at our feline friends.
The
DOG User's Manual http://www.andreas.com/dogmanual.html - Turnabout
is fair play for our canine friends.
Article:
Why Not to Use Frames in Your Website
by Victor H. Schlosser
Over the years, as the Internet has grown and expanded, website
developers have worked very hard to try and stay just a "little
fresher" , or one step ahead of the competition. Different
sizes of text, different colors of text, graphics, tables, bit maps,
animations, frames, push technology, pull technology, layering,
all of these are a means to an end... To get your page read!
I'm not going to discuss the others here (I'll save those for future
reports). Today, I would like to talk to you about frames. I personally
like frames if they are used properly. Some people seem to use them
just because they can. This can make you site harder to navigate
and a whole lot more confusing if not used properly.
Using frames should be like an other type of advertising or marketing
strategy you use for your business, base the decision on whether
or not it will enhance the message you are trying to get across.
But make sure that you understand the trade-offs that go along with
using them.
The biggest trade-off. And probably enough reason by itself NOT
to use frames: Search Engine robots do NOT read pages with frames!
When they encounter a frames page all they see is they outline of
the frames, the . They don't see any links so they assume it is
a dead page (or a dead site) and they move on. This can be disastrous
for a web-site.
If you want to generate sales, you need customers. To get customers
you first need to get people to your web-site. To do this, you need
the Search Engines. To go to the time, trouble, and expense of setting
up an Internet Store (web-site) and then to deliberately block your
site from the Search Engines is like opening up a retail store but
painting the windows black and not putting up a sign. You are open
for business, but nobody knows it, unless they happen to accidently
stumble in.
Frames can oftentimes be confusing, especially if all of them have
scrollbars going up/down and left/right. Besides taking up a lot
of your already limited screenspace, the scrollbars are just distracting.
This can cause a lot of people to leave your site immediately. They
figure that if your front page is confusing (and that is the page
you are using to draw them in) that the rest of the site probably
isn't worth their time or trouble either.
Navigation. You have to have Everything just right when you are
using frames. If you don't, when you click on a link it can come
up in the wrong window, thus destroying what was there and probably
blowing any and all formatting that you had done. And, if linked
pages come up in the window where the Links are supposed to be,
the person is trapped on your site, in your frames, with nowhere
to go.
Frames can be useful, but having your main site done in frames
is not wise. Look around at other sites that have frames, try top
navigate them, and try to read and see everything using all the
scroll bars. Then... think about your average customer. Is this
something you would want to put them through? Is it something you
would want to have to go through if you were the client?
Brought to you by: World Wide Information Outlet - http://certificate.net/wwio/,
your source of FREEWare Content online. Copyright 1997 by Victor
H. Schlosser
Quote:
"What we love to do we find time to do."
-John L. Spalding
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