More newbie questions

[AmyNY]

Spent the last 24hrs redoing entire website based on many recommendations from here. Started the site 2 mos ago and it's now 70 pages. I'd like to straighten things out before adding more pages.

Renamed all my pages to read "widgets_blue_large" instead of "widgetsbluelarge".
Made the heading at the top of each page a header and in bold. <h1><b>Widgets
Added links back to the homepage from deeper detailed product pages.
Made a logo for top of every page and links to "buy now" "about us" "contact us" and "homepage" for the top and bottom of every page.
Changed all my tables to read at 100% instead of pixel number.

Was all of the above the right thing to do?

Question?

Links to my home page from within website read index.html and buy now read buy_now.htm. If I am understanding what I read, I need to go through everything and change it to read www.mysite.com/index.html and www.mysite.com/buy_now.htm. Is that right? If so, can't do it in frontpage. Will it work in other software. Downloaded homesite free software which was recommended by a friend.

Question?

Don't yet understand what the google toolbar is other than something to do with pr. How do I get it?

That's all I can think of right now.

[jdMorgan]

Was all of the above the right thing to do?

Having your keywords in the URL can give a slight boost, so sounds OK to me.

Links to my home page from within website read index.html and buy now read buy_now.htm. If I am understanding what I read, I need to go through everything and change it to read www.mysite.com/index.html and www.mysite.com/buy_now.htm. Is that right? If so, can't do it in frontpage. Will it work in other software. Downloaded homesite free software which was recommended by a friend.

I don't know - I just use "/" for my home pages, and can't comment on buy_now.htm (non-profit). Wait for a second opinion on this one! :)

Don't yet understand what the google toolbar is other than something to do with pr. How do I get it?

The Google Toolbar is an add-on browser helper for Internet Explorer under Windows. It adds Google Search features and a "PR meter" in a new toolbar that spans the top of your browser window along with the usual IE toolbars and controls. You must enable Advanced Features in the toolbar, and enable third-party browser extensions in Internet Explorer Internet Options->Advanced to use it. Google Toolbar here [toolbar.google.com]

I'd also recommend you go to the Google site and read everything you can find under Google Information for Webmasters [google.com].

HTH,
Jim

[coconutz]

>>Renamed all my pages to read "widgets_blue_large" instead of "widgetsbluelarge".

The following recent discussion may be helpful to you:

Are underscores bad for google? [webmasterworld.com]

[Marcia]

You also don't want loads of duplicate pages turning up on the site. You can do 301 redirects from the old URLs to the corresponding new ones to avoid that.

[The_Boss]

yes

[sean]

If only I could have back all those wasted hours from the newbie days...

Spent the last 24hrs redoing entire website based on many recommendations from here. Started the site 2 mos ago and it's now 70 pages. I'd like to straighten things out before adding more pages.

Good idea. One thing to consider is making it so you can edit one page item and have it update sitewide. This is a fundamental need, so there are a lot of options. For example, you can use programming and databases, server-side includes (SSI), the universal Find & Replace, library items in Dreamweaver, and I think FrontPage has some kind of shared borders.

Renamed all my pages to read "widgets_blue_large" instead of "widgetsbluelarge".

Some here would make the case for using widgets-blue-large.

Made the heading at the top of each page a header and in bold. <h1><b>Widgets

Redundant. You can use just H1.

Added links back to the homepage from deeper detailed product pages.

Good. Personally, while I may arrive at a product page via a search engine, I always like to check the home page for signs of credibility. Be sure to link the logo to the home page.

Made a logo for top of every page and links to "buy now" "about us" "contact us" and "homepage" for the top and bottom of every page.

Good stuff. Also a good chance to make use of shared update functionality (see above).

Changed all my tables to read at 100% instead of pixel number.

Mixed opinions. It depends on the site. Test it at different screen resolutions and see what happens. Since you were not planning to build a percentage-based site, you might find a few surprises.

Links to my home page from within website read index.html and buy now read buy_now.htm

For flexibility, the best bet is to have each page as the index page of its own folder. This may be opinion, but it is an opinion based on seeing tons of broken links due to simple changes of file extension.

- www.domain.com/filename.htm
+ www.domain.com/foldername/

In other words, what happens if you want to change to filename.php3 or filename.asp? And then what happens if you want to upgrade to filename.php4 and filename.aspx? The second route tends to be a cleaner conversion.

If I am understanding what I read, I need to go through everything and change it to read www.mysite.com/index.html and www.mysite.com/buy_now.htm. Is that right? If so, can't do it in frontpage.

Are you sure? I don't use FP, but hope it supports Find & Replace in the source code.

* Assuming all links are internal to your site (same domain):
* Assuming all of yours links are at root level (no subfolders):

FIND: href="
REPLACE: href="http://www.domain.com/

This should insert the domain into your links
and convert from relative to absolute paths.

Don't yet understand what the google toolbar is other than something to do with pr.

Understand it, then try not to think about it too much.

HTH

edits: grammar

[Birdman]

>>> One thing to consider is making it so you can edit one page item and have it update sitewide.

I agree with sean. Your life will be so much easier if you have all navighational and layout code come from an include. Imagine wanting to add a link to your menu and have to do it 70 times as opposed to once!

Very good point sean

[AmyNY]

Came home at 2am last nite and saw responses to my post and quickly changed all pages from underscore to dash. Finished this morning. Looked at the tracker (use extreme tracking) and found that inktomi hit the site between the time I finished the first revision and the second. I had submitted to dmoz 2 days ago. Ouch! At least the hits go to my home page. How do I do a redirect?

Next will change all internal links to domain name. Hope that doesn't mess up the search engines.

Also need to fix descriptions of page. They are mostly generic to the whole site. There are many words not contained within the body of the page. For example: have page called "Widgets", it shows pictures of 5 widgets and they're each labeled blue widget, yellow widget etc. Then user clicks on the blue widget and finds the details about that widget. So the keywords and description of the main widget page has all kinds of words that do not appear on the page. Will the search engines dump me?

Leads me to another question. Do the names of the pictures have any significance?

Read that it's important to use "alt". What does "alt" mean? Do not have that in any pages.

Also wondering, last month the site received a few hits from google from searches on "widget type model #". This very specific search brought up less than 20 hits. When I ran the same searches today, the site was no longer listed. Found the site was still listed for a different product so I know google has not ejected the site. What happened?

Thank you again to everyone for your help.

Amy

[AmyNY]

Also just found that google also omitted some of my defunct pages. When I started I used frames and the product list was called productlistdetail.htm then I changed it to framereplacement.htm and now products.htm. The first 2 versions of the page were both showing on google through last week. Now they seem to be gone. Maybe google will eventually get rid of all the new junk pages with the underscores which I made yesterday.

Regarding google toolbar. I use netscape so I guess it won't help me.

Amy

[SlyGuy]

Hi AmyNY,

What does "alt" mean?

Basically, "alt" stands for Alternate Text [w3.org].

It's used for text-based browsers, people who set their browsers to not view images or folks with a visual disability.

The SEO value is negotiable, I include alt tags on most images, but rarely for the "optimization factor"

- Chad

edit reason : gwammer ;)

[jdMorgan]

AmyNY,

Regarding google toolbar. I use netscape so I guess it won't help me.

Yeah, many of us would like a version that works with Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, and Konqueror, just to name a few... :)

It's a good idea to use as many of these browsers as you can to review your sites. This will allow you to make sure your site looks great with the most popular browsers, and at least good with most of the others. Unless you are a "PR addict", just checking your main pages' PR once a month after the update using the IE browser would be useful and shouldn't be too distasteful for ya! ;)

Jim
(Using NS6 right now... think I'll switch to Opera for an hour, though)

[AmyNY]

Thanks again everyone. Thought I needed alt for optimization. Guess I'll skip that one for now. Will get google tool bar and fire up IE. Does that mean I have to go find those hidden folders again and delete them? :) Probably can't do that with win xp.

[Dante_Maure]

Thought I needed alt for optimization. Guess I'll skip that one for now.

Actually Amy, alt tags will be very important for optimization since you are using images as links.

Every single image on every single page of your site should have a text equivalent, so-called "alt text", specified in the alt attribute of the <img> tag.

You can read more on this by clicking here [diveintoaccessibility.org].

Link anchor text is one of the biggest factors in Google's ranking algorithm, and if you are using images as links you will definitely want to take advantage of the alt tag to describe the page you are linking to. You may also want to take advantage of the "title" attribute to name your images.

Unless it would throw off your design scheme you also might consider using a small plain text link underneath the image links to gain the additional benefit of the traditional anchor text.

[edited by: Marcia at 9:20 am (utc) on Jan. 7, 2003]
[edit reason] fixed broken link [/edit]

[SlyGuy]

Thought I needed alt for optimization. Guess I'll skip that one for now.

Sorry, I might have misworded my response.

Alt tags, by definition, are used as a text equivalent for images. That's how and why I use them. As Dante_Maure stated:

Link anchor text is one of the biggest factors in Google's ranking algorithm

So they can serve two purposes. Just remember that there will be people who can't see those images and are left with nothing but the alt text.

Hope that clears things up a little :)

- Chad

[AmyNY]

So I'm about to take everyone's advice and add alt tags to all of my images, make sure all the words in title, description and keywords are on each page (a monumental task) and then I spoke with someone in the same industry who has a website and makes lots of sales. The following is what he said (I posted this on ecommerce but so far received no answers, so I'm asking here):

He said he uses miva merchant. He bought a package that included a program and web hosting. All he has to do is put on the pictures and write description for the products. Everything else is set up. There is a shopping cart, quantity location, the program calculates shipping weight, calculates quantity discounts. He said the grunge-work manual html method of setting up many, many pages with products (the way I'm doing it and the way he started out) takes much longer than his software. Am I on the wrong track? I do not have a shopping cart yet. I was planning to set up my site, then get some visitors, then add more products, then buy a merchant package (which I currently know nothing about). What does everyone think? Thanks in advance.

Amy

[Dante_Maure]

Miva sites have historically caused indexing problems with Google though they have been showing signs of improvement.

It may indeed save you time with regards to site management but at the expense of being completely search engine friendly.

If you want to get good rankings with a Miva cart you may still need to build strong content pages around it.

The following thread has a number of first hand accounts regarding Miva and Google...

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Marcia]

With a Miva site I just exclude the whole dynamic thing from spiders and create static content pages to be able to have a good customer presentation. Search engines do not like Miva.

I do SEO on a site that uses FP extensions and borders, it's not compatible with *not* using it. It's a whole email hassle back and forth to have the web designer make even slight adjustments, then I double check, send corrections, etc. FP is great without proprietary features and if using regular FTP. And SSI does the same as the shared borders without the headaches if someone else has to work on the site who will not use FP.

[AmyNY]

Skipping miva. Thanks.

Amy

[jasonh]

Many of these responses are not true anymore. Search engines do like miva pages.

Jason