NovaMetis Designs

Do you need an RSS feed for your website?

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:24:25 EDT

The initials "RSS" are used to refer to the following formats:

    *     Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

    *     RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90)

    *     Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91).

What is RSS?

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

Why RSS? Benefits and Reasons for using RSS

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.

If your the type of person who loves to skim through tidbits of news or read about short and up-to-date announcements online, then chances are you have run into RSS. RSS or Really Short Syndication is a very potent marketing strategy used by webmasters and online marketers for better online exposure of their articles and to improve search engine placement for their websites. RSS makes news and information accessible wherever RSS can be applied or RSS readers can be used. Several blog providers like Blogger.com, Wordpress and Live journal offer RSS for their members content. More and more users, who are catching on the blogging craze, are putting importance on the relatively fast and reliable RSS.

wikipedia.com

whatisrss.com

thumbshots.org

Choosing A Website Designer

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:48:27 PDT

Being in the industry and trying to be objective is not easy because we know what makes the difference between a good web site design and a great web site design...

So here are some of the things you need to look for when trying to choose a company to design your web site.

1) Price is always a factor when choosing a web designer, but it should not be the only factor.

You get what you pay for and going with the lowest bidder usually means getting a sub-par designer who doesn't have the education or ability to give you the best quality web site.

2) Does the design firm your considering have a programmer on staff?

One thing that most lay people don't know is that a good deal of desingers use what is called WYSIWYG Editors (what you see is what you get). Programs like Dreamweaver or Frontpage are the two big ones that come to mind. While using these editors is not a bad thing to begin with, it should be only a beginnning.

Which means that the designers should know HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash and various other programming languages. If they don't at least know HTML and CSS they can't go in and edit the code that is produced by these WYSIWYG editors.

3) Does your design firm of choice know how to vaidate code?

Valid code is one of the first steps to creating a great web site that will rank high in the search engines. If your design firm does not know HTML and CSS like we mentioned above they will not be able to vaidate the code and thus could be costing you in your web site rankings.

4) Check your current web site designers code?

That's right take the web site of the design firm your considering and see if it their own web page vaidates. Below is the link to the W3C that you will need to test the web page.

To check your current web pages click here.

I want my site to rank high in Google!

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:04:37 PDT

We hear this phrase from all of our clients and potential clients these days. So what does it take to improve your ranking in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other leading search engines?

Let's start with the basic #1 rule which I don't see alot of other webmaster or website designers addressing and that's Valid Code. We can't stress enough how important is it to have great code that validates.

What is valid code... well let me introduce you to the W3C. The W3C is the agency or organization that wrote the book so to speak.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.

To check your current web pages click here.

Ok the code validates now what?

Now Meta-Tags, Keywords, Content, Recripcal Links, RSS Feeds, Titles, Alt Tags etc.

For more information on any of these subjects please contact:

NovaMetis Designs, LLC
Hillsboro, OR 97124
Phone: 971-645-1911
Fax: 503-693-6514

w3c.org

Guidelines for Google

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:08:54 PDT

Webmaster Guidelines

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

When your site is ready:

Have other relevant sites link to yours.
Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Design and content guidelines

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
Check for broken links and correct HTML.
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical guidelines

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.
If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

google.com

Meta Tags... What are they?

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:08:38 PDT

HTML <meta> tag

What are meta tags and do I need them?

Meta tags are HTML codes that are embeded into a web page. These codes are not seen by the average human visitor - they exist to provide web crawlers (employed by search engines) more informaiton about the page they are looking at. Meta tags usually contain the following:

1. Keywords - usually a comma separated list of terms and phrases that reflect what is on that page.
2. Description - a human readable sentence describing the information found on that page.

The general rule behind meta tags these days is this: You need to have them, but nobody is all that certain how much they help.

That being said, I know that Google frowns upon using the same set of meta tags on every page. So it is necessary to have different meta tags for each page.

I see a lot of people making the mistake of including keywords and descriptions that are too general. It's best to craft a set of meta tags that reflect the content on that page.

As a priority, I'd put meta tags in the middle of the list. I'd first concentrate on generating good content and good valid code on each page. I have found that Google is like a child, repetition is best..

Examples

Define keywords for search engines:
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, DHTML, CSS, XML, XHTML, JavaScript, VBScript" />

Define a description of your web page:
<meta name="description" content="Free Web tutorials on HTML, CSS, XML, and XHTML" />

w3school.com