Donna Warren wrote:
>
> I have built my website through Frontpage because I do
not know how
> to build it without. It is about a 40 page website and
while reading
These are not good signs.
> through Google on how to make the search more
beneficial it said we need
> Lynx. I am unfamiliar with Lynx and although I read
several information
> pages, I am still lost.
If you are lost, it almost certainly means that the page is
not good for
search engine indexing.
>
> Any help you can offer is appreciated!
Tab to go from link to link. Return to activate a link.
Left arrow to
return a level. Page forward and back. If you cannot
access the whole
indexable site using just these, or if the result is
gibberish to the
extent that indexing that gibberish would not produce a
sensible index,
with sensible text, when viewed at a detail level (the hit
context that
Google returns), it is not suitable for search engines.
(Note there are
alternative keystrokes for performing many of the the
above navigation
operations.)
If the result is indexable gibberish, it is still bad HTML,
but may be
good enough for search engines and unsophisticated GUI
browser users.
(On the other hand, it is still possible to create a good
appearance on
Lynx, and good indexability, without the HTML being well
written. - Lynx
has some error recovery and it is still possible to mis-use,
or fail to
use, proper heading markup.)
The best way of writing HTML is to write the document, in
plain text,
with no markup other than the odd single or double newline.
Then add
appropriate markup. Finally use CSS to style it.
In practice, you can violate this a bit by using table based
layout,
providing that the text in each table cell is self
contained, from the
point of view of indexing and returning hit contexts.
HTML was originally designed to allow ordinary people to
mark up
documents. That's still possible until you start thinking
that
appearance is more important than content. Most web pages
are trying to
abuse HTML as something more like PDF.
If appearance is too important, consider using PDF, i.e. the
right tool
for that job, but make sure you construct it using a word
processor type
tool, not a graphics tool, so that there are machine
identifiable
sentences and paragraphs in the document.
Note that, at least some versions of Frontpage are heavily
reliant on
specific error recovery in Internet Explorer, and I don't
think any are
capable of creating good HTML unless you understand how to
hand code
HTML. In general, HTML authoring tools need to be treated as
productivity aids for people who understand HTML, not as
substitutes for
that understanding.
For what its worth, the obvious web site for your email
address doesn't
look too bad in Lynx. It has some obvious violations, but
it looks like
it is not so over-designed as to be difficult for search
engines.
The one problem that it has for search engines is the splash
page. Look
at the major sites; none of them use splash pages. Also
note that
Google are reported to favour hits on the home page in their
page
ranking algorithms; the splash page is that site's home
page. The sites
needs to replace the home page with the current Intro page.
It might also help to tone down the use of marketing
language on that
page as nobody searches for "lifestyle", etc.
(Generally try and have
lots of facts and use the language that your prospects would
use, e.g.
research to see if they really look for "Olde
Worlde", rather than some
synonym or more specific period term. It is no good using
emotive
wording if the prospect will not consider searching on those
words.)
(For the GUI browsers, it needs to specify a fallback font
that users
will actually have on their machines! The site also needs
checking with
http://validator.w3.org/
as it contains basic HTML syntax errors.)
--
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses
may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a
world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may
not work.
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