Boojum Posted May 19, 2004 Posted May 19, 2004 Please add my site to your web-hosting family. My URL: http://www.squort.com My site name: Squort.com Site Description: An eclectic site, Squort.com includes news, news analysis, essays, political commentary, humor, downloads and information about me and my family, along with a new section about my hometown: Santa Cruz, California. Link back to TotalChoice: I've done you one better (actually 43 better): I've posted a link back at the bottom of every page of my site. This is a delayed reward (it took a long time to produce the new site version) for all the help and guidance provided me by my many knowledgeable fellow customers as well as TCH staff members. Oh, and Mitch: Please do perform a search-engine analysis on it. Spasiba. Quote
Deverill Posted May 26, 2004 Posted May 26, 2004 Here are some suggestions for your site, Boojum: Choose some keyword phrases people would use when looking for a site like yours. You currently have politics, propaganda, bush which do tightly relate to your site but they also relate to millions of other sites. Try to narrow it down a bit. Perhaps some more appropriate keyphrases might be: Corrupt government governmental complacency restoring our nation Common Sense Alliance I'll leave it to you to choose these phrases for yourself since you will know your desired audience better than I. Any javascript in your page will distract and sometimes derail a spider so move them to an external file you can call with a line like: ><script LANGUAGE="javascript" TYPE="text/javascript" SRC="/Scripts/mailto.js"></SCRIPT> In this case the subfolder is Scripts under my main site and the script is in a file named mailto.js in that folder. The same is true of CSS style instructions. Use: ><link rel="stylesheet" href="Styles/mystyle.css" type="text/css"> for example in the <head> section of your page to include them. The description is what shows up under your site on many search engines. Fashion it accordingly but remember that it is another opportunity to add keyword phrases and attract visitors' attention. Incoming links will help bring spiders to your site as well as your rankings in some cases (mostly Google). The more links to your site the easier it will be for everyone to find you so work on getting as many of those as you can in the most relevant places possible. No human visits link-farms (hundreds of links on one page) and the spiders pretty much ignore them so try to get onto similar sites or directories for your specific niche. This will get you started. Remember our forums are here to help and ask any time if you have a particular question... we'll try to find you the answer if we don't know it. Quote
Boojum Posted May 26, 2004 Author Posted May 26, 2004 Jim, Thanks for taking the time to review my site. Interestingly, I just finished incorporating my Javascript menu into a .php file; I hope this will help the spiders process it as well as the external-file idea you referred to. As for the CSS: Now that I'm finished "php-ifying" the site, my next structural objective is to introduce actual stylesheets. The keyphrase issue is one I will have to spend some time reviewing; it is the trickiest and most subjective part of the task, to me at least. Quote
Boojum Posted June 1, 2004 Author Posted June 1, 2004 Jim, Regarding those Javascripts, a concern: All but one Javascript (per page) is used as part of a menu button or navigation tab—now all further enclosed in a php include file. (Although I also do include a non-Javascript menu, also in a php include file, that will appear only to visitors who do not have Javascript enabled.) So, have I effectively prevented Google et al. from indexing my site? Or can they read one or another, if not both, of those menus anyway? Obviously, I do want search engines to be able to follow my internal links, but including additional plain-text links in addition to the existing rollover menu would clutter my site. Similarly, I'm not sure if it is practical, or indeed possible, for me to move the rollover scripts to outside files. Please advise. Quote
TCH-Bruce Posted June 1, 2004 Posted June 1, 2004 Best way to get your entire site spidered is to create a site map and link to it from your index page. Quote
Boojum Posted June 1, 2004 Author Posted June 1, 2004 I have. It's one of the Javascript buttons. Quote
Deverill Posted June 2, 2004 Posted June 2, 2004 First thing to always remember is that PHP is executed on the server so the end result is all the browsers or spiders ever see. Javascript, however, is the opposite. There are several spider "simulators" on the internet that will show you their interpretation of what the spiders see. Most are the same info and are pretty reliable. One I use is www.seotoolkit.co.uk/spider_viewer.asp for no particular reason other than it is the first one I came across and liked so I stayed with it. Using that tool I can see many links, some repeats, but at a casual glance it seems nothing has been "left out" so you should be safe. Quote
Boojum Posted June 2, 2004 Author Posted June 2, 2004 Thank you, Jim. I think, however, that to be on the safe side I will add a text site map link to my index page. Quote
Deverill Posted June 2, 2004 Posted June 2, 2004 Another benefit of a site map is that it puts a person "one click" away from wherever they wish to be on your site. That's good for spiders too because they will more quickly find the less prominent content that may otherwise be burried. (Speaking generically, I've not done any in-depth study of your layout and structure.) Quote
Boojum Posted June 5, 2004 Author Posted June 5, 2004 Another benefit of a site map is that it puts a person "one click" away from wherever they wish to be on your site. That's good for spiders too because they will more quickly find the less prominent content that may otherwise be burried. (Speaking generically, I've not done any in-depth study of your layout and structure.) All true. That's why I did add a site map to the new version. It will help both spiders and actual visitors find all my pages ... well, except for the "secret" page. (By the way, has anyone here found that yet?) Quote
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