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Girl
Geek Speaks Newsletter
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Welcome to the February 2004 Issue of our newsletter for
the technically challenged and web site wannabe's. We
feature articles to help guide you through the process
of designing, building, and promoting your business or
personal web site. If you know someone who may like
getting these newsletters, feel free to forward it to
them in its entirety, or have them sign up for their own
copy below.
In my ongoing effort to dissuade small
business owners and entrepreneurs from having their well
intentioned relatives build their website for free, I
offer this article on search engine ranking.
Your website designer needs to know
way more than just how to use Dreamweaver or FrontPage
site building software. They also need to know good
design, marketing, search engine optimization and
alittle bit about html coding. Plus, if you want an
e-commerce site (where you sell products or services
online) they’d need to know about integration of
databases, merchant accounts and shopping carts.
Unless
your dear relative is a professional web designer, hire
competent help. You wouldn’t hire your brother-in-law
the accountant to build your brick and mortar storefront
if he’s only seen a hammer, would you?
In
This Issue:
Feature Article: The Care and Feeding of Search Engine
Spiders
Ask
Girl Geek: How Do I Know If My Site Will Feed the
Spiders?
Announcements: New Programmer and Graphic Artists join
Girl Geek
The Care and Feeding of Search Engine
Spiders
For the novices out there, search
engine spiders (sometimes called “robots” or “bots”) are
the mathematical algorithms search engines (like
Google), use to calculate and rank your website. To
have any hopes of ranking well in search engines you
need to attend to the “care and feeding” of the search
engine spiders in the design of your site. Oh, and you
need to make sure your web designers doesn’t try to
“spam” them and get you banned forever from the search
engines.
Here’s the top 4 things that will
starve or kill the spiders (and then they won’t rank you
site well).
- Missing Content
- Missing TEXT navigation
- Missing links
- Low hit rates
Now I will explain each--
- Missing Content – Search engine
spiders read your site linearly – from top to bottom
and left to right. If your keyword-rich text isn’t
near the top of your page, the spiders will die of
starvation looking for it. If your text is “hidden”
in frames, embedded tables or image files, it is
basically invisible to the spiders.
- Missing TEXT navigation – Search
engine spiders gobble up sites with text navigation.
They can’t read javascript, xtml, or dhtml
fancy-schmancy menus. That’s why you feed them with a
simple text navigation added to the bottom of each
page of your site.
- Missing links – Link popularity
is one of the many ways to feed the spiders and rank
well in the search engines. If you have many related
and relevant sites linking back to your site, the
spiders will assume you’re a tasty morsel (by virtue
of being popular) and rank you well.
- Low hit rates – A new twist to
search engine ranking is on the horizon. Spiders are
now becoming sophisticated enough to rank busier sites
higher than sites who receive few visitors. This means
you need to drive traffic to your site in as many ways
as you can, not just rely on being found in a keyword
search.
Announcements
I am proud to announce the affiliation
of 3 graphic artists and one computer programmer to our
Girl Geek family.
Look for upcoming announcements about
the expanded services we will be able to provide,
including logo development, full e-commerce sites,
automated online assessments and dynamically generated
web pages.
Shameless Self Promotion:
Email or Call now (well, maybe wait until next week as
I'm kinda swamped)
for your FREE initial web design
consultation and NO OBLIGATION bid for new websites or
old website revamping.
Girl Geek Web Designs -ask for Annette
(618) 457-8103
1-877-225-9997 toll-free
Annette@GirlGeekWebDesigns.com
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