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On 4 November, some of the major media sources ran what we already knew that the folks over at Langley were doing, watching, and analyzing social media including blogs, Twitter and Facebook. It should not come as a surprise. We already know that many employers and landlords check social media for perspective employees or tenants before making a decision. What was news was that a special interview and tour was granted.
During this, the CIA said it used librarians to aid in the research and analysis. For those of us who research online, including those engaged in white hat SEO (search engine optimization), this is a wise choice. Librarians continue to be one of the best resources for research on and offline because of their training and experience in reference research with keywords.
This research by those who have been nicknamed the “vengeful librarians” is combined with other sources of information such as those conducted from ELINT (Electronic signals intelligence), personal communications, chatrooms, newspapers, television and radio broadcasts. The Agency’s Open Source Center (OSC) reviews about 5 million tweets a day.
Links from a variety of sources with different perspectives:
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/04/142029141/cia-analysts-comb-social-media-for-trouble-spots
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/world/52850565-68/center-naquin-media-social.html.csp
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/04/cia_open_source_center/
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402webpage will take a vacation this month from our blog posts. To learn more about websites, our philosophy as a company or ask us a question please go to http://www.littlemountainwebdesign.com. The blog posts will resume next month.
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PART II: WEB DESIGN
1. Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization (Continued)
Meta tags are located in the coding for the webpage near the top underneath the identification of they type of document and coding that will be used.
Here is a handy list of some of the most often used meta tags
To use these meta tags, simply copy the below in their respective format and insert into your website replacing the *ADD HERE* sections with relevant words for your website and deleting the asterisks as well as the directions.
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="*ADD KEYWORDS HERE SEPARATED BY COMMAS*"> <META NAME="description" CONTENT="*ADD YOUR DESCRIPTION HERE*"> <META NAME="author" CONTENT="*ADD YOUR AUTHOR HERE, IF ANY*"> <title>*ADD YOUR TITLE HERE*</title>
There is much more to search engine optimization than can be covered here in these two posts. Please contact us at Little Mountain Web Design to learn more about how our company can help you and your website with search engine optimization.
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PART II: WEB DESIGN
1. Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization (Continued)
Now that you understand better how search engines work, we will cover part of search engine optimization, SEO. It is important to use SEO to create better websites and not to use techniques and strategies solely to have your website rank high. Google has written much about this aspect of SEO.
To Meta or Not To Meta
Meta tags are in the coding of your website. With the exception of the title of the webpage you will not see them when viewing the webpage. To view the code, other click on a website where their is no image or flash and check under the hood so to speak to see what is there running the page like an engine for your car. You should see one for title. You should also see other meta tags but they are not present in every website.
Some of the less experienced search engine optimists and web designers feel and write that it is unnecessary to use meta tags with the belief that Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engine companies will find their website without this effort. While that can be true, a large part of why a customer wants their website optimized is to have their website rank higher on search engines.
As such, they are not mindful of these three things:
As discussed earlier, a website has two audiences people and robots. The robots collect information including those contained in the meta tags and report back to their respective search engines with these golden nuggets. These data nuggets are in turn evaluated in the search engine algorithm and compared with other data such as the content of your website. This evaluation ranks your website according to that particular algorithm and other criteria. The weight or importance put on the meta tags and comparison with the content can shift depending on the the algorithm or the version. The current search engine algorithm used by Google has been called Panda or Farmer.
The use of meta tags is an important strategy to be incorporated into any web design and is an integral part of search engine optimization. To meta or not to meta should not be the question. It should be a standard practice for those wanting to build good solid websites that are search engine optimized.
Our next segment of our series, “Website Basics: An Introduction to Important Terms and Concepts” will cover the different types of meta tags.
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PART II: WEB DESIGN
1. Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization (Continued)
Meta search engines combine searches for several types of search engines in one location or in one search.
A few of these are as follows:
http://www.metacrawler.com/index.htm
Different countries and languages may have different search engines that specialize in the language and other needs.
Here are a few:
China
http://www.baidu.com
http://www.zhongsou.com
Germany
Russia
The next installment of our series, “Website Basics: An Introduction to Important Terms and Concepts” will focus on search engine optimization.
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PART II: WEB DESIGN
1. Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization (Continued)
In order to understand search engines better, it is best to familiarize yourself with different types of search engines and directories. While some search engines use the same search engine algorithms, for example, AOL currently uses Google’s algorithm, many have different types with different criteria of how to find your website and catalog it. As stated earlier, these search engines used programs called robots to scour the web and collect information that is evaluated by the algorithms.
Here are some popular and useful search engines and directories:
About.com located at http://www.about.com, it contains a collection of different information and articles. While some do not consider it a true search engine, it is listed here as some people use it like one. At one time, preceding the boom of Wikipedia style information, they captured a huge section of the informational market.
Alexa.com located at http://www.alexa.com, contains information regarding ranking and traffic for websites.
Altavista is located at http://www.altavista.com. Previously this was an interesting alternative search engine to use, but seems to be advertisement not search driven at this point in time. It is now run by Yahoo.
Ask.com is located at http://www.ask.com. The descendent of Ask Jeeves, this search engine is a pale version of its predecessor in more than branding and the loss of the Jeeves character. For those of you who are younger, Jeeves was the name of a famous butler in shows of a time gone by. He always had the answer which is why he was such a good candidate to personalize and brand a search engine as your informational servant. Back some years, it became popular with a different type of algorithm than Google was using. It was particularly good for scholastic research and question based searches, bringing up to the forefront the educational and informational websites that the competition did not.
Bing, located at http://www.bing.com, is the latest version of a search engine by MSN.
Google located at http://www.google.com is among the most popular search engines for the English language. It is so popular and well used that its name has become a phrase in popular language. To “google” something has come to mean perform a search using a search engine, just as xeroxing became synonymous with making photocopies at one time and Kleenex with tissue.
Open Project Directory is located at http://www.dmoz.org They describe themselves as, “ the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.” ( http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/about.html). Because this information is added by humans and not bots, it provides an interesting alternative to search engines. Submitting your website here for evaluation is an important step to include when adding your website to search engines.
Technocrati, located http://technorati.com , has a blog directory and search capability for blogs.
Yahoo is located at http://yahoo.com. Its search engine has a serious following. Yahoo has a history of purchasing other search engines and relationships with search engines such as Google and Bing.
When submitting to search engines and directories, you may wish to keep the above in mind and make your own list.
The next installment of our series, “Website Basics: An Introduction to Important Terms and Concepts” will continue our segment on search engines.
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PART II: WEB DESIGN
1. Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization
In the previous post, we discussed that there is a second audience besides humans that your website should consider- robots!
Robots are the programs that search engines send out to gather and scour information on the Internet and report back to them. These robots are also called spiders and their activity is called “spidering”. Spiders, of course, “crawl” the World Wide Web.
This collected information is then evaluated by criteria set forth in search engine algorithms. Algorithms are a set of procedures created to solve a problem or get to a desired result in a specified manner. The results of the algorithm process determine search engine rankings. This is the order in which websites are displayed when a search is made.
Search engine algorithms are constantly changing and can be different from search engine to search engine. When the algorithm changes, your website’s rankings may fluctuate up and down for a time as your website is affected by the new weighting of different criteria and so are your competitors. This fluctuation is called by some the “Google dance”.
If you are using the Internet to help advertise or increase your Internet presence for your business, organization or area of interest, rankings are very important. This is because many people do not go past the first few results or pages, so what is on top has the best opportunity of having Internet users visit.
Search engine optimization specialists will often research and study many more pages in order to have a more in depth understanding of the competition to help clients rank better. While search engine optimization specialists study many things and employ a variety of techniques to help a website be and rank its best, no one should ever guarantee a high ranking. Ranking high is like doing well in the stock market or a horse winning a race. While much can be done to ensure success, there are so many different and uncontrollable variables and competitors, even the best specialist cannot and should not guarantee results.
Having some basic understanding of these busy spiders is key to encouraging them to visit and report back that your website is indeed worthy, in the minds of those who created the latest algorithms, of a higher ranking than your competitor. It is important to create good solid websites that are useful to humans which is what companies like Google state is their intent for the algorithms.
It is also important to realize that what is considered tasty by a spider whether it is program or an arachnid is very different from a succulent meal or “eye candy” to humans.
The art, or practice, of making a better website by using and creating tasty morsels for the spiders to feast on and report back favorably to their masters’ is called search engine optimization (SEO).
Search engine optimization will be covered in a future installment of our series, “Website Basics: An Introduction to Important Terms and Concepts”.
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PART II: WEB DESIGN
Web design should give cohesion to all your thoughts and ideas for presenting your information to the Internet public in the form of a website. This next chapter will be broken into many parts. Today we will explore some basic factors to be used for creating a website, some goals and types of audiences.
1. What Factors Should One Consider In Designing a Website?
When you are considering your design, it is important to consider the following factors and strategies:
Choosing the right design and content for your website is very important and depends upon two major factors, your goals and your audience.
Here are some questions to help you get started.
What Are the Goals/Purposes of Your Website?
Websites can have many purposes as stated earlier. They can introduce/sell a new idea, product, service, business, or organization. They can be used to communicate with, connect with and provide functions to clients. They can also be used to help your team, business, organization, Internet community work or engage more effectively.
The type of goals, whether they are internal, for your employees, or organization members, affects how the website can be designed. For example your goal could be to increase the level of collaboration among your team, explain new products or services to existing customers, or introduce your business to new customers.
For websites whose purpose is more common, that of reaching the unknown Internet user, different strategies are employed including more explanatory text and search engine optimization (seo).
When you begin to create your website, you should start with your specific goals in mind and any other factors that may be important to you and create your own special list of goals. As time passes, you may change this list to better reflect your needs and direction. It is best to set up a time frame to periodically reevaluate your website, its goals and audience as one does your business plan to make sure your website is working hard for you to do what is needed.
For more details on goals and purposes please see our earlier article dated 17 January 2011. You can do that by clicking this link, http://402webpage.com/?p=25.
Who Is the Audience for Your Website?
There are many ways to look at your audience. One is to break it up into three categories: general, intended, and robots.
General refers to anyone that ends up finding your website. This person may or may not have an interest in finding your particular website, but they have located it. It is important when designing the website and creating your text to realize that not everyone may know as much about your area of interest or specialty, so some broad explanations are needed to help fill in some of the gaps, even if your website is only geared towards professionals in your area.
Intended is the specific group of people that you hope to attract. These may be customers, buyers for department stores, government entities, suppliers, volunteers for a non-profit, or just people with a common interest in your field.
The last type of audience you have are robots, programs that collect information from the web. This is important if you want others to find your website when using a search engine.
We will explain more of this in our next installment, “Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization”.
Please return later or read on for the continuation of this series and more on web design where we will cover an overview of search engine optimization.
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PART I: DOMAIN NAMES (CONTINUED)
After choosing a domain name, you can purchase it either separately or as part of a package with your hosting service. Some hosting services, such as Blue Host*, offer a free domain name with the purchase of their hosting service.
3. How Do You Purchase a Domain Name?
Domain names are purchased by domain name registrars that are authorized by ICANN for such purposes. “ICANN” is an acronym that stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
“The mission of The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) is to coordinate, at the overall level, the global Internet’s systems of unique identifiers, and in particular to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet’s unique identifier systems.” (BYLAWS FOR INTERNET CORPORATION FOR ASSIGNED NAMES AND NUMBERS, Article 1, Section 1, January 25, 2011) according to their website at http://www.icann.org/en/general/bylaws.htm#I .
To learn more about ICANN, visit http://www.icann.org.
To purchase a domain name directly from a domain registrar, you can use the below registrars:
Other registrars may be found at http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/accredited-list.html
You can also purchase a domain name from companies that work with a registrar such as:
If your desired domain name is in use, you may try to work with the owner, hope you get lucky and it drops off quietly when it expires or try one of the following companies to purchase it:
These companies or the owner of the domain name may use a domain name appraiser similar to what appraisers do in real estate for homes. The appraisers evaluate and put the numbers of what they think the “property” is worth.
The domain appraiser estimates the value of a domain name based on certain criteria such as:
If there is a functioning website associated with the domain name, the appraiser may look at the following:
Please note that some of the above links are marked with an asterisk. These are affiliate links and those companies may remunerate Little Mountain Web Design as part of a partner or affiliate referral relationship.
Please return later or read on for the continuation of this series to include information on Part II, Web Design, from our website blog.
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