Updated: 09/10/2004 10:03:05 PM               (Broken Link? Report It Here)      

Maintenance Area

What is the purpose of the Maintenance Hints and Tips area?

Many times one has enough knowledge about a subject to be beyond the need of a tutorial but not enough to know exactly how to accomplish a certain task or reach a certain goal. Often one finds himself needing to learn how to do just one small thing instead of a receiving a full course instruction. And then there are times where you learn something interesting and useful just by browsing around; but without really intending to learn.

That's the purpose of the Maintenance Hints and Tips area - to teach you something small, but interesting and useful. To show you how to do just one thing at a time and help you reach your goal. More importantly, to provide you the opportunity to learn something new each day; which is a goal most people envision and strive for.

Membership requirements for Giz Gears.

This interactive area within Giz Gears does not require an active Giz-Net Network membership in order to participate.

Promotion Tricks

Building Better Banners - Contributed by Jean Grey!

When building banners, the first thing you need to make a decision on is what your intentions are. Do you want brand recognition, clicks, or both? Many companies don't focus on click-throughs. They focus on branding, or name recognition. Some companies don't care about branding and will often put up deceptive ads simply to get the click through.

Banners that focus on branding are usually simple in design; a logo, some information about the company, and that's about it. The trade-off is the click through rate will usually be very low.

A banner that promotes a bit more traffic usually has the key ingredient that many companies forget...a "click here" button. Believe it or not, if it doesn't say "click here", many people won't realize they can click on it.

Combining these two concepts often results in the website receiving "qualified" visitors.

Comment Tags: Use Them to Promote Your Website?

Search engines recognize Comment Tags and use them to help index your website. Sometimes the text on your site will not be optimal for search engine spidering. To offset this disadvantage, use comment tags above your text blocks. This little trick will help improve your search engine ranking, plus it can help you to better organize your website for easy editing. For example:

<!-- HTML Editors -->
The text block may be a list of website building programs, their advantages and disadvantages.
<!-- Image Editors -->
The text block may be a list of graphic editors, their advantages and disadvantages.

Build An Ezine Subscription Base - Contributed by a Guest! - Added 10 Sep

This is a must-have for an webmaster if you want to generate return visitors for your website. Opt-in newsletter subscribers can be the best leads you'll ever prospect. Build a quality list and give people the option to join on your home page. Even if they leave, you have the opportunity to convince them to return to your website over and over through periodic mailouts.

Build Traffic With Ezines - Contributed by Jean Grey!

Any growing online enterprise should have electronic Newsletters or Ezines. A well-planned ezine is a way to build your website's traffic base, as well as generating income through advertising. Success for any ezine depends on growing your readership. Here are five ways to do that:

1. Include a link or form within the navigation menu on your site, ensuring maximum exposure.

2. Add a link to your ezine subscription on all outgoing e-mail with a signature file.

3. Trade ad spots in other ezines to promote your website. Track subscribers if possible.

4. Post articles to other ezines, with a link back to your site to generate interest in your own ezine.

5. Get listed on ezine directories around the Web. It's like free advertising!

File Names and HREF Titles - Contributed by Jean Grey!

Help search engines to index your website and increase your keyword density at the same time. Use file names and HREF titles that relate to the theme of your site.

<A HREF="gg-index.htm" Title="web design,HTML,webmaster">

(The keywords will display when you hover your mouse over the link in IE browsers.)

For example: Move your mouse of this link and hold it to see the effect.

Keywords: What Are They and How Do You Use Them?

Keywords are words that search engines use to qualify, or rank, your website when a searcher types in a search engine query.

1. The Title Tag. Don't put in just your website name. Include a few keywords there as well.

2. General Content. Mention the keywords a few times throughout the content of the webpage. Search engines spider all of the webpage's content. If your website has really long pages, keep the keywords toward the top; or separate your website into smaller webpages.

3. Links. Using the keywords in your links will add value to your webpage in the search engines because your webpage will not only contain the words, but also links to pertinent information about the words.

4. Image Alt Tags. For all of your images on your webpage, you should have an Alt Tag in case your visitor's browser cannot load images. Be sure to include keywords in these Alt Tags as well.

5. Meta Tags. Although they cannot be seen on your webpage, your website should have Meta Tags that contain your keywords because the search engines use these tags to qualify your website. Use all lower case letters. For some reason search engines do not respond to a metatag that has upper case letters if the searcher uses all lower case letters in the search.

6. Other Keyword Uses. Get even more exposure with HTML Comments, Hyperlink Titles and other code that is not directly displayed on your website simply by including your keywords.

Measuring and Improving Keyword Density

Search engine success or failure is what can identify a successful or failing Internet business. One important part of your overall search engine strategy is how to optimize your "keyword density".

What is keyword density? It's the number of times a keyword appears in relation to the other words on your pages. If your site is about fonts and you had a page that contained only the word fonts, your keyword density for the search term "fonts" would be 100%.

However, if that same page contained only one sentence that read: "Free Fonts: Downloads and Reviews." The keyword density for "fonts" is now 25% because there are three other search terms contained on the page and the word "fonts" represents only 1/4 of the total words. I know...there are five words total but keep in mind that most engines will ignore words like "and," "the," "of," "from," etc.

So how do you measure your website's keyword density? You can use a tool like "Webjectives' Keyword Density Analyzer" to test the value of your keyword density.

1. Type in your URL and the keyword or phrase you would like to check.

2. Click the "analyze" button.

Now you know what keyword density is and how to check your website rankings on major search engines.

So how do you improve your website ranking? First find out what sites are generating the best search engine rankings based on the keyword you chose earlier for your website. You can use "Ixquick's Metasearch" analysis tool for your research.

Choose a website that scored well using "Ixquick's Metasearch" analysis tool and return to "Webjectives' Keyword Density Analyzer" to review the keyword density of the website. Finally, view the source of the website that scored higher than your website and determine what steps you can take to mimic its properties.

Keyword Synonyms

When working with meta tags, comment fields or image alt tags, you want to try to use a variety of relative words to get deeper search engine indexing. For instance, if your site is about children you certainly want to use "children" as a keyword. But you should also try to use words such as "child", "kid" or kids", "family", or "sibling" etc. The number of synonyms possible are very great. To help you find related keywords, try visiting Thesaurus.com

Create a Simple Logo - Contributed by a Jean Grey!

CSS styling allows you to create a simple logo or highlighted text area on your webpages. Copy this code in-between the <head></head> tags of your webpage.

<style type="text/css">
.simplelogo
{
background-color : white;
border-style : outset;
border-color:#C9DBFF;
border-width:6px;
height:60px;
width:230px;
color:#003399;
font-weight:bold;
font-family: arial, sans-serif;
font-size:24px;
text-align:center;
}
</style>

Place this code in the main body of your webpage where you want the logo to appear. Then modify the basic styling to create the look you prefer.

<div class="simplelogo">Giz Gears
<span style="font:bold 10px;letter-spacing:2px;">HTML and Web Design</span></div>

For example: The below coding could be used to generate a simple logo for Giz Gears:

Meta Tags: Their Names and Contents FAQ from a Guest!

Meta Tags are used by search engines to help index your website. They are placed between the <head> </head> tags of your webpage. Here are some of the Meta Tags and their formats that you can use:

1. The Description Meta Tag.
<META name="description" content="This is a brief description of your website. It is usually 150 character or less in length.">

2. The Keywords Meta Tag.
<META name="keywords" content="These are words or phrases that a potential visitor would use to search for your website. Make sure you separate words and phrases with commas.">

3. The Distribution Meta Tag.
<META name="distribution" content="global">  <META name="distribution" content="local">
Use the global content for the major entry points of your website and the local content for local indexes.

4. The Robots Meta Tag.
<META name="robots" content="[no]index,[no]follow">  <META name="robots" content="ALL">  <META name="robots" content="NONE">
The default setting for this tag is <META name="robots" content="index,follow">. The index directive tells all search engine robots whether or not to index the webpage. The follow directive tells the search engine robot if it should also index any links found on the webpage. Preceding the directive with no as in noindex or nofollow will prevent the robot from performing the directive.
The Meta Tag <META name="robots" content="noimageindex"> will prevent the robot from indexing the images found on the webpage, but not the text.
The Meta Tag <META name="robots" content="noimageclick"> will prevent the use of direct links to the images and will instead offer a link to the webpage.

5. The Revisit-After Meta Tag.
<META name="revisit-after" content="15 days">
Use this tag if your update your content frequently. It instructs the proxy server to re-cache your webpage after the specified time has elapsed. It does not direct the search engine robots to come back.

6.  The Revisit-After Meta Tag.
<META name="rating" content="General">  (Options include General, Mature, Restricted, 14 years)
Use this tag to help warn your visitors of some possible inappropriate material or if your website requires visitors of the age 18 or older.

Title Tags: Use Them to Get More Exposure for Your Website! - Contributed by Jean Grey!

This trick may help you get a little bit more exposure on Search Engines. All you have to do is change your website's <Title></Title> tag every now and then...say every couple of weeks or perhaps once a month.

For example, Giz Gears has a title that says "The Giz-Net Network: Welcome to Giz Gears, the Network's HTML and Web Design Section" and we know that I have submitted my website to the search engines since you probably wouldn't be here otherwise.

If I were to change my website's title at the beginning of the month to say "Giz Gears: Web Design Accessories, Downloads, Hints and Tips, and Tutorials" then search engines may index my website more and get me even more visitors.

Have You Got a Viral Component? - Contributed by Guest!

And no....our Guest was not talking about a virus! A viral component is some sort of way for people to spread the word about your website.

If you've done a good job of building your website and you are getting the interest of visitors, then you need an easy way for people to spread the word about your website. This is a form of viral marketing that is invaluable and will be probably be the best source of quality traffic for your website.

Try using a Recommend Service so people can quickly alert their friends about your site through an email form.

Contributions for Giz Gears.

If you have a great web design source you would like to share, please let me know! I give credit for all sources of contributions; links, tutorials, downloads, hints, tips, etc. If you would like to see other pages added to this area, please let me know either through email or through the Forum.