There’s a whole world to coding specifically designed for promoting yourself. I had no idea! After reading the PDF I realized how much control the designer has in their web page’s “searchability.” Our options as designers are to add short, descriptive description tags that anticipate what user’s might type in the search bar and make sure clickables are text. What’s most important for the future... I think… is creating “alt” text for images. Not only will image descriptions show up in search engine lists, but with the ubiquitous use of Iphones, blackberries etc people are going to be encountering Web page where they can’t see the images. The alt text gives these iphone-users an idea about what the image would be if they could see it.
One of the easiest ways to promote your site, post HTML- production, is through your use and optimization of links. Lately I’ve noticed that many sites have their own blogs. At first I thought this was a little weird but I appreciated it because it gave a personality to the could-be static page. But lo and behold, the blog is simply self-promotion. The more the links to your site, the more credibility the site has to a search engine. I find in-links (links on your page to other pages on your web site) not only very easy to incorporate into your site, but very important. SO I looked into them on various help blogs. I found a blog devoted to SEO tips, which had many posts on link potential.
One post commented on the changing search engine world, which apparently pushes pages to the top of the organic search list depending on the amount of links.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-secret-to-ranking-at-the-search-engines-thats-really-no-secret-at-all. “The search engines got smarter, mapping the link patterns of the web and giving higher ranks to those sites & pages with more inbound links… All of this algorithmic evolution means that sites wishing to rank at the top of the engines must have high quality, naturally given, topically relevant links.” So that use of a blog is clever. It allows Web site managers to post about new additions, updates and content of their site in their Blogging, linking to the pages and boosting their visibility.
Another blog gave tips on promotion post HTML phase. Basically his tip is to be like a door-to door salesman, aggressively sell your site to other site-owners or bloggers. http://selfpromotion.com/ says to visit other relevant sites that you want to link to. Once you link to them, say in your blog, let them know! “Tell him that you have linked to his site, and that regardless of what he decides, you will continue to do so, because you think his site is useful. The cute thing here is that by explicitly saying this, he'll give your request extra consideration. Isn't it great how being virtuous can be so evil?” So...link, link, link and make your blog USER& SEARCH-ENGINE FRIENDLY with descriptions and tags!
You bring up a good point about alt text for images. That way, images we look for can appear in the search engines. I may change as technology changes.
ReplyDeleteThe whole thing about having more links to boost your site up the search engine is a really simple yet fool proof way of getting more visitors! With the popularity of blogs, anyone can do this, even us with our own begginer sites.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that was discussed in a class I took previously -- "quality" (for want of a better word) of links has an effect on SEO ranking. For example, if CNN.com decides to link to your blog, then that will have a far greater impact on your ranking than if "Joe's blog" (with a total readership of two people) links to you.
ReplyDeleteI'm just curious to see in the years to come as search engines change, how all these SEO techniques will change, as well.