Google's Prohibitions

Avoiding Overly Aggressive SEO Practices

Google,
and
other major search engines, urges you to avoid overly aggressive SEO
practices when
you build your site.

I've
primarily covered Google in this chapter, but what applies to Google
also
applies for the most part to the other major search engines.

Here's
why
you avoid being overly aggressive with SEO (besides wanting to avoid
Google's disapproval).
Building sites that get highly ranked is simply a matter of common
sense; just
build a site that will be useful to people, and it will naturally get
indexed
correctly. Taking this viewpoint, you shouldn't concern yourself with
search
order ranking or search engine optimization when you construct your
site. Just create
worthwhile content that is genuinely useful, interesting, or
entertaining.

Google's
Prohibitions

Below is a list of the
techniques
that Google considers bad behavior. Google prohibits these things
because it
considers them

overaggressive and deceptive,
but
note that Google does not consider this list exhaustive and will frown
on
anything new that you come up with if it is considered deceptive to
either
humans or the Googlebot, even if it is not on this list.

According to Google, good
search-engine-citizen web sites do not:

Employ hidden text or links

For example, users cannot read
white
text on a white background (and will never even know it is there). But
this
text will be parsed by the search engine. This rule comes down to
making sure
that the search engine sees the same thing that users view.

Cloak pages

Also called stealth, this is a
technique that involves serving different pages to the search engine
than to
the user.

Use redirects in a deceptive way

It's easy to redirect the
user's
browser to another page. If this is done for deceptive purposesfor
example, to
make users think

they are on a page associated
with a
well-known brand when in fact they are on a web spammer's pageit's
frowned
upon.

Attempt to improve your PageRank with dubious
schemes

Linking to web spammers or bad
neighborhoods on the Web may actually hurt your own PageRank (or search
ranking), even if doing so provides inbound links to your site.

Bad
neighborhoods are primarily link farms or link exchanges sites that
exist
solely for the purpose of boosting a site's inbound links without other
content. Web spammers are sites that disguise themselves with pseudo
descriptions and fake keywords; the descriptions and keywords do not
truly
represent what the site contains.

Bombard Google with automated
queries

This
wastes
Google's bandwidth, so it doesn't like it.

Practice keyword loading

This
is the
practice, beloved by SEO "experts," of adding irrelevant words to
pages (the page can then be served as the search result based on a
query for
the irrelevant words that actually don't have anything to do with the
page
content).

Create multiple similar pages

Google
frowns on the creation of pages, domains, and subdomains that duplicate
content.

Present "doorway" pages

Pages
created just for search engines are sometimes called doorway pages .
(The term
covers a variety of techniques that are used to substitute one page for
anothereither by redirection or actual substitution of pages on the web
serverwhen the first page is optimized for specific keyword searches
and the
page to which the user is actually sent has little or nothing to do
with that
search.)

Pages that lack content

Google
frowns on pages that lack original content, such as a page that exists
simply
to present affiliate links.

Create domains with the intention
of confusing users

Likely
you've landed on a site with a domain name that's confusing because
it's
sharing the same name with a different

Google
frowns on deceptive domain naming if the domain name was selected for
the
purpose of taking advantage of the confusion.

Any other deceptive technique

As Google puts it, spending
your
energy creating a good user experience will let you "enjoy better
ranking
than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit."

You
should think of this list as applying to all major search engines, not
just
Google, even though Google is the search engine that is enlightened
enough to
clearly spell these prohibitions out. For more information, see
Google's
Information for Webmasters: http://www.google.com/webmasters

At
the very least, web sites constructed using the dirty tricks on
Google's no-no
list will be penalized by legitimate search engines.

If you are a webmaster, you've
likely
been approached to pay for search engine optimization services. A great
many of
these SEO pitchesalthough they seem very plausibleare scams. Caveat
emptor.
Legitimate SEO companies cannot do more for you than the steps outlined
in this
chapter,and any representations that they can are probably fraudulent.

Pages and Keywords

Pages and Keywords

By
now, you
probably understand that the most important thing you can do on the SEO
front
involves the words on your pages.

There
are three issues you need to
consider when placing keywords on a page:

How many words should be on a page?

Which words belong on what page?

Where should these be placed on the
page?

Page size

Ideally,
pages should be between 100 and 250 words. If it is shorter than 100
words,
Google and other search engines will tend to discount the page as a
lightweight. In addition, you want to include as many keywords as you
can
without throwing the content off-kilter.

With
less than 100 words, any
significant inclusion of keywords is going to look like keyword
stuffinga
verboten practice.

There's
nothing wrong with creating pages that are longer than 250 words.
However, from
the viewpoint of hosting lucrative advertising, lengthy pages waste
content;
250 words is about as many as will fit on a single monitor screen, so
your
visitors will have to scroll down to finish reading the rest of the
page if you
publish longer pages. You
might as well provide navigation to
additional pages for the content beyond the 250 words and gain the
benefit of
having extra pages to host advertising.

Choosing keywords

Beyond
the
mechanics of crafting sites and pages that are search engine friendly
lies
another issue: what search queries does your site answer? You need to
understand this to find the keywords to emphasize in your site
construction, a
very important part of search engine optimization.

It's
likely
that you'll want to vary keywords used in a page depending on the page
content,
rather than trying to stuff a one-size-fits-all approach into all the
pages on
your site.

If
the
answer is X, for example, what is the question? This is the right way
to
consider keyword choice. X is your web site or web page.

What
did
someone type into Google to get there?

As
you come
up with keywords and phrases, try them out. Search Google based on the
keywords
and phrases. Are the results returned by Google where you would like to
see
your site? If not, tweak, modify, wait for Google to re-index your site
(this
won't take too long once

you've
been
initially indexed) and try your search again.

Ultimately,
the best way to measure success is relative. It's easy to see how
changes
impact your search result ranking: just keep searching (as often as
once a day)
for a standard set of half-a-dozen keywords or phrases that you've
decided to
target. If you are moving up in the search rankings, then you are doing
the
right thing. If your ranking doesn't improve, then reverse the changes.
If you
get search results to where you want them (usually within the top 30 or
even
top 10 results returned), then start optimizing for additional keywords.

You
should
also realize that the success that is possible for a given keyword
search
depends upon the keyword. It's highly unlikely that you will be able to
position a site into the top 10 results for, say, "Google" or
"Microsoft," but trivial to get to the top for keyword phrases with
no results.

The
trade-off here is that it is a great deal harder to do well with
keywords that
are valuable, so you need to find a sweet spot: keywords where you
stand a
chance but that also will drive significant site-related traffic.

In a
society where feedback is ultimately
determined by financial incentive, an interesting approach to keyword
selection
is to see what words cost the most to advertisers. If you are
registered with
Google AdWords, you can use the AdWords tools to do just that and get
cost

estimates
for keywords and phrases

Keyword placement

The
text on your web page should include the most important keywords you
have
developed in as unforced a way as possible. Try to string keywords
together to
make coherent sentences.

Not
all text on a page is equal in importance. Generally speaking, besides
including them in the body of the page itself and in meta information,
you
should try to place your keywords in the following elements, presented
roughly
in order of descending importance:

Title

Putting
relevant keywords in the HTML title tag for your page is probably the
most
important single thing you can do in terms of SEO.

Headers

Keyword
placement within HTML header styles, particularly headers toward the
top of a
page, is extremely important.

Links

Use your
keywords as much as possible in the text that is enclosed by hyperlink
tags on
your site in outbound and crossbound links. Ask webmasters who provide
inbound
linking to your site to use your keywords whenever possible.

Images

Include your
keywords in the alt attribute of your HTML image tags.

Bold

If there is
any reasonable excuse for doing so, include your keywords within HTML
bold tags.

_{Keywords
higher up in a given page
get more recognition from search engines than the same keywords further
down a
page.}

_{Keyword
placementsometimes called keyword
stuffing seems simple enough conceptually. You take the most
significant
keywords and place them in the HTML elements of your page that I've
just
highlighted. But looking at an actual example may help you understand
what}

_{you
need to do.}

_{To show
you an example of keyword
placement, I've turned to an SEO competition. SEO competitions take a
nonsense
phrase that, to start with, yields no Google search results when
entered as a
query. (The words that make up the nonsense phrase can be real words.)
At}

_{the end
of a given time period, the
site that is first in Google's search results wins the contest.}

_{Obviously,
keyword placement is not
the only technique employed by contestants, who also try to maximize
inbound
links. But keyword placement is an extremely important part of search
engine optimization,
as these contests prove, and one which you can easily implement.}

Linking

Linking

The
links on your site constitute a
very important part of how Google and other search engines will rank
your
pages.

Links
can be categorized into
inbound links , outbound links, and cross links :

Inbound links

These
links point to a page on your
web site from an external site somewhere else on the Web.

Outbound links

These
links point from a page on
your site to an external site somewhere else on the Web.

Cross links

These
links point between the pages
on your site.

Broken Links

It's
quite important to a search engine that none of the links on your site
is
broken . It shouldn't be that big a problem to go through your site and
check
to make sure each link works manually. Doing this will also give you a
chance
to review your site systematically and understand the navigation flow
from the
viewpoint of a bot.

Even
though you've checked your links manually, you
should also use an automated link checking tool. Quite a few are
available. A good
choice is the simple (and free) link checker provided by the World Wide
Web
Consortium (W3C) at http://validator.w3.org/checklink
. As you can see in the figure, all you need to
do
is enter the domain you want checked and watch the results as the links
in your
site are crawled. After you've checked your links manually, use an
automated
link checking tool such as the W3C's Link Checker to make sure your
site has no
broken links .

Inbound links

You
want as
many inbound links as possible, provided these links are not from link
farms or
link exchanges. With this caveat about

inbound
linking from "naughty neighborhoods" understood, you cannot have too
many inbound links. The more popular, and the higher the

ranking,
of
the sites providing the inbound links to your site, the better.

PageRank
and Inbound Links

Inbound
links are considered a
shorthand way of determining the value of your web site, because other
sites
have decided your site has content worth linking to. An inbound link
from a
site that is itself highly valued is worth more than an inbound link
from a
low-value site, for obvious reasons.

This
concept is at the core of
Google's famous PageRank algorithm, used to order search results.
However, the PageRank
algorithm by now has more than 100 variables (the exact nature of which
are a
deep and dark secret); many factors besides a recursive summation of
the value
of a site's inbound links do come into play.

Outbound links

The
"everything in moderation" slogan is really apt when it comes to
outbound links. You could also say that the "outbound link giveth and
the
outbound link taketh." Here's why: you want some respectable outbound
links to establish the credibility of your site and pages and to
provide a
useful service for visitors. After all, part of the point of the Web is
that it
is a mechanism for linking information, and it is truly useless to
pretend that
all good information is on your site. So on-topic outbound links are
themselves
valuable content.

However,
every time your site provides an outbound link, there is a probability
that
visitors to your site will use it to surf off your site. As a matter of
statistics, this probability diminishes the popularity of your site,
and Google
will subtract points from your ranking if you have too many outbound
links. In
particular, pages that are essentially lists of outbound links are
penalized.

Cross links

Cross
linkslinks within your siteare important to visitors as a way to find
useful,
related content. For example, if you have a page explaining the concept
of
class inheritance in an object-oriented programming language, a cross
link to
an explanation of the related concept of the class interface might help
some
visitors. From a navigability viewpoint, the idea is that it should be
easy to
move through all information that is topically related.

From
an SEO
perspective, your site should provide as many cross links as possible
(without
stretching the relevance of the links to the breaking point). There's
no
downside to providing reasonable cross links, and several reasons for
providing
them. For example, effective cross-linking keeps visitors on your site
longer
(as opposed to heading offsite because they can't find what they need
on your
site).

In
addition, from the perspective of making money with site advertising,
you want
to have dispersal through your site. One page that gets 100 visitors is
much
less lucrative than 100 pages that each gets one visitor. The aim of
effective
cross-linking should be disperse traffic throughout the pages of
relevant
content on your site.

Creating a Sit with Seo in Mind

Creating
a Site with SEO in Mind

The
saying
"Everything in moderation, even moderation" is a good principle to
keep in mind when you tweak your web site to achieve

SEO.
The
moderation slogan has been aptly applied to many human activities, from
the
sexual to the gustatory and beyond. It fits very

well
with
SEO.

For
example, you want a nice density of keywords in your pages, but you
don't want
so many keywords that the content of your pages is

diminished
from the viewpoint of visitors. Search engines look for keywords, but
they take
away points for excessive and inappropriate

keyword "stuffing."

Put
Meta Tags in an Include

If
your
site is large, with many pages, and has several distinct areas of
content, you
can create a separate file, each

consisting
only of meta description and tags, for each content area.

You
can
always customize the meta information for a specific page by discarding
the
reference to them eta include file and

adding
page-specific meta information. Alternatively, you can create a
page-specific
meta include, keeping track of your meta

includes
by
placing them all in one directory and devising a sensible naming
convention.

It's
a
really good idea to have default meta information for a site that can
easily be
tweaked.

Site
Design Principles

Here
are some
design and information architecture guidelines you should apply to your
site to
optimize it for search engines:

Eschew fancy graphics

For
most
sites, the fancy graphics do not matter. If you are looking for search
engine
placement, it is the words that count

Use text wherever possible

Use
text
rather than images to display important names, content, and links.

Always provide alt attributes
for images

Make
sure
you provide accurate alt attribute text for any images that are on your
pages.

Navigability

Pages
within your site should be structured with a clear hierarchy. Several
alternative site-navigation mechanisms should be

supplied,
including at least one that is text-only.

Provide text links

Every
page
in your site should be accessible using a static text link.

Make a site map available to
your users

The
major
parts of your site should be easy to access using a site map

If
your
site map has more than about 100 links , you should divide the site map
into
separate pages.

Meta Robot Tags

Meta Robot Tags
The Google bot, and many other web robots, can be instructed not to index specific pages (rather than entire directories), not to follow
links on a specific page, and to index, but not cache, a specific page, all via the HTML meta tag, placed inside of the head tag.
This document was created by an unregistered ChmMagic, please go to http://www.bisenter.com to register it. Thanks .
Google maintains a cache of documents it has indexed. The Google search results provide a link to the
cached version in addition to the version on the Web. The cached version can be useful when the Web
version has changed and also because the cached version highlights the search terms (so you can
easily find them).
The meta tag used to block a robot has two attributes: name and content. The name attribute is the name of the bot you are excluding. To exclude
all robots, you'd include the attribute name="robots" in the meta tag.
To exclude a specific robot, the robot's identifier is used. The Googlebot 's identifier is googlebot, and it is excluded by using the attribute
name="googlebot". You can find the entire database of excludable robots and their identifiers (currently 298 with more swinging into action all the
time) at http://www.robotstxt.org /wc/active/html/index.html.
The 298 robots in the official database are the tip of the iceberg. There are many more unidentified bots
out there searching the Web.
The possible values of the content attribute are shown in Table 3-1. You can use multiple attribute values, separated by commas, but you
should not use contradictory attribute values together (such as content="follow, nofollow").

For example, you can block Google from indexing a page, following links on a page, or caching the page using this meta tag:
meta content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive" name="googlebot"
More generally, the following tag tells legitimate bots (including the Googlebot) not to index a page or follow any of the links on the page:
meta content="noindex, nofollow" name="robots"
There's no syntax for generally stopping a search engine from caching a page because the noarchive
attribute only works with the Googlebot.

---

For more information about Google's page-specific tags that exclude bots, and about the Googlebot in general, see
http://www.google.com/bot.html.

---

Meta Information
Meta information, sometimes called meta tags for short, is a mechanism you can use to provide information about a web page.
The term derives from the Greek word meta, which means "behind" or "hidden." "Meta" refers to the
aspect of something that is not immediately visible, perhaps because it is in the background, but which
is there nonetheless and has an impact.
The most common meta tags provide a description and keywords for telling a search engine what your web site and pages are all about.
Each meta tag begins with a name attribute that says what the meta tag represents. The meta tag:

means that this tag will provide descriptive information. The meta tag:

means that the tag will provide keywords.
The description and keywords go within a content attribute in the meta tag. For example, here's a meta description tag (often simply called the
meta description):

Keywords are provided in a comma-delimited list. For example:

More About Meta Tags
Meta tags can contain a lot more than just descriptions and keywords, including (but not limited to) a technical description
of the kind of content on a page and even the character encoding used:


Additionally, you've already seen how meta tags can instruct search engine bots on what to index in "Meta Robot Tags,"
earlier in this chapter.
It's easy for anyone to put any meta tag keywords and description they'd like in a page's HTML code. This has lead to abuse when the
meta tag information does not really reflect page content. Therefore, meta tag keyword and description information is deprecated by
search engine indexing software and not as heavily relied upon by search engines as it used to be. But it is still worth getting your meta tag
keywords and descriptions right.

Google will try to pick up page descriptions from text towards the beginning of a page, but if this is not
availablefor example, because the page consists of graphics and has no textit will look at the
information provided in the content attribute of a meta description.
Meta keywords should be limited to a dozen or so terms. Don't load up the proverbial kitchen sink. Think hard about the keywords that
you'd like to lead to your site when visitors search

For the keywords that are really significant to your site, you should include both single and plural forms, as well as any variants. For
example, a site about photography might well want to include both "photograph" and "photography" as meta tags.
If you want to include a phrase containing more than one term in your keyword list, quote it. For
example: "digital photography." However, there is not much point in including a compound term if the
words in the phrase ("digital" and "photography") are already included as keywords.

Viewing Yor Site with an All-Text Browser

Viewing Your Site with an All-Text Browser
Improvement implies a feedback loop: you can't know how well you are doing without a mechanism for examining your current status. The
feedback mechanism that helps you improve your site from an SEO perspective is to view it as the bot sees it. This means viewing the site
using a text-only browser. A text-only browser, just like the search engine bot, will ignore images and graphics and only process the text on
a page.
The best-known text-only web browser is Lynx. You can find more information about Lynx at http://lynx.isc.org/. Generally, the process of
installing Lynx involves downloading source code and compiling it.
The Lynx site also provides links to a variety of precompiled Lynx builds you can download.
Don't want to get into compiled source code or figuring out which idiosyncratic Lynx build to download? There is a simple Lynx Viewer
available on the Web at http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html.
First open the Lynx Viewer web page. Next, you'll need to follow the directions to make sure that a file named delorie.htm is saved in the
root directory of your web site. To do this, you'll either need FTP access to upload a file to your web server, or the ability to create an
empty page on your site.
It doesn't matter what's in this file. Its sole purpose is to make sure you own or control the site you are
testing.
Finally, simply enter your URL, and see what your site looks like in a text-only version.

Excluding the Bot
There are a number of reasons you might want to block robots, or bots, from all, or part, of your site. For example, if your site is not
complete, if you have broken links, or if you haven't prepared your site for a search engine visit, you probably don't want to be indexed yet.
You may also want to protect parts of your site from being indexed if those parts contain sensitive information or pages that you know
cannot be accurately traversed or parsed.
If you need to, you can make sure that part of your site does not get indexed by any search engine.
Following the no-robots protocol is voluntary and based on the honor system. So all you can really be
sure of is that a legitimate search engine that follows the protocol will not index the prohibited parts of
your site




The robots.txt File
To block bots from traversing your site, place a text file named robots.txt in your site's web root directory (where the HTML files for your
site are placed). The following syntax in the robots.txt file blocks all compliant bots from traversing your entire site:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
You can exercise more granular control over both which bots you ban and which parts of your site are off-limits as follows:
The User-agent line specifies the bot that is to be banished.
The Disallow line specifies a path relative to your root directory that is banned territory.
A single robots.txt file can include multiple User-agent bot bannings, each disallowing different paths.
For example, you would tell the Google search bot not to look in your images directory (assuming the images directory is right beneath
your web root directory) by placing the following two lines in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /images
The robots.txt mechanism relies on the honor system. By definition, it is a text file that can be read by
anyone with a browser. So don't absolutely rely on every bot honoring the request within a robots.txt
file, and don't use robots.txt in an attempt to protect sensitive information from being uncovered on your
site by humans (this is a different issue from using it to avoid publishing sensitive information in search
engine indexes).
For more information about working with the robots.txt file, see the Web Robots FAQ, http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html. You can also
find tools for generating custom robots.txt files and robot meta tags (explained below) at http://www.rietta.com/robogen/.

Optimizing Sites for Search Engine

Optimizing Sites for Search Engine
Placement
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it fall, has it really fallen? If no one can find your site, then you are like that
unobserved tree. All your work in creating a great site that is the perfect host for lucrative advertising content will be in vain. You certainly
won't make money from your site.

I've already explained how you generate traffic by publicizing your site and getting inbound links to it. Provided these
inbound links don't come from bad neighborhoodssites set up just to exchange linksthe more inbound links your site has, the higher its
PageRank . A higher PageRank implies a better search result ranking for a given query.
You can also generate traffic by using advertising such as the Google AdWords program

Besides obtaining inbound links and advertising your site, there are some things you can do when you construct your web sites and web
pages that can help your pages with their search order ranking. On the other hand, there are also some things you can do that will harm
your prospects.
The general field of constructing web sites and pages to helpand not harmtheir chances with search engines is called search engine
optimization, or SEO, and is the subject of a certain amount of mystification, perhaps to justify the high consulting rates that SEO experts
can charge.
In reality, SEO is pretty simple, and involves the following steps:
You need to understand how your pages are viewed by search engine software.
You should take common-sense steps to make sure your pages are optimized from the viewpoint of these search engines.
Fortunately, this essentially means practicing good design, which makes your sites easy to use for
human visitors as well.
You need to avoid certain over-aggressive SEO practices, which can get your sites blacklisted by the search engines.

How Your Site Appears to a Bot
To state the obvious, before your site can be indexed by a search engine, it has to be found by the search engine. Search engines find
web sites and web pages using software that follows links to crawl the Web. This kind of software is variously called a crawler, a spider, a
search bot, or simply a bot (bot is a diminutive for "robot").
You may be able to short circuit the process of waiting to be found by the search engine's bot by
submitting your URL directly to search engines

To be found quickly by a search engine bot, it helps to have inbound links to your site. More important, the links within your site should
work properly. If a bot encounters a broken link, it cannot reach, or index, the page pointed to by the broken link.

Images
Pictures don't mean anything to a search bot. The only information a bot can gather about pictures comes from the alt attribute used within
a picture's tag and from text surrounding the picture. Therefore, always take care to provide description information via thealt along with
your images and at least one text-only link (for example, outside of an image map) to all pages on your site.

Links
Some kinds of links to pages (and sites) simply cannot be traversed by a search engine bot. The most significant issue is that a bot cannot
log in to your site. So if a site or page requires a username and a password for access, then it probably will not be included in a search
index.
Don't be fooled by seamless page navigation using such techniques as cookies or session identifiers. If
an initial login was required, then these pages probably cannot be accessed by a bot.
Complex URLs that involve a script can also confuse the bot (although only the most complex dynamic URLs are absolutely
nonnavigable). You can generally recognize this kind of URL because a ? is included following the script name. Here's an example:
http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/resources.php?set=313312&page=2&topic=Colophon. Pages reached with this kind of URL are dynamic,
meaning that the content of the page varies depending upon the values of the parameters passed to the page generating the script (the
name of the script comes before the ? in the URL). In this example URL, the parameters are passed to ther esources.php script as name=value
pairs separated by ampersands (&). If the topic parameter were changedfor example, to topic=Equipment using the URL
http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/resources.php?set=313312&page=2&topic=Equipmenta page with different content would open.

File Formats
Most search engines, and search engine bots, are capable of parsing and indexing many different kinds of file formats. For example,
Google states that "We are able to index most types of pages and files with very few exceptions. File types we are able to index include:
pdf, asp, jsp, html, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf."
However, simple is often better. To get the best search engine placement, you are well advised to keep your web pages, as they are
actually opened in a browser, to straight HTML. Note a couple of related issues:
A file with a suffix other than .htm or .html can contain straight HTML. For example, generated .asp, .cfm, .php, and .shtml files
often consist of straight HTML.
Scripts (or include files) running on your web server usually generate HTML pages that are returned to the browser.


Google puts the "simple is best" precept this way: "If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash
keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site." The only way to
know for sure whether a bot will be unable to crawl your site is to check your site using an all-text browser.

Using Email Lists

Using Email Lists
Although they may seem a little old-fashioned, email lists can be a great mechanism for increasing interest in your web sites over time.
The rise of spam email, and the creation of increasingly stringent spam filters, has made the use of email lists more problematic and
something you may want to approach with caution. Although email remains the most widely used Internet application of all, publishing
syndication feeds may actually be a better mechanism for broadcasting information when you don't personally know the recipients.
First and foremost, you should take care that any email you send out doesn't walk like spam, look
like spam, or quack like spam. If it has even a hint of spam about it, at least some recipients will
regard your email as spamand be offended.
Start by adding only people who have expressed an interest in you or your site to the email list. Make it easy to opt out and unsubscribe.
Don't rent or buy email lists. These are worthless and have already been run into the ground with
spam.
Your email list will only build valuable traffic for your site to the extent that you build it up yourself.
Weblogging software such as MovableType will provide basic email list functionality such as
self-service sign-up for notifications when you add a blog entry and the ability to automatically send
out email notifications.
Each email you broadcast to your list should provide value. If you send out vacuous pieces of sales puffery in your email, at best your
recipients will hit the delete button or add you to their spam filter. (They may also send you nasty emails back, and in any case they won't
be inspired to visit your site, the point of the operation.)

Newsletters
The best format is a newsletter. There are quite a few email newsletters that have great content, include links back to the publishing
This document was created by an unregistered ChmMagic, please go to http://www.bisenter.com to regis.ter it. Thanks
web site, and even make a little money with sponsored ads in the email newsletter themselves. A good example of this kind of newsletter
is Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz , which provides great information about research and the Internet (you can sign up at
http://www.researchbuzz.com), and I'm certain drives well-deserved traffic to Tara's site.
You don't need much in the way of tools to send out email newsletters periodically. Just use your email client software of choice, making
sure to blank copy (bcc) senders so email addresses don't show (and you're not invading anyone's privacy). You can copy and paste
your list of bcc recipients so you don't have to reenter it each time.
It may be smart to use lowest-common-denominator text email for your newsletters. If you send
email newsletters in HTML format, some recipients won't be able to properly display it or will have
turned it off.

List Administration
Once you've got more than 40 or 50 email addresses on your list, list administration becomes a challenge. You can install software on
your web server to manage your email listPHPList, available for free from http://tincan.co.uk/phplist is a good choiceor you can outsource
your email management .
If your email newsletters take on a life of their own and you are not comfortable installing your own management software, an email
outsourcer like Constant Contact , http://www.constantcontact.com, provides a raft of features for about $15.00 per month. Besides
basic email management, an outfit like Constant Contact can provide some important functionality, including:
Tracking which recipients click on your HTML email content
Targeting different content to a variety of recipients with different interests
Compliance with antispam laws and relationships with ISPs to make sure your emails go through

Action Items
Here are some action items for you to take to get started on the road to driving traffic to your web site:
Understand who is the ideal visitor to your site.
Discover some interesting stories to tell about your web site.
Make a checklist and plan for publicizing your site.
Submit your site to search engines.
Resubmit your site to search engines as necessary over time.
Get your site listed in the ODP and Yahoo! taxonomic directories.
Work to encourage appropriate inbound linking to your site.
Publish a press release.
Continue to publish press releases as stories related to your site come up.
Create and distribute syndication feeds.
Consider creating and maintaining an email newsletter to support your site marketing campaign.

Publishing Press Releases

Publishing Press Releases
It used to be that putting out a press release was a big deal. It required special accreditation and membership in a wire service and could
generally only be accomplished by large companies or by using an accredited public relations or ad agency.
As with many other things, the Web has disintermediated and democratized the process of publishing a press releaseso much so that
some large organizations don't even bother with them anymore, figuring that their releases will be lost in the flood of information unleashed
on the world by the "little guys."
These days, publishing a press release that will be picked up by wire services is technically free. In reality, to get the distribution you want
for the release will cost you
about $30.00 per release. Although my general stance is not to pay for listings, this is usually well worth doing, provided you have the skills
to write a good press release and have an interesting story to tellnot only will it produce inbound links but also some traditional media may
pick up on your site and story.
There are several online services that exist to distribute press releases, including 24-7PressRelease.com
(http://www.24-7pressrelease.com), FreePressRelease.com (http://www.free-press-release.com/submit/), and PRWeb
(http://www.prweb.com). These sites all work in essentially the same way: an online form is provided for your press release submission,
and the service submits your release to wire services, web search engines, and anyone who subscribes to the service's feeds. Free
submission is available from all of the press release services, but to get the distribution your press release deserves, you need to buy (in
some cases, phrased as a "contribution" or a "donation") premium membership in the service (or upgrades for specific press releases).
Comments, Trackbacks, and Discussion Threads
The "cheap-date" way to get inbound links is to post them yourself, using a mechanism such as a blog comment, a blog
trackback, or a discussion thread. These links do not have the permanence or credibility of a link from a stable site, but
can draw considerable short-term traffic if posted on a popular site.
There's nothing wrong with adding a link to a comment on a blog, or in a discussion thread, or using a trackback
mechanism, provided you have a valid hook for hanging your URL. In other words, it's OK to enter a discussion if you
really have something to say, and it's also OK to link back to relevant material on your site, but don't come completely
from left field. It will undermine the credibility that you are trying to build up for your site.

The viewing statistics for PRWeb are impressive, typically in the tens of thousands of views for most
press releases. PRWeb also tells you how many times your release was picked up by a media outlet,
how many times it was forwarded using PRWeb's forwarding service, and how many times it was
printed using the printer-friendly version of your release. However, it's not entirely clear what these
statistics actually mean, and you should not necessarily expect a corresponding increase in your
volume of site traffic.

You can edit the press release later, but you do need to supply the following elements initially:
Headline (one sentence)
Summary (two to four sentences)
Body of the press release
Keywords (don't bother repeating keywords in the release itself, since these will be picked up automatically)
Industry
Site URL and contact information

Preparing a Press Release
Before you go online to submit a press release, you should prepare the press release using a word-processing program
such as Microsoft Word. It's important that you get your release reviewed by several people, including (if possible) a
professional writer or editor. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation do count; if your press release is deficient in these
areas it will look amateurish.
A good press release should be succinct. Keep it to one page if at all possible.
The press release should start with a summary of no more than two or three sentences. You should also prepare a single,
short sentence to serve as the headline for the release.

A final short paragraph should describe your web site, perhaps with links to an FAQ page and related sites. This
paragraph can be used as a slug, which means it can be copied and pasted for use in all your press releases related to
your web site.
The press release should provide email and phone contact information in case someone who reads the release wants
further information. Don't make it hard to find you!
A press release created in this way can easily be copied and pasted into online submission forms.

To some degree, your industry selection determines to whom your press release is distributed. You
need to pick a primary industry when you create the release, but (depending on your contribution level)
you can add industry groups after the release has been saved but before it is submitted. You should
take advantage of this to get your release as widely distributed as possible.
When you've completed your press release and assigned a release date, click Save Press Release. You'll next be asked to pay for your
submission (select a contribution level).
Press releases are subject to a vetting process conducted both by software and human editors. Some kinds of content are forbidden. For
example, you cannot submit a press release having to do with adult content and any related industries on PRWeb.

You can find out more about PRWeb's review policies using the Knowledge Base on the PRWeb site. Generally, besides adult content,
PRWeb will reject any outright
and apparent advertisements, so take care to word your press releases to avoid this stigmatization. If your press release is rejected,
PRWeb will refund any contributions as a matter of course. Note that PRWeb does not vet spelling or grammar and does not check
factsit's up to you to get these things right.
Provided your press release has been accepted, you'll receive email confirmations and a link to your release online on the wire service site.
For a fee, PRWeb will write or edit your press release for you.

Working with Directories

Working with Directories
It's a not-so-well-kept secret that the best approach for getting into the search engine listings is to enter through a back door by working
with the two most important structured directories: the Open Directory Project (ODP) and the Yahoo! Directory.

Understanding Taxonomies
A directory differs from the index used by a search engine because a directory uses a structured way to categorize sites, sometimes called
a taxonomy. In addition, sites are included in a particular category in the ODP and Yahoo! directories only after they have been reviewed
by human editors. You can search within directories (just as you can search in a web index, such as the one compiled by Google). But it's
common to use a directory, following its taxonomy by drilling down through subjects to find what you want. For example, suppose you
wanted to find resources related to alternative photo processes, such as creating daguerreotypes (a nineteenth-century print technology).

You can think of the index of the Web compiled by search engines such as Google as being like the
index to a nonfiction book. In contrast, a taxonomic directory is much more like the table of contents to
the book: it is organized according to the structure of the book, and you can drill down by part, chapter
(within the part), heading (within the chapter), and subtopic to find the information you need.


Becoming Popular
Sometimes it seems like all of life has the same themes as high school: what's important is being popular. A significant measure of
popularity on the Web is how many inbound linkslinks from other sites to your siteyou have.
Inbound links are an important component of Google's PageRank system, which is a way to order the
sites returned from a search.
Obtaining inbound links is not rocket science, but it is labor-intensive and does require some thought. The best way to get another site to
link to your site is to ask for it, as obvious as that may seem.
Link farmssites that exist for the sole purpose of providing inbound links to better a page's search
rankingwill not help your site become more popular and may in fact damage your standing with Google
and other search engines.
It makes sense for sites to link to your site when they have similar or related contentalways assuming the webmaster in charge of the site
linking to you likes your content. This is a reasonable thing for the webmaster in charge of the other site to do because it adds value for the
other site's visitors. (If your site is not adding value, you might want to rethink its premise.)


You can also find the Yahoo Directory by opening the main Yahoo! home page, selecting Directory as
your search category, and searching for a term. The search results you will be presented with are from
the Yahoo! Directory (not the Yahoo! web index), and the display will show where in the taxonomy you
are, so you can browse through related categories

Submitting Your Sites to Search Engines

Submitting Your Sites to Search Engines
Google and most other search engines use several separate mechanisms:
A program that crawls the Web to find sites, also called a crawler or a spider. Once found (crawled), sites are placed in the
search engine's index.
Software that ranks sites in the search engine's index to determine their order of delivery when someone uses Google to search
for a particular keyword or phrase.
To start with, if your site hasn't been found, you won't be ranked by a search engine at all (to state the obvious). So the first task is getting
your site into the systems of Google and other search engines.
Unless you have money to burn, I do not recommend participating in any programs that ask you to pay
for search engine listings, regardless of whether these programs are run by search engines themselves
or by third parties.
If you have inbound links links to your sitesfrom other sites in a search engine's index, then the search engine's spider will find your
siteeventually. But why not see if you can speed the process up?
It's peculiar but true: different search engines index different portions of the Web. Also, at any given
time, it is impossible for any search engine index to include the entire Web!

The rub, of course, is that by submitting a form to a search engine there is no guarantee if, and when, your sites will be included by a given
search engine. The best approach is to list your site using the search engine's procedures, and check back in six months to see if you are
included in the search engine's index. If not, submit again. In other words, this is a process that requires patience and may produce limited
resultsbut at least the price is right!

Summarizing, search engines find the web pages they index by using software to follow links on the Web. Since the Web is huge, and
always expanding and changing, it can be a while before this software finds your particular site. Therefore, it's smart to speed this process
up by manually submitting your site to search engines.


Submission Tools

>You may also want to use an automated site submission tool that submits your site to multiple search engines in one fell swoop.
It's quite likely that your web host provides a utility with this functionality that you can use to submit the URLs for your hosted domains to a
group of search engines.



If you search Google with a phrase like "Search Engine Submit," you'll find many free services that submit to a group of search sites for
you. Typically, these free submission sites try to up-sell or cross-sell you on a product or service, but since you don't have to buy anything,
why not take advantage of the free service? The two best-known examples of this kind of site are Submit Express ,
http://www.submitexpress.com, which will submit your URL to 40 sites for free (just be sure you pass on the various offers you'll find on the
site) and NetMechanic , http://www.netmechanic.com, another search engine submission site along the same lines.

Naming Your Site

Naming Your Site
If you haven't already picked a name for your web site, try to select a name that helps to tell your story. Good names, at least with a .com
suffix, are hard to find these days. It's worth working hard to find the right name.
The Cult of Personality
Life writ large with the cult of personality might well describe the times we live in. Paris Hilton, an heiress with an
apparently vacuous personality, has a television show, and is famous, because (and not despite) of that vacuous
personality. I think the reality is that Paris is a great deal smarter than she seemsalthough another moral you can
certainly draw from the Paris Hilton success story is that sex sells.
My point is that people, particularly celebrities, get attention these days. If you have celebrity, have access to
celebrities, or have ideas about how to create celebrity, I say: "Go for it! Milk it!" And don't forget to mention your web
site.
It's reasonable that people should be interested in people. People are interesting. As the poet Alexander Pope said a
long time ago, "The proper study of mankind is man." (If Pope had included both genders, we moderns could surely go
along with this.)
It's really very simple. Getting web site traffic requires publicity. Publicity is best generated using stories about people,
particularly interesting or notorious people. If your web site has an interesting story about people, let others know about
it (perhaps using a press release). Your people story will draw traffic.
Ideally,
a site name, as I mentioned, should tell, or evoke, the story of your site and be memorable. Consider these classics:
Amazon: the world's greatest river meets the world's largest inventory.
eBay: I don't know why this one works, but it does.
Google: a very big number fits with the very large quantity of information Google indexes.

Creating a Plan and a Story

Creating a Plan and a Story
Many of the steps I suggest in this chapter for publicizing your site are essentially mechanical, for example, submitting your site to a
variety of search engines. Even so, you should have a plan for marketing your content sites. No brick-and-mortar business in its right
mind would attempt a marketing or publicity campaign without a plan, and you shouldn't proceed online without one, either.
Having a plan will help you accomplish even mechanical steps more effectively. For example, when you submit your site to a search
engine or a directory, you will often be asked for a description of your offering. Understanding your site in the context of a marketing plan
will help you hone a site description.
The two most important aspects of a plan for online marketing and publicity are:
Understanding your target audience (or audiences )
Creating a story (or stories ) that will meet the needs of and intrigue your target audience

The Elevator Pitch
You should be able to summarize your story in a sentence or two. (This is sometimes called an elevator pitch .) For example,
Digital photography resources, techniques, software, equipment reviews, and photo galleries
is a story that will probably attract people interested in digital photography. On the other hand,
Ramblings of a grouchy, cranky person who, well, rambles about everything is not a targeted story likely to interest
anyone for long.


Creating a Checklist
In addition, your plan should provide a checklist with specific "to do" itemsessentially, all of the techniques used to create online publicity
described in this chapter. The list should also include offline marketing and publicity placements appropriate to your target audience and
your story.
Successfully getting online publicity and generating traffic is largely a matter of focus and keeping track of the details. Creating a
checklist as part of your plan will help you make sure that none of these details fall through the cracks.

Driving Traffic to Your Site

Optimal Include Layout
The optimal include layout is to provide includes for both geographic areas of your web page and for specific ad programs. The two should
not be the same, although one can go inside the other and (at least initially) consume all its area. If you don't follow this organizing
principle, down the roadto take one exampleyou'll find that you named the include for the entire right side of your content pages
Google_ad_right, even though it by now contains a variety of graphic elements, but no Google skyscraper.

Action Items
Here are some action items for you to take to get started on the road to creating content sites to make money with advertising:
Understand content categories, types of content, and why people visit content sites.
Create a plan to build community on your site.
Find a quality content source.
Design a simple site that highlights content.
Separate content from design.
Keep your content fresh.
Experiment with ad positioning.
Create a site architecture that uses includes, templates, or content management software to facilitate flexibility.

Driving Traffic to Your Site
They say (whoever "they" are) that the best things in life are free. That's certainly true when it comes to driving traffic to your web site.
You can spend a great deal of money to send traffic to your site using advertising. One of the most effective ways to do this is to use
Google's AdWords program

Even if you are using paid
advertising to draw traffic, you should know about free techniquesand you should use these techniques in conjunction with your
advertising.

This chapter explains how to publicize your site and increase traffic using techniques that do not cost money and do not involve tinkering
with the HTML code and content of your pages themselves. In other words, this chapter explains how to drive traffic to your site using
external mechanisms, such as submitting your site to a search engine, leaving more complex issues of constructing your site so that
search engines will like ita field sometimes called search engine optimization (SEO)

Content Architecture

Content Architecture
You should think about site architecture before you create your first content page. Site architecture should be arranged so that you can
make global changes to the look and feel of a site with no impact on the content. You also want to be able to change the code for an ad
programor even swap one ad program for anotheronce and have the changes take effect across your site in all the content pages.
Server-Side Includes
The simplest mechanism for implementing a "change code in one place, change the whole site" architecture is to use server-side includes

Most web hosting accounts provide a server-side include mechanism. You tell the web server which file extensions mean that a file can
have includes. When the web server processes the file to send back to a browser for display, it looks for the special syntax that means
there is an include. When it sees this syntax, it expands the page it is serving to the browser by expanding it with the file indicated by the
include's syntax.
The default file extension for a web page is usually .shtml, although you can add other file extensions so that your web server will look
through them for includes (there is, of course, a slight performance hit for this).

For example, suppose you have a simple .shtml home page like this:

Hello!

...


You could create two include files:
styles.html , which contains CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) styles for the elements used on the site such as font size and color
top-bar.html , which contains the site navigation bar
You can link to an external CSS style sheet, or define your CSS styles in an include file. Either way, to
change styles sitewide, you just have to change the style definitions in one file.
The site home page, and every other content page on the site, includes these two files as follows:

Hello!

...


Now it's easy to change the appearance of the text on each page of the site by just making one change to styles.html. And if you need to
change the appearance of the navigation bar, you can simply make the changes to top-bar.html, and it will be replicated across the site.
There's generally no requirement that included files be named with any particular file extension; instead
of .html you can perfectly well use .foo, or anything else you'd like.

PHP Includes
If you are constructing a dynamic site using PHP

Most Linux and Apache based web hosts provide PHP scripting automatically for files named with a .php file extension. Within these files,
PHP includes work almost exactly like server-side includes.
For example, suppose you have a simple little web home page in a file named index.php:





...


If you put the CSS styles for the elements of the web site such as the appearance of web site text in a file named style.inc, it can be
included in PHP code like this:


The code for the top portion of a page, to be shared in common across the site, might be put in a file named top.inc. It could now be
inserted at the top of the body of a content page using the PHP include directive:







...


As with the server-side include example, if all the pages in a site use the PHP directives to include style.inc and top.inc, then site styles and
the top element can be changed globally just by changing the contents of these include files.
Note that you can include PHP codeincluding other PHP include directiveswithin PHP includes and that there is no requirement that
includes be named with any particular file suffix.

Positioning Ads

Positioning Ads


Studies have shown that ad positioning is crucial to content revenue generation. Positioning means the physical position of an ad on a
web page, the size of the ad, and also which page(s) on a site carries an ad.

Although there are some general guidelines for what works best with advertising positioning, it is far more art than science. You should
expect to spend a fair amount of time tweaking ad position to see what works bestanother good reason for having a site mechanism in
place that allows you to change ad settings globally by editing one include file.
Tweaking ads is good for another reason: you don't want ad fatigue to set in. Ad fatigue is a term used by webmasters to describe the
phenomenon in which visitors to your site are so used to the ad display on your site that they ignore it. Experimenting with new ad
positioning (and colors) is a good way to combat that "same old, same old" ad feeling and avoid ad fatigue.
Most studies show that ads positioned above the fold do better than ads lower on a page. Above the fold means visible without scrolling.
The smaller the monitor, and the lower its resolution, the less screen real estate there is above the fold. In other words, a monitor running
at 640 x 480 pixels screen resolution has a lot less available real estate above the fold than a monitor running at 800 x 600, which in turn
has much less area above the fold than a monitor running at higher resolution.
If you want the maximum eyeballsand you should, because more eyeballs means more advertising revenueyou should try to place ads so
that they will be above the fold on lower-resolution monitors. It certainly makes sense to target 800 x 600 monitor resolution, because this
is widely in use. Don't finalize your ad positioningand web site and page designwithout checking it out on an 800 x 600 monitor.
Some research has shown the vertical ad blocks the kind Google calls skyscrapers work better than horizontal ads . However, from the
viewpoint of basic geometry, it is easier to fit a horizontal ad block above the fold than a vertical skyscraper: the lower part of the
skyscraper is likely to be below the fold. So if you decide to go with vertical ad blocks, make sure they are positioned as high as possible
and that at least one ad (assuming the skyscraper contains multiple contextual ads) is positioned above the fold.
One other major positioning issue is context. From the viewpoint of a content publisher, you'd like to position ads so they are not only
contextually relevant but also lead to a high click-through rate.

With programs like Google's AdSense, context is important because you want a high click-through rate.
With affiliate advertising, context is even more important because you don't make any money without a
conversion, which means turning someone into a customer. You may, perhaps, care less about context
when you are paid by the impression. In that case all you really care about is that the ad gets seen on
your site.
Google's AdSense attempts to place only contextually relevant ads. With some notable lapses, AdSense is pretty successful at this. In any
case, you can't exercise a great deal of control over the ads that AdSense displays on your siteyou have to trust that Google gets this
right.

You can forbid your competitor's ads from appearing on your site by using the AdSense option that
allows you to ban specific IP addresses. The ability to ban IP addresses can be used to a limited
degree to also keep out advertisers you find offensive. For example, an animal rights information site
might want to ban ads from prominent furriers.
There are some important aspects of context that you can control, although there is no reliable analytic research about what works best.
Some sites use graphics and positioning to make contextual ads blend in with the site and appear almost part of the editorial content.
Other sites feel that keeping the appearance of editorial integrity is vitally important and so use color and position to instantly indicate that
the ads are separate from the body of the content.
Overloading pages with ads generally does not work because viewers tend to ignore pages that have too many ads. If you're working with
multiple ad programs and kinds of ads to generate a revenue stream, you can make an important contribution to ad context by deciding
what kind of ad should go with what content. For example, it might make sense to advertise books on Amazon on a page of book reviews.
There's also a school of thought that believes ads should only be placed on "boring" pagesfor example, registration pages, login pages,
resource pages, exit pages. (An exit page is a page designed to launch a visitor onward following a visit, for example, an order
confirmation.) One reason for placing click-through ads on resource and exit pages is that visitors will be leaving your site anyhow from
these pages. You won't be losing traffic by providing click-through opportunities.

The more general logic for placing ads only on boring pages is that it gives your site a clean, inviting, ad-free lookand that visitors are more
likely to click on ads in the context of boredom than in the context of exciting content.
Whatever strategy you decide to try, if you will be varying ad programs depending on context, you should attempt to implement this
programmatically rather than by manually adding and deleting advertising code from individual HTML pages.

Presenting Content

Presenting Content
Content is king. Content is certainly king if your business model is to publish content on the Web and make money from advertising with
traffic drawn by the content. Your first rule should be: Don't "dis" the king. In other words, don't do anything to distract from the content,
make it harder for surfers to find content they need, or make the graphics that frame the content too jazzy. In particular, if the graphics
seem too important, they will distract from the content.
A particularly annoying sin on content-based web sites is to use an animated splash page (Flash is the
tool usually used) to open the site.
Page and Site Design
These rules of content presentation can be put positively (rather than negatively):

It should be clear that the purpose of the site is to clearly present content.
Choose a name for the site, and titles and headers for the pages, that make it abundantly clear that the purpose of the site is to
present content, and (as a general matter) what that content is.
The design of the site should serve the purpose of presenting content.
Site design should be intended to facilitate navigation and frame the content: nothing more, and nothing less.
Specific content items and subject areas should be easy to find.
Provide multiple mechanisms for finding things: index pages, search boxes, site maps, subject areas, and so on.
Type should be legible.
Be careful to choose a readable font, in a large enough size, and background and foreground color combinations that are easy
on the eyes. It's hard to go wrong with black type on a white background. The reversewhite on blackis hard on the eyes, and
some combinations (for example, dark blue on lighter blue, are essentially unreadable).
Keep graphics simple.

As it happens, following the rules of content presentation I've outlined will serve you well with search engine placement.
But that's not the point of these suggestions here. The point is usefulness and transparency to site users. If viable content is presented in
an accessible fashion, then indeed "they will come."

If you are targeting your content specifically for Google's AdSense program (or a competitive contextual engine), you should also bear in
mind the following:
AdSense can't interpret images (except using captions, the value of alt attributed in the tag, and surrounding text), so keep
images to a minimum.
You are likely to get more relevant ads if you keep each page to a single subject (and move tangential subject matters to
different pages).

Key concepts, words, and phrases should be clear by glancing at a page (see Chapter 3 for information about how to use these
keywords and phrases to optimize your pages for AdSense, Google, and other search engines).
1.4.2. Page Size
How much content should go on each site page? Like Goldilocks and the three bears, the answer is not too much, and not too little: just
the right amount of content.
It's in the interest of the site publisher to keep pages short, because the same amount of content spread over shorter pages makes for
more pages. And more pages on a site means more places for advertising, which in theory might mean more revenue.
In addition, more pages may mean more page views, implying better metrics to advertisers who don't
look too carefully.
However, if you break an article up into many short pages that a user has to click through, users will find it irritating and vote with their time
by frequenting the site less often.

The happy medium is to be natural about page length. The natural length for a content page is the content that will reasonably fit into a
maximized browser window without having to scroll.
Obviously, this is a rough, rather than precise, guideline since different browsers on different systems
will show different size pages.
Don't gratuitously break an article into multiple pages unless the article really is longer than a few browser-sized pages. Also, don't break
an article (even if it is long) unless there are natural breaks in the content. Anytime there is a new Level 1 header in an article, it's a good
sign that you could break to a new content page without the break feeling forced.
A related issue is to be careful about the width of your content pages. People will be looking at your web pages using a variety of
hardware, operating systems, and browsersthe most important variable being the monitor size. You don't want your readers to have to
scroll to the right because part of a content web page is off the screen. This is very bad form and may also obscure content advertising if it
is positioned along the right border of the page.
The answer is to design pages for lowest-common-denominator displays. In practice, content pages should be no wider than 800 pixels.
Pages 800 pixels wide (or less) should display without scrolling on most (although not all) computers; some displays are still only 640
pixels wide.

Separating Content from Design
When you create content web sites, it's imperative to use mechanisms that separate web page content from design. The purpose of
separating content from design is to let you:
Easily change the look and feel of a site without the change in overall site design having any impact on the content
Tweak positioning and other ad-related variables to maximize revenue without having any effect on site content
The simplest way to achieve these goals is to use includes server-side includes to position site graphics such as navigation bars. A
server-side include is a file that the server includes within another file (the inclusion is specified by a special directive). When you view the
HTML source code in a browser, you have no way of telling whether the main file was generated using includes or not.
Includes can also be used for advertisement code, such as that provided by Google's AdSense. By changing the code in a single include,
you can change the navigation bar or advertising parameters across all the content pages on an entire site.

Sitewide Changes to Styles
It's somewhat less important than the ability to easily do sitewide changes of advertisements and site graphics such as
navigation bars, but it's still nice to be able to perform sitewide changes of text styles. It is less important because leaving
everything as reasonably sized black text on a white background is usually just fine.
Style attributes can be set using a server-side include. Each content page then includes the include file, which contains
the styles for the content. Text styles can be changed on a global basis simply by changing the definitions of the styles
within the include file.
Another simple mechanism for doing sitewide font and font-size changes is to use an external style sheet to define the
fonts and sizes to use with various types of text (each content page references the style sheet). To effect a global
change, simply change the style definitions in the external style sheet.
Server-side includes work well to separate key design elements (and advertisements) from content, provided your content site doesn't
have too many pages and assuming that each page doesn't have a great many repetitive elements.
If many of your content pages are essentially the samemeaning they have the same elements but the value of the element differs from
page to pageyou should probably be using a templating system. Templates use special tags for the common elements, with the actual
content for each page that replaces the special tag specified, often using content stored in a database table. This means that an
appropriately written template file and one or more database tables can populate and create a whole raft of web pages, one for each row
in the table.
PHP is one of the most popular server-side programming languages available on the Web (most inexpensive Linux/Apache web host
services let you program in PHP without any additional configuration effort). You can find out more about PHP at http://www.php.net .

If you are a programmer, or have access to programming talent, you can create your own templating system using PHP or some other
language. But why reinvent the wheel? A popular PHP templating system, available for free download, is Smarty , http://smarty.php.net.
One of the great features about Smarty is that it caches a web page the first time it is generated from a template. Subsequent calls to the
page, unless the template or data have changed, open the cached pagemeaning the web site isn't slowed down by page generation each
time the templated page is opened.
A server-side include mechanism is a great start for creating a manageable content site andfrom a technology standpointwithin the grasp
This document was created by an unregistered ChmMagic, please go to http://www.bisenter.com to regis.ter it. Thanks
of almost anyone.

Templating is a good next step if you (or an associate) have the technologic sophistication and expect to be managing content sites with
thousands of pages. It's particularly important to use a system of templates if you expect to generate pages using data from a database.
Suppose you are managing a site with not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of pages. You have multiple authors, a team of editors,
and a workflow process to make sure that work is fact-checked, copyedited, and approved before it is published. In this case, you'll want
to use Web Content Management software (WCM) to provide content and design separation, template features, workflow management,
and more. Commercial WCM packages are available from vendors including IBM, FileNet, Interwoven, Microsoft, Stellent, and Vignette.
Not everyone recognizes that, in fact, blogging software such as MovableType and WordPress in effect
manages web content using special tags and a template system. You can use WordPress, in particular,
to manage pages that are not part of a blog. So if it's appropriate for your particular project, consider
creating a "Blogosite"a content web site managed by blogging software such as WordPress.
No matter what mechanism you use, it is vitally important to separate form from content so that you can easily keep your site design fresh
and tweak advertising positions.

Keeping Content Fresh
Have you ever tried to keep fresh-caught fish fresh? It isn't easy. Neither is keeping site content fresh. But sites, and their content, need to
stay fresh. It's not a big deal to change the overall look of a site by changing the graphic used as a navigation bar every month or sothat is,
if you've set the site up with server-side includes so that editing one file creates a global site change. But keeping content fresh is a trickier
issue.
Since search engines appreciate new content, some sites go to great lengths to provide content that appears new, for example, by
displaying syndication feeds on the site's home page. This may help with search engines (I have more to say on this point in Chapter 3),
but it doesn't do much at all for your primary audiencereal people.
Quality content sites need to strike a balance. You need to have a core of worthwhile reference material that doesn't change much. You
also need to keep content site fresh. As you plan your successful site, you should consider what strategy you will use to keep people
coming back for the latest and greatest. For example, do you plan to keep up with the latest events in a technology niche, such as a
programming language? Will you feature articles about current cultural events (which are constantly changing by definition)? Or will your
site present interesting blogs with frequently added entries?