4MakingYourOwnWebsite Blog

There are so many web designers out there that design beautiful websites but fail to realize how the search engines spider a site.  By failing to take into account how the bots spider, the fail to realize how their design affects their search engine rankings.

Think of how the bot approaches and reads your web pages.  Lets take the Googlebot for example.  It enters your page from the top reading down and from left to right.  This all sounds familiar as it is much the same when you read a page. 

Now imagine that the page has been made with tables.  The first row is your header.  So far, so good.  The second row consists of two columns.  The first is your menu and the second is the content, or body of the pages.  This is the area that you want Google to index with the highest relevance.  The third row is your footer. 

Now as Google spiders your page, it sees the header and goes on down to the first element it finds on the left.  This is your menu column.  It finds a link to “home”, for instance, in the first row of this column.  This leads the spider to see that this column is populated and it begins to read down the menu.  Once finished it takes a step to the right and finds your content in the second column of the table. 

Is this what you really want the Googlebot to do?  I think that you can see that the answer is no.  You want the spiders to read and index your content as soon as possible.  By having the content spidered early, the bots place more importance on it and your rankings are affected positively. 

Your true aim as a web designer is to direct the spiders to where you want them to go while still keeping the layout asthetically pleasing.  This is easy for designers using CSS, but a bit more thought has to go into your layout if you’re using tables.  Many website designers have conquered this problem by placing the menu on the right side of the page.  I’ve done this myself with my Colorado Travel Experience site.

But often, your client might opt for a more traditional-looking page with the menu on the left.  What to do then?  You know that the spiders are going to encounter the menu column first.  The answer to this dilemma is quite easy to solve.

All you have to do is leave the first row of your menu blank.  Then, as the spiders read down you page, they see your header, continue down and to the left to find your menu column.  Here they encounter a blank row.  This makes them head to the right column where they spider your content.  Once the content has been spidered, they head down to the next row of your navigation menu and continue to spider the page. 

What this means to you is that by using this simple technique, you will always have your page content spidered quickly and the bots will place more emphasis on its relevance, thus aiding your search engine rankings.  A simple web design technique that can go a long way to enhance your SEO efforts.

For more advice on how to direct the search engines through your tables see: Table Structures for Top Search Engine Positioning

Jason Potash just emailed me that he is opening up his extraordinary PortalFeeder program to a lucky few.  If you’ve been online for any length of time, I’m sure that you’ve heard of PortalFeeder. 

This is your chance to buy into this great website software, the best internet marketing training ever, and a community of online marketers that are ready to help you take your internet business to new heights.

Each day your inbox is crammed with promises like this.  Each new email guarantees you the easy way… the quick way… the ultimate ’short cut’ to help you make money online.

Ask yourself this… Aren’t you tired of promises? 

PortalFeeder is the real deal.  It’s not just hype.  Within a couple of days (for a limited time), you will also get access to this same “Total Solution” and secret weapon that myself and many online marketers have been using for over a year to take their marketing efforts to the next level.

On April 26th at 12 noon Jason will be opening the doors to PortalFeeder again.  You don’t want to miss out on this.  But don’t take my word for it, go right now to: Portal Feeder, sign up for notification, get access to read the testimonials (mine’s in there).  Listen to the Podcasts and also watch videos about some cool web tips.

If PortalFeeder feels right for you, be sure to sign up to get your name on the waiting list for those people wanting notification of when the program goes public and get access to all the testimonials.

 Hit this link right now for instant access: Portal Feeder

Your website traffic statistics can be an invaluable aid to you for a number of different reasons. But before you can analyze and make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data these statistics provide.

Most web hosts will provide you with basic web traffic information. You then have to interpret and make pertinent use of these. However, the data you receive from your web host can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to make use of these data and apply it to your particular business and website. Start by examining the most basic data. These basics are the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

This data is the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic to your site that you see, the better. You can assume your website is doing well with increased numbers, but this may be an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website. This will give you a more accurate gauge of the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, or targeted quality traffic to your site. “Hits” simply means the number of requests received by the server for pages from our site. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page served up to a visitor, you will get an idea of how overblown this concept can be. For example, if your homepage has 10 graphics on it, your server records this as 10 hits. In reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your website. As you can see, hits are not useful at all for analyzing your website traffic.

Read more of this article …

I’ve noticed that a lot of spam has been hitting my inbox lately.  Most of it has to deal with winning the UK Lotto or Job Offers where they want me to send them money to secure the deal.  Why have they been getting through my spam filters?

After some deep investigation, it seems that all of this spam has been coming through the “contact us” links on my web pages.  I, like you have been doing the mailto:___@me.com or whatever I want to use link for my “contact us” on my pages that give others my email address.  This is a direct line to my email address and it circumvents the spam filters.  This is how they are getting through.

So, what does this all have to do with Web 2.0?  Web 2.0 is simply interactivity.  Allowing people to interact with your website through comments, forums, videos, or membership where they can discuss things with others that are of like mind. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could hide your email address from the spammers and become part of the Web 2.0 community at the same time?  It just so happens that my friend, Joel Comm, who lives just south of me, outside Loveland, Colorado, has developed a script that does just that.  It hides your contact info from the spammers, plus allows visitors to your website to give you their feedback.  Thus, becoming part of the Web 2.0 generation. 

You can see it in action in the sidebar of this blog.  Click on “contact us” or “give us feedback” and you will see how powerful this script is.  It uses “Captcha” technology to keep the spammers away, plus Web 2.0 feedback so that you can become interactive. 

Defeat the spammers and become Web 2.0 at the same time.  If you want to know more about this niffty little script, read more at My Contact Station…