In this installment, Dan Cort provides insight into Web Standards and why they are becoming increasingly important.

Imagine if each household appliance came with a different plug, and when you bought it you had to adapt a socket in your house for it. That would become chaotic, wouldn’t it? Fortunately there is a STANDARD plug for every household appliance. So if you buy a micro system in Auckland, you can take it to Christchurch and it will work normally. I offer this example so we can realize the value of standards. On the Internet it is no different, we need to have standards to realize the full potential of the Web. To turn this dream into reality, a project called WaSP (Web Standards Project) came to spread the Web Standards with the organization which is behind these, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

What are the benefits of having a standards compliant Website?

Standards compliance helps ensure that everyone has access to the information you are providing on your Website, and also makes access to it faster and more flexible. WaSP defines these Web Standards on their website:

“Standards compliance makes it easier for people with special needs to use the Web. Blind people may have their computer read web pages to them. People with poor eyesight may have pages rearranged and magnified for easier reading. And people using hand-held devices can browse the Web just as easily as those using high-end workstations.”

Also if your Webpages are complied with Web standards, they have greater visibility in Web searches. According to WaSP, the structural information present in compliant documents makes it easy for search engines to access and evaluate the information in those documents, and they get indexed more accurately. Read Daniel’s previous posts about SEO to understand this more.

Accessibility is also really important for Websites. After all, if you have a Website certainly you want it to be viewed by everyone, including people with disabilities and people using browsers other than the usual ones – including voice browsers (which read Webpages aloud to people), Braille browsers (that translate text into Braille), hand-held browsers (with very little monitor space) and other unusual output devices.

Conclusion

As a Web Development company, MaxGen Media are constantly bringing the best, newest and coolest technologies to our clients, and Web Standards are one of them. The W3C explains why you should buy a standards compliant Website, so before you move forward with a Web designer its wise to pay attention to what you are buying and the quality offered by the company.

Daniel Chung presents another post. This time he details the theory behind the Google Pagerank™ system.

PageRank™ (PR) is a key that makes Google the most powerful search engine in the world, and has made all its competitors fall behind. And it is very important to your Website as well.

Basically, PR is a score of trustee to a Webpage, and you can get higher PR if you get many other Webpages linking to your Website. Because PR is based on each single page, you will have multiple and differing PR across one Website.

Normally your “homepage” will get a higher PR than your other pages, because generally when other Websites want to make a link to your Website, they will choose to link to your homepage, therefore your homepage is quite important to Google.

PR is ordered from 0 to 10. A lot of famous/high traffic Websites are rewarded with high PR.

Example Websites

International sites:

• CNN (http://www.cnn.com), PageRank 9
• Yahoo US (http://www.yahoo.com), PageRank 10
• ESPN (http://www.espn.com), PageRank 8
• Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) , PageRank 8

New Zealand Websites:

• NZ Yahoo (http://nz.yahoo.com), PageRank 4
• NZ Herald (http://www.nzherald.co.nz), PageRank 8
• TV3 Website (http://www.tv3.co.nz), PageRank 6

As you can see, popular news Websites always get good PR, because a lot of other Websites link to them.

It is very easy to see PR of each page. Just to go Google’s Website (http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/FT3/intl/en/index.html) and download the Google toolbar, install it, and then it will show you the Page Ranking of sites while you browse them.

Also the quality is more important than quantity, which means a PR4 website link to your website is better then 100 PR0 Websites linking to yours. If a high PR Website links to your Website, Google will treat it as a “high ranking Website voting for/recommending your website”, therefore you will gain trust from Google, which will result in an increase in your PageRanking. A visual example of this is shown below:

Image courtesy of www.smashingmagazine.com

To make your Website search engine optimized, PR is not the only thing you need to look after, but it is one very important part. Note that Google is not always updating your PageRanking, so you will not see instant results even you have a lot of Websites linking to you. Normally Google will update the Page Ranking across all sites every 2-3 months.

All MaxGen Media clients get links from our Website (PR4) and our tag Website (TagCloud), which benefits their rankings greatly. We also offer a link exchange system, which automatically makes links between your Website and all our clients’ Websites. We do this because we consider it vital that all our clients are represented as well as possible throughout the major search engines.

As one of our new ‘informative’ blog segments, Daniel Chung presents an easy to follow breakdown of SEO tips. MaxGen Media actively employ all of these techniques when developing a Website.

Provide good digital content and services to your visitors

This is the most important part of SEO. Good content will not only increase your search engine ranking, but also give people the intention to make a link to your Website, because your Website is worthy to be recommended by other Website owners.
However, some SEO companies will introduce “cheat” SEO tactics to their customers. For example, they may put a lot of “hot” keywords on the Website and make text colour the same as background so it is invisible to your Website visitors, but still visible to search engines. Most search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) are very aware of this, therefore the “cheat” action will result in lowering your search ranking, or even completely taking your site off search results.

Keep “ONE” domain name

You may have more than one domain name to your website, for instance, “yourwebsite.com” and “yourwebsite.co.nz”, but don’t submit both your domain names to search engines as they will treat these 2 domain names different Websites, even if it points to the same Website. Because people will visit your website from two different links, it will result in a failing to centralise your Website visitors, and the result will benefit nothing to your search engine ranking.

Focus your keywords

When you define your Website keywords, remember to Focus them. For example, if you are running a car dealer Website, you may use following terms to express your keyword “car” – “quality car”, “best car”, “budget car”, “cheap car”, etc. Doing this will not only confuse search engines, but also confuse your customers. So choose “one” keyword (in this case, lets choose “cheap car”) and make use of this keyword across the whole site.

Prepare a text version of your Website

Some people like “fully animated” Websites, which is very attractive and can impress your customers. However, not all search engines cannot dig through the content inside the animation, so it will result search engines treating your Website as an empty, and of course gaining no ranking.

If you do need a fully animated Website, also prepare a text version of it. See http://www.hms.harvard.edu/dcp/, they use Flash for their Website, but also place a link on top to which directs to a text version of the Website. In this case, search engines still be able to index all their content, while still maintaining the Flash animations.

Use “robots.txt” and robots META

• Place a “robots.txt”on your website root. It can tell how search engines dig through your Website.
• Place a “<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”ALL”> in head section of your website page. This will tell search engine dig through all your content, so no pages will be missed out.

Do not link to/with “bad” or ”unknown” Websites

There are a lots of “link farm” Websites, which allows you exchange links with all their members. Beware of this because you never know who will link to you, and who you link to, and it will affect your search engine ranking if you link to a lot of bad-quality Websites.

Submit your Website to directories and search engines:

• Submit your Website to ODP-DMOZ: http://www.dmoz.org/
• Submit your Website to Google: http://www.google.co.nz/addurl/?continue=/addurl
• Submit your Website to Xtra!Yahoo: http://nz.search.yahoo.com/freesubmit/submit
• Advertise on FINDA: http://www.finda.co.nz/advertise-for-free/

Clean up your Website

• Make your Webpage file name related to the content
• Use CSS to define all your website layout / colour / fonts / etc.
• Make Javascript external links
• Make your Webpage less than 100k in size (not including picture/music, etc)
• Have no more than 100 links on each single page
• Create a sitemap page. It’s good for search engines to find all your Webpages
• Place most important keywords on your web browser title
• Place keywords in meta-tag keyword section (no more than 100 characters)

At MaxGen Media, we follow all search engine optimisation technologies to ensure your website is search engine friendly and can be easily found by your potential customers. Hope you enjoyed this overview of SEO. I’ll be posting more in the coming weeks.

Boys and girls,

In the coming weeks we’re gonna have various MaxGen Media team members posting in this very blog what they know about certain Web technologies. This is going to coincide the our release of the videos in the Touch section (which are admittedly taking longer than expected). For example, at one stage someone will make a post regarding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and what it means for you, the Web consumer. Then I’ll get one of the boys to give you a run down on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and why tableless Websites are more better than the other kind. Either way these PSAs will be in plain English and will be intended to help you better understand what we do at MaxGen.

So yeah, James Brown singing Sunny.

Afternoon team.

Big hello to visitors from the various CSS gallery sites that we’ve submitted our new design to. Hope you’re liking the look. We’re still going to implement the switchable themes eventually, but we aren’t calling that priority number one. Those videos I mentioned in the last post should be up shortly, so you wont have to hear my voice much longer.

Anyways, here’s something I came across the other day. Kiwi “folk parody” duo Flight of the Conchords have a deal with HBO in the states to air their show in whats going to be the hole left when The Sopranos finishes up for good in a couple of weeks time. Big shoes to fill. Either way, the pilot below has promise. Classic deadpan stuff.