Tài liệu Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS- P12 pptx

Most hosting providers actually require that you use FTP to transfer your pages onto their servers, which

means that you need an FTP program (sometimes referred to as an FTP client) to put your files on a server.

Most FTP programs have two windows, each with a file explorer. One represents the files and folders on

your computer; the other represents the folders on the web server. In Figure 13-7, you can see the folders

on my computer, and on the right you can see those on a web server.

Figure 13-7

The table that follows shows some of the most popular FTP programs.

Each of the programs is slightly different, but they all follow similar principles.

Product Name URL OS

FireFTP http://fireftp.mozdev.org/ Windows and Mac OS X

Cute FTP www.cuteftp.com/ Windows and Mac OS X

FTPX www.ftpx.com/ Windows

Fetch www.fetchsoftworks.com/ Mac

Transmit www.panic.com/transmit/ Mac

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When you register with a host, this host will send you details of how to FTP your site to its servers. This

will include:

❑ An FTP address (such as ftp.example.com)

❑ An FTP username (usually the same as your username for the domain)

❑ An FTP password (usually the same as your password for the domain)

Figure 13-8 shows you how these are entered into the FTP program called Transmit on a Mac.

Figure 13-8

While you can download trial versions of several of these programs before you buy them to find out

which one you are most comfortable using, most of these programs have graphical user interfaces that

are very similar.

Search Engine Strategies

Now that you have your site on the server, you want people to come and visit it. One of the best ways to

get visitors to your site is to ensure that users can find your site in a search engine when they enter words

that are relevant to the content of your site. Preferably they find you in the top ten values returned.

Beyond meta Tags

You have already seen how search engines can use the <meta> tag’s description and keywords proper￾ties to help search a site, but search engines are becoming much more complex in the way in which they

address the task of indexing all the sites on the Web. You, too, therefore need to continue to work on your

search engine strategies a lot more than just adding in <meta> tags.

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Staying on top of your search engine rankings is an ongoing exercise and should form part of your stan￾dard marketing practice. It’s good to review your search engine ranking at least once a quarter — or

once a month if possible.

You should never just rely upon the search engine sites to find your site and index it. For example, sites

such as dir.yahoo.com and dmoz.org are Internet directory sites based upon categories, and you have

to navigate through the categories to find the site you want. This manual categorization of sites requires

that you submit the URL of your site to them; it can then take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few

months for your site to appear on theirs.

Some sites charge for the privilege of being listed on their site, and in such cases you should carefully

consider whether it’s worth the money. While it may be worthwhile to pay to be featured on large popu￾lar sites, unless you personally know the site, you may find it does not provide many referrals. This is

discussed more in the next section.

Once you have manually notified a search engine, you should wait at least a month before submitting the

URL again. If you over-list a site it’s considered spamming, and you might not get listed at all. If you have

made significant changes to your site, it is always worth re-submitting it (not too frequently) so that the

changes get identified.

Personally, I ignore programs that promise to submit my site to thousands of Internet directories and

would rather do the work myself. Spending just an hour a day for a couple of weeks, first submitting

the site manually to major search engines and then looking for other relevant web sites and asking them

to list my new site. I do this because some of the programs used generate so many submissions to web

search engines that they are considered spam (and as a result are ignored). Remember that if the offer of

results sounds too good (guaranteeing you top ten placements on thousands of search engines), the offer

may well be too good to be true!

Designing Your Page to Maximize Rankings

Search engines that use programs to automatically index sites are using increasingly sophisticated rules

to determine who gets the highest ranking (top) results in a web page. Following are some points to con￾sider when designing your pages to help ensure that your site gets the highest ranking it can:

❑ The titles of your pages are among the most important words in your site and are one of the most

important things indexed. So avoid using titles that just contain words such as “Home Page” and

instead go for descriptive titles such as “Wrox Press — Computer Programming Book Publishers.”

Then on specific pages the title could change to something like “XHTML Programming Books,

learn to code and build web sites.” If the words the user types into the search engine are found in

your title, the engine will consider your site more relevant. But don’t make the title longer than

one sentence or the program will realize you are trying to fool it and count this against you.

❑ Most search engines look through the text content of a page and will index that, too. The first words

tend to be considered the most relevant. So you should try to strategically place the keywords for

your site in the text near the start of the page as well as in the title. You can also expand on that list

of keywords here.

❑ If the keywords a user searches on appear in the page with more frequency than other words, then

they are considered to be more relevant. However, do not make them appear too frequently —

again, the search engine will count this against you.

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❑ If your site uses images instead of text, the site can index only your alt text; so try to make sure

any information conveyed with images is also conveyed in text.

❑ If you try to fool the search engines by repeating keywords in text that is the same color as the

background (so that the repetitive text is invisible to your users), then the search engines can

penalize you for this.

❑ Using keywords that are not related to the subject matter or the content of the site can count

against you.

❑ The more sites that link to yours the better. Some search engines will give you higher priority if

you are linked to by lots of other sites. But note that they will also consider which site is linking

to you. The site should be relevant to your business — a search engine would not consider a used￾car dealers linking to a pet shop as being a relevant link.

❑ The more users who click on links to your site when it comes up in the search engine, the better

your rating should be. While things such as the title, keywords in the text, <meta> tags, and the

number of links may help you appear nearer the top of the search engines, if nobody clicks on

the links to visit your site, your ranking will soon fall.

It can take a long time to build up your search engine rankings, but constant attention will help you get

better and better. See the section “Other Web Marketing Possibilities” a bit later in this chapter for addi￾tional marketing tips to help you build traffic on your site. But first I’ll show you what to do if you do

not want your pages indexed.

robots.txt

On some web sites, there will be pages that you do not want to be indexed — for example administration

pages and test pages. To prevent pages from being indexed by a search engine, you can include a simple

text file on your site called robots.txt (which you write in a simple text editor such as Notepad on

Windows or SimpleText or TextEdit on a Mac).

The robots.txt file can contain simple commands that prevent parts of the site from being indexed by

the web crawlers (the little programs that index sites), which are often programmed to read these files.

You should have only one robots.txt file for your site, and it should be placed in a folder called htdocs

in the root folder of your web server. Some web hosting companies create the htdocs folder for you; other

hosts require you do this yourself if you need one.

The first line of this simple text file should be:

USER_AGENT: web_crawler_name

Given that you are likely to want all crawlers to obey the rules, you can simply use an asterisk instead of

the names of any web crawlers — the asterisk is also sometimes referred to as a wildcard character, and

it indicates that all crawlers should obey the rules.

Next, you can specify which folders you want to disallow the crawler from indexing (another reason why

a well-organized site is important) by using the DISALLOW command. This command may be repeated

for each folder you do not want indexed:

USER-AGENT: *

DISALLOW: /admin/

DISALLOW: /scripts/

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This simply indicates that no crawler should attempt to index the admin or scripts folders (or any of their

child folders).

While there is no requirement for the crawlers to obey the rules in this file, it is in their interest not to index

pages people don’t want displayed (usually because they will not allow the user to do something), so the

main search engines will usually obey the rules.

Other Web Marketing Possibilities

Search engines are just one way to get people to visit your site — and it is definitely worth allotting time

for other types of marketing of your site both on and off the Internet. Here are just some of the tactics you

can use to attract visitors to your site:

❑ Search for other web sites that are related to your industry. Some of these sites will have links to

sites of interest, and you can ask to be added to the page featuring those links.

❑ A lot of industries have industry-specific directory web sites listing products and services for

that particular field. However, many of these charge to advertise on their sites. You will have to

decide whether the cost is justified by the amount of traffic it will bring you. You could always

ask some people in your industry if they use the site and thus gauge whether you are likely to

get many referrals from it.

❑ Many sites offer reciprocal links; that is, they will link to you in return for your linking to them.

It is a way for everyone to boost traffic. But make sure that you are not putting someone on the

front page of your site when they are going to put a link to you tucked away on a page that few

people will come across — the term is reciprocal linking, after all.

❑ Use a few search engines to search for related companies and find out who is linking to them —

the sites that link to related sites may well link to you, too, if you ask. You may find sites that you

have never heard of before but would be happy to have link to you.

❑ You can provide buttons or banners on your site so that people can integrate them into their sites.

This is more likely to happen with community sites than with commercial sites, but hobbyists will

often link to special-interest sites, and it is a lot easier for them to do this if you have already pro￾vided links for them. If the links look great, too, they are more likely to want to add them.

❑ Take a look at Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. Google has a PPC system called AdWords, for

which you specify keywords, and when a user searches using those words, the ads appear on the

right side of the page. These ads can also appear on other special-interest sites. AdWords works in

a very clever way. You pay for an advertisement only when the user clicks it. The ranking of which

ads appear first is based upon the amount you are prepared to pay each time someone clicks the

ad, and the number of people who actually click on your ad. If users do not click the ad, it slips

down in position, no matter how much you pay (after all, Google stands to make more money if

10 people click a cheaper link than if one person clicks a slightly more expensive link, and more

users are getting value from their service). Generally speaking, this is a very cost-effective way to

generate traffic to your site. Yahoo offers a similar service called Overture, and Microsoft has a sys￾tem called adCenter.

❑ There are many other forms of paid advertising you can take out on the Web. Lots of sites take out

banner advertising, and lots of sites allow you to pay to be listed. You will have to judge each of

these on whether you think you will get enough traffic to justify the money. Remember that a lot

of web users are immune to advertising and just scan pages to find what they really want — so if

you are going to create a banner, make sure it’s visually attractive and that people will want to

click on it in order to make it worth the money you are spending to have it appear on other sites.

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