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HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 03:50:04 +0000

HTML is also known as Hyper Text Markup Language. This is the predominant markup language used for development of web pages. It offers a procedure to create structured documents and coding by certain semantics like headings, lists, paragraphs, breaks etc. They also make use of quotes and links and various other items. One can embed images and various objects in a website through HTML. These can be used to create a lot of interactive forms.

HTML is generally written as a HTML element that contains tags which are surrounded by angle brackets inside the content of the website. It often involves scripts in various languages such as Javascript. It affects the working of HTML processors like CSS or Cascading Style Sheets and web browsers to state the layout appearance, text and other materials.

The HTML or the Hyper Text Markup Language is coding system that is used to create as well as format a particular web document. One does not require being an excellent programmer to learn HTML. One can learn it fast and make use of it for the creation of hypertext documents which is used on the internet. The HTML language is a language used that works above the network. Files are however not needed to store a HTML formatting. It is the most easy and simple way to do your work.

The HTML is such a computer language which allows creation of websites. These websites are easily viewed by anyone who is connected with the internet. It’s fast to learn and the basics can be accessed by anyone. It is a powerful language which allows you to create and edit. Continuously it is getting revisions and evolutions for meeting the high requirements of the industry. It gives you power to move around the web. HTML is hence a language that makes use of various code words and syntax like any other language.

Email Marketing

admin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:48:46 +0000

If you are an email marketer and you want your emails, newsletters, and the like to look as professional as possible while garnering the most response then you need to learn a little about HTML. Fortunately, HTML does not have to be confusing or tricky. As long as you can read and follow directions you will be able to include basic HTML in your newsletters and emails and make them look more professional without having to pay a professional to do it. The following tips will help you with your HTML.

Tip #1 Multipart-Alternative

When setting up your emails and newsletters you will want to have the HTML email display in “Multipart alternative format. What this means is that the email has the plain text and the html versions embedded. This is so that all those “plain text” folks out there can still view the email if they don’t choose to see it in HTML. There are several systems that can help you with this.

Tip #2 Images

With HTML you won’t be sending email files as attachments. Instead, you will have the images hosted on your server and the email’s code will have absolute paths to the images. This means that you will have to use your server’s web address in the code so that the images are actually embedded within the email. It sounds tricky, but it’s actually pretty straight forward. Once you try it a few times you will have it down.

Tip #3 Preview Pane

When you are designing your newsletters or other emails for email marketing you need to design it for the preview pane. This will give you a maximum of 600 pixels to work with and 500 pixels is probably playing it safer. The reason why is that the vast majority of recipients will not double click the email to open it to wide screen. So, don’t design it for full screen. Instead, design the email for how it is most likely to be viewed.

Tip #4

Don’t try to use CSS In emails to get the appearance you have in mind. It’s not reliable in email and won’t work right. Instead, use font tags, shim.gifs, and tables because they are what will allow you to create the “Look” you are going for.

Flash or HTML?

admin — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:22:00 +0000

Flash-mania was making waves over the internet in the recent past. It was a phenomenon of sorts in the past five to six years. The corporate bigwigs preferred the creation of flash websites for their companies. But, things are changing rapidly and they are reverting back to the old methods of using HTML websites. We will analyze both the methods turn by turn.

HTML: It is considered to be the best option for an efficient and brisk delivery for access of information. Most of the designers and developers of websites will harmonize with the fact that the main goal concerning the websites is the quick delivery of information which is effectively presented in front of the audience. This can be done by using HTML. Hence, HTML has a long way to go.

Consider a situation wherein a person is looking for the address of a pizza take-away in his locality on the internet. The person will not have the patience of waiting for the long flash intro of the website to end; rather he will want the information instantly. He will not be interested in watching the graphic presentation. The person will instead like to see the phone number writhen in bold letters. This makes the HTML website more user-friendly.

If the website of a particular company requires regular updates with content that is search friendly, and is easily accessible through the search engines, then HTML has to be used without any compunction.

Flash: This is the perfect multimedia experience for the users. Flash is usually for the multimedia crazy people. Flash is a tool that always catches the eye of the creative people. The layout is not required to fit into the grids as with CSS or the tables. Sound is easily incorporated into a Flash site without the concern of browser compatibility. Huge animations can be easily swarmed in the site thus negating the need of downloading.

Flash websites have their own beauty and niche. They have their own world and once a person learns to converse with it, you are in for a truly enchanting experience. There are lots of hidden treasures to be unveiled through this experience. Flash has the capability of stimulating the imagination and leading the user to a path that is very exciting.

New Website in PHP

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:52:01 +0000

New website owners and existing website owners alike consistently make a very common, yet extremely costly mistake. They find a web designer first and then an SEO second. Unfortunately, these entrepreneurs do not realize that literally every single thing that goes into building a new website will impact your SEO campaign. They commonly funnel thousands of dollars into a brand new website, only to find out that there are a lot of areas that must be rebuilt in order to have an optimum SEO campaign.

I will identify 6 major areas of concern, in hopes that even a small percentage of these website owners will come across this document at the right time, which is before they begin to develop their website.

1) Domain name registration & hosting. Make sure that when you register your website’s address that you register it for at least 5 years. Sites that register their site for a short amount of time send up a red flag at Google, who end up thinking that site site has been registered short-term in the hopes of helping another website, that is owned by the same person/company, to rank well by linking to it. When choosing your domain name, do not choose a URL that is riddled with hyphens between all your keywords. It is more important that you target this to your visitors than to the search engines.

2) Creating static URL’s. This is one of the most overlooked yet important things that you can do to ensure that your SEO campaign is a success. By eliminating dynamic parameters within your website’s URLs, you are ensuring that search engine bots will have no problems indexing all of your pages. Creating static URL’s can be accomplished by using the mod rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the root folder of your server. Here is an example of a dynamic URL (which you want to avoid), and a static URL (which you want):

Dynamic: http://www.example.com/listings.php?ref=22
Static: http://www.example.com/listings/22.html

Make sure that any potential programmer or designer that you hire understands that this will be a full requirement of the job.

3) Editing the head tag. There are three areas in the head tag that you will want to be able to either edit yourself or have your SEO edit. They are the page title, the description meta tag and the keywords meta tag. Having control over these for each of your top level pages (all the pages linked to from your home page), will be critical to your websites success in the search engines. You definitely do not want these to be the same on every page (they must be unique and reflect the nature of the content on the given page). For other pages that will be created in high volumes, you will want to make sure that there is a variable string (your web designer/programmer will understand what this is) in place for each of the three areas in question, so that they will automatically be filled with content that is the right length and reflects the content on the given page.

Again, make sure that your designer/programmer understands that this is a requirement of the job.

4) Clean, simple code. Ideally you want to define all aesthetic properties that different types of text on your site are going to have in a separate CSS file. This means that you want to avoid using as many tags as possible, especially font, size and color tags. You also want to avoid creating PHP scripts that are either two long, and contain a lot of unnecessary steps, or ones that rely heavily on javascript. It is best to avoid using javascript as much as possible.

Remember, the most important thing your site can be doing is making it easy for search engine bots to easy scroll through the code of your website and follow all the links that it finds. When there is unnecessary code and script on your site, it makes it a lot harder for them, thus hurting your SEO campaign.

Make sure that whoever is helping you build your site understands that there job is to output the cleanest, simplest code possible. If you have any questions about this or don’t understand it, it is best to talk to an SEO expert about it, to ensure that it is done properly.

5) Ensuring that visible written content is editable. The writing within the body of your site is one of the most important areas for you or your Optimizer to help your site increase it’s rankings. Ensuring that either of you can edit it at your own convenience is extremely critical to the entire SEO campaign. This because from time to time search engine algorithms will change, and that might mean that a strategy that was implemented in the past might not suffice, so you must be able to change it to keep up with the most up to date SEO techniques.

6) Site structure. Considering the nature of PHP, your site will most likely (and should) be created by a series of includes that puts all of the pieces of a given page together. You want to ensure that the layout and placement of graphics and navigational links within these includes is strategically correct. Remember, you don’t want to have to pay someone to go back and redo this, so it is critical to get it right the first time.

If you are unfamiliar with a lot of the information that I presented in this article, it is probably in your best interest to at the very least, consult with an SEO or SEO company during the entire design process. A good SEO will be very comfortable working with you and your design team to ensure that the end product will be one that will last you a long time, and will go a long way in helping your site generate revenue online.

Combining CSS with SEO

admin — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:53:30 +0000

CSS stands for ‘Cascading style sheets’ which is a computer style sheet language. It gives web designers the liberty of affixing different styles like color, spacing, font and so on to the HTML documents of a website. The work pattern of CSS is same as a template, styles can be labeled and then applied to many web pages altogether. Numerous benefits are associated with CSS like effortless website maintenance, easy access to alter the style sheets, SEO advantages, etc are associated with it.

Use of CSS in your websites can make a website more search engine friendly, so that your website gets higher ranking in search engines. The bots very well understand the cascading style sheets and makes a website score fairer in online rankings.

As far as nature of search spiders are concerned, they are very lethargic. They usually avoid going through lengthy and complex HTML codes for getting the indexes. The search engine spiders prefer HTML coding with CSS as they are precise and clear when compared to any other table based coding. Lots of over work is saved by these external style sheets. Primary reason behind HTML codes getting clear and yield higher search engine rankings are the CSS files which help in designing and deciding the attributes. Overall download time of the website is minimized as combination on CSS and Java script files decreases the web page size. Thus the indexing becomes faster leading your website to higher rank positions.

Application of CSS makes a website light-weight which is preferred by major search engines like Yahoo, MSN and Google. CSS eliminates junk HTML codes and keeps them well organized making them a favorite among the search engine spiders. Bots are not concerned with complicated HTML coding but the website and its content.

CSS works not only for search engines but also for the website visitors, as it gives a well-formatted look to the web pages. Visitors also prefer websites that have standardized format and do not have old fashioned and complex HTML coding.

The great benefit of CSS is- it allows any web developer or designer to move almost all display code out of the HTML elements in the respective web pages, excluding the straight content. CSS makes it a lot easier to implement changes to the page and users only have to download display code once (in the linked CSS file).

Thus when search spiders are able to crawl easily and at faster pace due to smaller web page size, the chances of getting high rank doubles, making CSS extremely beneficial SEO tool.