Remember game Hide & Seek? Just like game, websites can be hiding from you on Internet while you try to seek out particular information, services, or products. How do you find what you are seeking?

The Internet is like KING of all Libraries. Among stacks you seek. Among librarians (search engines and directories) you perform a query. But if you don't know language, search criteria, or your way around, you can get lost playing endless hours of hide & seek.

In order for you to locate information or site you're seeking, several things must have happened:

>> The site owner must register or submit their site with directory in which you are doing a search. Then a real person goes and checks out their site and decides if site is worthy of getting listed in their directory.

>> The site owner must register or submit their site with search engine in which you are doing a search OR search engine's robots or spiders must have * crawled through * their websites which will rank them by many different factors. The most important factor is use and weight of site owner's use of keywords.

When you do a search or a query, you type in a word or phrase of words, right? Here is where you might not find what you are looking for because site owner or webmaster didn't put in keywords you are typing in search window.

Therefore, site owner or webmaster must determine what keywords are important for each page on their website and what word(s) you will type in a search window to find their site. The words you type in might not be webmasters keywords, so you don't find what you are looking for.

To make matters worse, each search engine and directory can have their own search criteria; however, most are very similar.

Using particular search strategies can help narrow your search and hopefully find stuff more relevant to what you are seeking.

Seven Searching Techniques to try:

>> Read help section of search engine or directory

>> Put word(s) in quotation marks; tells most search engines you're looking for that exact term

>> Type in lowercase letters; many search engines are case-sensitive

>> Be specific - instead of typing in organizers, type in professional organizers

>> Type in plural form of word

>> Type in word(s) misspelled, such as organizers or organisers or orgnaizers

Many of concepts presented in this course are subtle; but they add up to a professional look. When we look at a document, be it on paper or on a web page, we might not know exactly what gives it that look, but we are aware of viewing quality. With a little knowledge we can increase our awareness of what makes work look professional. We can learn to look closer with a critical eye.

Widows and Orphans

The term is an old typographical term. When a paragraph ends and leaves less than seven characters on last line (or a single word), that last line is called a widow. Worse than leaving one word there, is leaving part of a word, other part being hyphenated on line above.

Widow example:

‘A translation is not a translation,’ he said, ‘unless it will give you music of a poem along with words of it.’

An even worse widow:

Can anything be more absurd than keeping a woman in a state of ignorance, and yet so vehemently to insist on their resisting tempt- ation

When last line of a paragraph won’t fit at bottom of a page (or column) and must end itself at top of next page or column, that is an orphan.

Orphan example: