How to be a WWWow on the WWWebWritten by John Saxon
In quest to develop and publish world's number one business related web site I knew we had cracked it when we entered NorthernLight at No 7 out of 4,876,060 sites on key phrase 'business start up'.Coming from a Sales and marketing background, with a background in IT, but no knowledge of Internet, I had to approach everything from ground up, with an open mind. This proved to be of significant advantage, since I was prepared to listen to everyone, try anything, reject bad and improve on good. We also appear on Lycos, Google, AltaVista, Excite and a myriad of other search engines and know that with 12 months work ahead we will be No1 Business site by 2002. So here are my ten top tips for successful web placement 1 Most web designers assume that customer is reader, wrong. It's a bit like assuming customer for an old people's home is resident - it isn't it's residents 45 year old daughter. Therefore sell to her and place is full. The main customer for a web site is 'gulliver' or 'arachnia' or whatever search engine spider is called. Observe it, profile it, get to know it intimately, what does it like and loathe. How can you get it's attention? 2 In my experience only AltaVista takes seriously. I know this because I used mingmong21 as a keyword and, despite all search engines we appear on, if I search on all of them for 'mingmong21' I only turn up on AltaVista. Don't put too much store in keywords.3 The of page is single most important thing to Google, Excite and a host of other search engines, so why, why, why are we so vain that we call our web site 'XYZ inc.' if they knew who we were before they got on web they would have called us on telephone. The of your site should be what you do, not who you are.4 Many of search engines pick up first paragraph of content (in other words what's written on page). Don't confuse it with 'last updated on ...' and counters, etc. Just have a simple paragraph that says what you do and ... use same words as .
| | Decloaking Hazards - Why You Should Shun Caching Search EnginesWritten by Ralph Tegtmeier and Dirk Brockhausen
While all search engines use one form of caching or another to build their indices, some of them make a point of displaying cached web pages to their users. The commonly quoted pretext for this is that it offers searchers fast access to a page's content, making it easier to check out whether it's what they are really looking for in first place. Of course, what this actually does is keep visitors on search engine's site, making them more susceptible to banner ads and other means of promotion.However, drawbacks this entails are numerous. - Depending on search engine's index cycle content presented may be quite outdated. - More often than not, presented pages will not be fully functional: = relative (internal) links tend to get broken = JavaScript and external Java applets won't work anymore = site design and layout may be massacred by incorrect or non-existent display of external Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) = banner ads may not be displayed properly, thus depriving webmasters of revenue = dynamic content may not be rendered way it was originally set up. - Displaying content within an alien context (e.g. under search engine's header, encased in a frame, etc.) beyond control of said content's generators/authors, arguably constitutes a blatant infringement of intellectual property and copyrights. Moreover, for a web site employing IP delivery, this practice constitutes a prime Decloaking Hazard: as cloaking works by feeding an optimized (or, at least, different) page to search engine spiders not intended for human perusal, caching such pages and displaying them for asking will reveal your cloaking effort, this rendering it useless - any unscrupulous competitor could easily steal your cloaked code to optimize their own pages with it and achieve better rankings to your detriment. The most prominent search engine displaying cached web pages not of their own making is, of course, Google. In past Google staff would promptly comply with any request by webmasters not to display cached pages. Then, about a year and some ago, Google introduced a proprietary meta tag (META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE") for webmasters to include in header of those pages they want to see excluded from this feature. The Google meta tag actually works. While there was some indication immediately after their introduction that sites opting for this exclusion might be penalized ranking wise, this seems to have abated. Obviously, should Google really start a witch hunt on cloaking sites, as their public announcements are font of stating every other month or so, it only stands to reason that web sites making use of this special meta tag might constitute prime targets. For this reason we do not recommend cloaking for Google unless you do it exclusively from a dedicated shadow domain.
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