Online Seo For Beginners: search crawlers

Validating Your HTML

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<b><span style="color: #76a5af; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-large;">Validating Your HTML</span></b></h2>
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<a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2015/04/validating-your-html.html" target="_blank"><img alt="Search engine optimization" border="0" height="435" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTfgfuYtKFfQTCGW4FbP-OPZY5-JYjdA_YfXA_xD3TFgMKowXvHwKL0he8tIncMJnKDfzd3hbXy9NN3MjKLqGtoJ3gOS03XScFZFW1cHj250Sl5ommGMD5kGk7PZiESNxEimdoXPKQ-7w/s1600/html.gif" title="Validating HTML" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML" target="_blank">HTML</a></b> code is a pretty straightforward <b>programming language</b>. However, like any language, a document written in HTML can contain a lot of meaningless garbage that doesn’t seem to interfere with the message but leaves the document less than pristine. In fact, if your web site designer leaves a snippet of trash in your HTML code because it didn’t overtly affect the site and the designer didn’t want to take time cleaning it up, it could spell disaster for your SEO. With HTML there’s a lot behind the scenes that site visitors don’t see. There are the tags and elements that must be there for users, of course, and then there are the tags and elements that aren’t ever visible, so whether they are there or not doesn’t seem to matter — but of course </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">it does.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When you recognize that a <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/08/basics-of-serp-crawlers-and-page-rank.html" target="_blank">search engine crawler</a></b> looks at text, and that HTML is a type of text, then your HTML begins to take on new meaning. If your site contains something that shouldn’t be there, visitors may not see it but <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/08/basics-of-serp-crawlers-and-page-rank.html" target="_blank">search crawlers</a></b> will, and it could affect the quality score of your site. Because HTML can be manipulated on the back end, a set of guidelines and best practices has been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These guidelines and best practices were created to help web designers use HTML in the most efficient and effective manner. Unfortunately, the designers don’t always pay attention, and sometimes the HTML of a site can be littered with unneeded elements that affect your search engine rankings. The best thing to do is validate your HTML, or check to ensure that it complies with W3C standards.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You could do that manually, by going through every single line of code in your web site, but that would take a very long time when you consider that some web sites contain millions of</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">lines of code. Instead, you can use a tool such as the free HTML Validator <u>(http://validator.w3.org/)</u> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">that the W3C makes available to examine (or validate) your HTML to ensure that it adheres to the W3C guidelines. To use this tool, just enter the URL of your web site, and the validator will run a diagnostic on the site and return the results to you. You can then use that information to ensure that your site is free of the clutter that turns crawlers off. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">After Your Site Is Built</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Building the right site to help maximize your <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/08/understanding-concept-of-search-engine.html" target="_blank">SEO</a></b> efforts is a difficult task; and when you’re finished, the work doesn’t end. As mentioned earlier, SEO is an ongoing strategy, not a technology that you can implement and forget. You need to spend time reviewing your practices, examining results, and making adjustments where necessary. If this ongoing maintenance is ignored, then your <i>SEO</i> efforts up to this point will quickly become time that would have been better spent standing on the street with a sign around your neck advertising your web site. That might be more effective than outdated <i>SEO</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Beware of content thieves</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Maintenance of your SEO strategies is also essential to helping you find problems that might be completely unrelated to SEO. For example, SEO strategies can help you locate content thieves. One such strategy is tagging your web site. Some people (including black-hat SEOs) take snippets of content from your site to use on their own. If you tag your content cleverly, you can use some very distinctive tags, which will help you quickly locate content that has been stolen. Another way in which SEO helps you to locate stolen content is through tracking. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Presumably, if you’re executing <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/10/seo-strategies-that-should-be-made.html" target="_blank">SEO strategies</a></b>, then you’re also monitoring your site metrics with a program such as <u>Google Analytics</u>. Watching the metrics used by one of those analytics programs can help you locate content thieves. For example, if you look at your incoming links on one of these programs, you might find that people are coming to your site from a completely unexpected location. If that’s the case, you can follow the link back to that site to find out why. A site using stolen content is easy to find using this method. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Many services are available that will help you track your web site content. Tagging works well for finding content thieves, and you can also use domain cloaking to thwart automatic content scrapers. Recall that this is a process by which your web site appears to be located somewhere other than where it actually is. This is accomplished using an HTML frameset that redirects traffic from one URL to another. For example, if your web site address is www.you.somewhere.com, you can use domain cloaking to have your site appear to be www.yourbusiness.com. As you learned earlier, a problem with using domain cloaking is that it can confuse a<b> search engine crawler</b>, because the same content appears to be on two pages, although it’s only one page that redirects. Another problem is that some search engine crawlers can’t read the frameset that’s used to redirect the user, which means your site may end up not being ranked at all. Domain cloaking is a tactic that should be used only in special cases — namely, where content </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">is truly unique and could possibly affect your <b>SEO </b>rankings (or that of someone who might</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">steal it) in a dramatic way. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Dealing with updates and site changes</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One last problem you may encounter after you’ve initially set up your <b>SEO strategies</b> is the updates and changes that your site will undergo. Web site owners often think that once the SEO is in place, it’s always in place and they don’t have to think about it again. That attitude can lead to a very unpleasant surprise.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When your site changes, especially when there are content updates or changes to the site structure, links can be broken, tags may be changed, and any number of other small details may be overlooked. When this happens, the result can be a reduced ranking for your site. <b>Site crawlers</b> look at everything, from your tags to your links, and based on what they see, your ranking could fluctuate from day to day. If what the crawler sees indicates that your site has changed in a negative way, the <b>site’s ranking</b> will be negatively affected.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As you know, many factors affect the way your site is ranked in a <i>search engine</i>. You’ve seen an overview of a lot of them on this blog, and you’ll see them all again in more depth. Realize that SEO is not a simple undertaking. It is a complex, time-consuming strategy for improving your business. Without attention to all of the details, you could be wasting your time. Plan to invest the time needed to ensure that your <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/08/beginning-pure-search-engine.html" target="_blank">search engine optimization</a></b> efforts aren’t wasted.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Image Source</b>: Google</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Thanks for Reading</span><br />
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Validating Your HTML

Validating Your HTML HTML code is a pretty straightforward programming language . However, like any language, a document written in...

Problem Pages and Work-Arounds

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<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-large;">Problem Pages and Work-Arounds</span></h2>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">No matter how much time and consideration you put into your <a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/10/seo-strategies-that-should-be-made.html" target="_blank"><b>SEO strategy</b></a>, some elements of your web site will require special consideration. Certain sites — such as <b>portals</b> — need a different approach than a standard web site might require. How you deal with these issues will have an impact on the effectiveness of your <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.in/2014/08/beginning-pure-search-engine.html" target="_blank">SEO</a></b> efforts.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Painful Portals</span></h3>
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<a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/10/problem-pages-and-work-arounds-no.html" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="search engine optimization" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2eZ_IQn0uiPEv4PN0wWijgELGNWO3kQG9K8AUZHNqvjv-NVCWKMymx5UAtV6ZcJqcdCwqG3UBNY27dNSDhYogesFRMYfNZrC-BRIVNC5NXap0s_aNnimpeVDw058oHUjHvzz7HtE_H1k/s1600/web-portal.gif" title="Portals" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The use of portals — web sites that are designed to funnel users to other web sites and content — as a <b>search engine</b> placement tool is a hotly debated topic. Many experts will start throwing around the word ‘‘spam’’ when the subject of <b>SEO</b> and portals comes up; and there have been serious problems with portals that are nothing more than <i>search engine spam</i>. In the past, portals have certainly been used as an easy <b>link-building</b> tool offering nothing more than regurgitated information. Sometimes the information is vaguely reworded, but it’s the still the same information.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Search engine operators have long been aware of this tactic and have made every effort to hinder its usefulness by looking for duplicate content, interlinking strategies, and other similar indicators. Using these techniques, search engines have managed to reduce the usefulness of portal web sites as <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.in/2014/08/understanding-concept-of-search-engine.html" target="_blank">SEO</a></b> spam mechanisms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">However, because search engine operators need to be cautious about portals that are nothing more than SEO spam, if your site is a portal, then optimizing it will be a little harder. As with all web site design, the best objective for your site, even for a portal, is to help your visitors achieve a desired result, whether that’s purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, or finding desired information. If you make using your site easy and relevant, your site visitors will stay on your site longer, view more pages, and return to your site in the future. <b>Portals</b> help you reach these goals by acting as excellent tools for consolidating information into smaller, more manageable sources of information that users find easier to use and digest.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Too often, people optimizing web sites focus on the <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.in/2014/08/basics-of-serp-crawlers-and-page-rank.html" target="_blank">spiders</a></b> and forget about the visitors. The sites you are developing have to appeal to the visitors and provide them with the information they’re looking for, or all you will have at the end of the day are hosting bills and low conversion rates. Portal web sites enable you to create a series of information resources that provide full information on any given topic, while structuring a network of information covering a much larger scope. Though the visitor is of significant importance when building a web site, the site itself is of primary significance, too. There’s no point in creating a beautiful web site if no one’s going to see it, and portals are a fantastic tool for <u><i>increasing your online visibility and search engine exposure</i></u>, for a wide variety of reasons. Perhaps the most significant of these reasons is the increase in keywords that you can use in portal promotion. Rather than have one web site with which to target a broad range of keywords, portals enable you to have many web sites, each of which can have its own set of </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/09/long-tail-search-concept.html" target="_blank">keywords</a>.</b> For example, instead of trying to put ‘‘deer hunting’’ and ‘‘saltwater fishing’’ on the same page, you can create a hunting portal that enables you to have separate sites for deer hunting, saltwater fishing, and any other type of hunting activity you’d like to include. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">On one page it’s much easier to target the two key phrases ‘‘deer season’’ and ‘‘Mississippi hunting license’’ than it is to target two key phrases like ‘‘deer season’’ and ‘‘marlin fishing.’’ Targeting incompatible <b>keywords or phrases</b> — that is, keywords or phrases that aren’t related to a larger topic — makes it harder to have both readable, relevant content and reach the keywords that you need to use. There are other advantages to creating web portals as well. Having a portal enables you to have multiple home pages, which gives you the opportunity to create sites that consistently appear in a top ranking. You also have more sites to include in your other <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/10/seo-strategies-that-should-be-made.html" target="_blank">SEO strategies</a></b> and more places to include keywords. However, there is a fine line between a useful portal and one that causes search engines to turn away without listing your portal on <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.in/2014/08/basics-of-serp-crawlers-and-page-rank.html" target="_blank">SERPs</a></b>.  As with most issues in web design, keep it user-friendly and attractive. If you have any concerns </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">that the actions you’re taking with your site or the design methods that you’re using could lead to negative results for the <b>SEO </b>of your site, don’t use them. If you have a feeling that a strategy won’t work, it probably won’t, and you’re wasting your time if you use a design you’re not comfortable with.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Fussy frames</span></h3>
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<a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/10/problem-pages-and-work-arounds-no.html" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="search engine optimization" border="0" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJxIO6WoA77vLKfTfBucKCHChxZGTJQG7kOgMgNVssTNPPCgGTgQ_YcNB63Ua5_ufPX6PEIALXz70js77f47u6LVqXcxnz3V6_FePzo0X_m8N4V95VoLyUlOOdTTFXvuAiPVa21RKbU2M/s1600/frames2.jpg" title="frames" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Some web site designs require the use of frames. <span style="color: #cc0000;">Frames are sections of a web site, with each section constituting an entity separate from the other portions of the page. </span>Because the frames on a site represent separate URLs, they often create display issues for users whose browsers don’t support frames, and for <a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.in/2014/08/basics-of-serp-crawlers-and-page-rank.html" target="_blank">search crawlers</a> that encounter the frames and can’t index sites where the frame is the navigational structure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You have a couple of options when frames are essential to the design of your web site. The first is to include an alternative to the framed site. This requires the use of the noframes tag. This tag directs the user’s browser to display the site without the framed navigational system. Users may see a stripped-down version of your site, but at least they can still see it. When a <b>search crawler</b> encounters a site made with frames, the noframes tag enables it to index the alternative site. It’s important to realize, however, that when you use the noframes tag, you need to load the code for an entire web page between the opening tag and closing tag. Another issue with frames is that search engines often display an internal page on your site in response to a search query, but if this <b>internal page</b> does not contain a link to your home page or some form of navigation menu, users are stuck on that page and cannot navigate through your site. That means the search crawler is also stuck in that same spot. As a result, the crawler might not index your site.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The solution, of course, is to place on the page a link that leads to your home page. In this link, include the <b>attribute TARGET = "_top".</b> This prevents your site from becoming nested within your own frames, which locks users on the page they landed on from the search results. It also makes it possible for crawlers to efficiently crawl your site without getting stuck.  That link back to your home page will probably look something like this: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><a href="index.html" TARGET = "_top">Return to Home Page</a></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Frames are difficult, but not impossible, to get around when you’re putting <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/10/seo-strategies-that-should-be-made.html" target="_blank">SEO strategies </a></b>into place. It’s a good idea to avoid them, but they won’t keep you completely out of <b><a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.in/2014/08/how-does-search-engine-retrieve-and.html" target="_blank">search engine rankings</a></b>. You just have to use a different approach to reach those high rankings you desire.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #e69138; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Cranky cookies</span></h3>
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<a href="http://onlineseoclassroomforbeginners.blogspot.com/2014/10/problem-pages-and-work-arounds-no.html" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="search engine optimization" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQeAKU_kum7zEkyXqPMnyGgb9oovo26hPgDV2LuJPlnFG_fCtoNiKPtSIzWTAPQHN0JhSATIsaXfrUY399teNNYRbLuvSiE6Vg3aRfFNqOdDZhIaOGey03E4PzK1I5YPq9Skn80FAo_TM/s1600/cookie-ch.jpg" title="cookies" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cookies are one of those irritating facts of life on the Internet. Users want web sites tailored to them, and cookies are one way companies have found to do that. When users enter a site and customize some feature of it, a small piece of code — the cookie — is placed on the user’s hard drive. Then, when the user returns to the site in the future, that cookie can be accessed and the user’s preferences executed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When cookies work properly, they’re an excellent tool for web designers. When they don’t work as they should, problems arise. The main issue with cookies is that some browsers allow users to set how cookies will be delivered to them; and some source code prompts the user to be asked before a cookie is accepted. When this happens, the <b>search engine crawler</b> is effectively stopped in its tracks, and it doesn’t pick back up where it stopped once the cookies are delivered. In addition, any navigation that requires cookies prevents a crawler from indexing the pages. To overcome this issue, you must code cookies to ensure that the source code is not designed to query the user before the cookie is delivered. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>If you like the post please comment and share it.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Thanks for Reading</b></span></div>
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Problem Pages and Work-Arounds

Problem Pages and Work-Arounds No matter how much time and consideration you put into your SEO strategy , some elements of your web site...