Website promotion

Successful implementation (i)

I have chosen to implement the following two measures:

  1. Checking that the web site has a search crawler-friendly design and mark-up. Then submitting it to directories and search engines.
  2. Creating a blog for Ryan Townsend so he will be able to use his excellent writing skills to produce interesting and attractive articles and post other relevant content to draw visitors. Keeping the content fresh.

Search engine submission

To maximise the effectiveness of search engine submission the site must be designed with search robots in mind.

Avoid the use of splash pages.

The PSD site does not have a 'splash' page to introduce the visitor as this would hinder search crawlers and frustrate your average web user. Instead the user is taken straight-through to the main index of the site (shown right) where he or she is able to have access to the navigation cycle which also includes the site map.

Balance HTML text and graphics.

Some web sites are made up of image after image after image, leaving no real room for hypertext. Surely textual information is the heart of the web and for the semantic web to work all content should be able to be read by any type of device.

Generally, if there is an awful lot of images on one page or lots of text is contained within many image files, search engine optimisation cannot be acheived without re-working the entire site. Thankfully because I used valid CSS and XHTML from the start, the large majority of the page is real textual content. Images are only used to aid the description of an item or to give the first time visitor an intuitive understanding of what is PSD's main purpose.

Create search-engine friendly HTML text navigation and cross-links.

To prove to myself that this was already in place I turned off the default stylesheet in the display controls section of the accessibility page in the PSD site to see how accessible the navigation was to a search engine crawler. Search engine spiders tend to concentrate there efforts on the top half of the index page so it is necessary to have the navigation near the top of each XHTML document.

As the top red box indicates the navigation is nearly the first element of the page and comes before the main bulk of content. The bottom red box shows the 'back to top' anchor, this will tell the robot that there is good continuity within the page itself.

Use external CSS and JavaScript whenever possible, to maximize relevance.

Search engines read the markup, beginning at the top of the index page, so they'll also review embedded CSS and JavaScript between the opening and closing <head> elements. Generally, search engines tend to give more weight to the text that appears at the top of web pages than to text published further down the page. So instead of embedded CSS and JavaScript in every HTML document getting in the way of the search, the PSD website uses over five different external stylesheets and one external JavaScript file containing all the functions used.

Below is all the JavaScript and all the links to CSS files that are contained within the <head> of each page of the PSD website: 

<!-- javascript -->
<script type="text/JavaScript" src="inc/functions.js"></script>
<!-- cascade style sheets -->
<link href="inc/layout.css" rel="stylesheet" title="Default style" class="layout" type="text/css" media="all" />
<link href="inc/text-regular.css" rel="stylesheet" title="Medium Text" class="text" type="text/css" />
<link href="inc/contrast.css" rel="alternate stylesheet" title="High contrast" class="layout" type="text/css" />
<link href="inc/text-small.css" rel="alternate stylesheet" title="Small Text" class="text" type="text/css" />
<link href="inc/text-large.css" rel="alternate stylesheet" title="Large Text" class="text" type="text/css" />
<link href="inc/print.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" />

This method also gives site wide control of the presentation of all the HTML documents.

Use structural mark-up, and separate content from presentation as much as possible.

Search engine crawlers use structural markup to understand what the web page's content is about, and they give more weight to text within heading elements (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc.).

So for complete search engine optimisation one must be mindful of what one includes within in a heading.

The snapshot on the right depicts the sitemap without any CSS applied to it.

The <h1> has the words "site map" contained within it for the main purpose of this page is the provide the user with a map of the site. Then lower down the HTML document a <h3> element appears with the word "cycle..." in it. The text following it gives some extra information about the type of navigation that has been executed in the PSD site implementation. All the headings are linked to specific relevant chunks of content. This is the essence of semantic markup.

So then...

It is my belief that the PSD website in it's current version has been fully optimised for search engine crawlers and therefore just needs to be submitted. I feel that it has been right to spend the amount of time that I have in doing this because the company is sure to reap a great harvest over time with this solid structured markup scheme.

On the next page the reader will see the process of me creating a blog for Ryan Townsend so to be an integral part of the site to further maximise visitor numbers.

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