Web Site Design Tips & Tricks

Microsoft FrontPage Facts

For many people, the Microsoft FrontPage server extensions are the most compelling reason to use FrontPage for website design. However, FrontPage is a robust website development application even when used without the server extensions, provided you use a little trial and error to find out what works best for you.

There are CGI substitutes for most of these. Although installing CGI scripts on your server is not particularly difficult, you may want to have your Web hosting service tech support person or a knowledgeable friend help you with it the first time you try it.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are informational html tags that invisible to the average user. These tags contain information about your site. Search engines are often interested in this information as a way of indexing and ranking your site. This makes meta tags very important to the web author. The more effectively you use meta tags, the better chance people have of finding your site.

The most important meta tags for our purposes are the title, description and keywords tag.

The Title Tag:

Some search engines display the description tag along with your page's search results. In FrontPage, description tags can be created by going to page properties ->custom tab and then add a system variable. Some search engines display this as the summary of your web site so make your description tag descriptive! A short sentence will suffice (under 200 characters) that illustrates what your site is about. Once again, try to use keywords that you want the search engines to focus on.

Other things to remember:

Your DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS should reflect the actual content of your page. It seems that more and more search engine robots/spiders are rejecting sites that do not have keywords that match the actual content of the pages submitted. Do not be too repetitious in your use of KEYWORDS on any given page, as you may also be rejected, three (3) is a good safe number. Some search engines will look for the first 250 words of text on your page, and create a description from there. If you have no text, limited text, or non-relative text (text that doesn't match your keywords), you could be in trouble. Commas are not necessary and count against you in terms of character count, however, it you do use commas make sure to place a space after them.

When preparing your DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS, put yourself in the shoes of the person who is searching for a site like yours. What are they thinking, what words are they keying in? What makes your site different from all others that are similar? Don't use general words, be specific. And use phrases, too. Properly laid out, the search engine will make strings that will match what your searcher is looking for.

Search Engine Tips

Top Ten Search Engines:

Note: It can take anywhere from 2 days to 8 weeks to be listed. Also, keep in mind that when the search engines first spider your site, they are most likely only indexing your home page, it may take months before your complete site is indexed. When you make major changes to your site pages, and change or add content to your DESCRIPTION/ KEYWORDS, resubmit to the search engines. You may also want to resubmit anyway about every month or two to maintain your site's decent ranking. Or you'll find yourself lower and lower on the totem pole.

Properly preparing your website and submitting it to the search engines is more of an art than anything else. And, nothing is automatic... you must submit in order to be listed. Each search engine has it's own criteria for submitting your site, so be sure to read their instructions carefully. If you don't follow their guidelines, you could very well find your site rejected.

Major Search Engines

Not all of the services below are "true" search engines that crawl the web. For instance, Yahoo and the Open Directory both are "directories" that depend on humans to compile their listings. In fact, most of the services below offer both search engine and directory information, though they will prodominately feature one type of results over the other. See the How Search Engines Work page to understand more about the difference between search engines and directories.

AOL Search

AOL Search allows its members to search across the web and AOL's own content from one place. The "external" version, listed above, does not list AOL content. The main listings for categories and web sites come from the Open Directory (see below). Inktomi (see below) also provides crawler-based results, as backup to the directory information. Before the launch of AOL Search in October 1999, the AOL search service was Excite-powered AOL NetFind.

Ask Jeeves

Direct Hit

Direct Hit measures what people click on in the search results presented at its own site and at its partner sites, such as HotBot. Sites that get clicked on more than others rise higher in Direct Hit's rankings. Thus, the service dubs itself a "popularity engine." Aside from running its own web site, Direct Hit provides the main results which appear at HotBot (see below) and is available as an option to searchers at MSN Search. Direct Hit is owned by Ask Jeeves (above). See the Using Direct Hit Results page to learn more about Direct Hit.

Excite

Excite is one of the more popular search services on the web. It offers a fairly large index and integrates non-web material such as company information and sports scores into its results, when appropriate. Excite was launched in late 1995. It grew quickly in prominence and consumed two of its competitors, Magellan in July 1996, and WebCrawler in November 1996. These continue to run as separate services.

FAST Search

Formerly called All The Web, FAST Search aims to index the entire web. It was the first search engine to break the 200 million web page index milestone and consistently has one of the largest indexes of the web. The Norwegian company behind FAST Search also powers some of the results that appear at Lycos (see below). FAST Search launched in May 1999.

Go / Infoseek

Go is a portal site produced by Infoseek and Disney. It offers portal features such as personalization and free e-mail, plus the search capabilities of the former Infoseek search service, which has now been folded into Go. Searchers will find that Go consistently provides quality results in response to many general and broad searches, thanks to its ESP search algorithm. It also has an impressive human-compiled directory of web sites. Go officially launched in January 1999. It is not related to GoTo, below. The former Infoseek service launched in early 1995.

GoTo

Unlike the other major search engines, GoTo sells its main listings. Companies can pay money to be placed higher in the search results, which GoTo feels improves relevancy. Non-paid results come from Inktomi. GoTo launched in 1997 and incorporated the former University of Colorado-based World Wide Web Worm. In February 1998, it shifted to its current pay-for-placement model and soon after replaced the WWW Worm with Inktomi for its non-paid listings. GoTo is not related to Go (Infoseek).

Google

Google is a search engine that makes heavy use of link popularity as a primary way to rank web sites. This can be especially helpful in finding good sites in response to general searches such as "cars" and "travel," because users across the web have in essence voted for good sites by linking to them. The system works so well that Google has gained wide-spread praise for its high relevancy. Google also has a huge index of the web and provides some results to Yahoo and Netscape Search.

Hotbot

HotBot is a favorite among researchers due to its many power searching features. In most cases, HotBot's first page of results comes from the Direct Hit service (see above), and then secondary results come from the Inktomi search engine, which is also used by other services. It gets its directory information from the Open Directory project (see below). HotBot launched in May 1996 as Wired Digital's entry into the search engine market. Lycos purchased Wired Digital in October 1998 and continues to run HotBot as a separate search service.

IWon

Backed by US television network CBS, iWon has a directory of web sites generated automatically by Inktomi, which also provides its more traditional crawler-based results. iWon gives away daily, weekly and monthly prizes in a marketing model unique among the major services. It launched in Fall 1999.

Inktomi

Originally, there was an Inktomi search engine at UC Berkeley. The creators then formed their own company with the same name and created a new Inktomi index, which was first used to power HotBot. Now the Inktomi index also powers several other services. All of them tap into the same index, though results may be slightly different. This is because Inktomi provides ways for its partners to use a common index yet distinguish themselves. There is no way to query the Inktomi index directly, as it is only made available through Inktomi's partners with whatever filters and ranking tweaks they may apply.

LookSmart

LookSmart is a human-compiled directory of web sites. In addition to being a stand-alone service, LookSmart provides directory results to MSN Search, Excite and many other partners. Inktomi provides LookSmart with search results when a search fails to find a match from among LookSmart's reviews. LookSmart launched independently in October 1996, was backed by Reader's Digest for about a year, and then company executives bought back control of the service.

Lycos

Lycos started out as a search engine, depending on listings that came from spidering the web. In April 1999, it shifted to a directory model similar to Yahoo. Its main listings come from the Open Directory project, and then secondary results come from the FAST Search engine. Some Direct Hit results are also used. In October 1998, Lycos acquired the competing HotBot search service, which continues to be run separately.

MSN SEarch

Microsoft's MSN Search service is a LookSmart-powered directory of web sites, with secondary results that come from Inktomi. RealNames and Direct Hit data is also made available. MSN Search also offers a unique way for Internet Explorer 5 users to save past searches.

NBCi

NBCi is a human-compiled directory of web sites, supplemented by search results from Inktomi. Like LookSmart, it aims to challenge Yahoo as the champion of categorizing the web. NBCi launched in late 1997 and is backed by NBC. It was formerly known as Snap but had a name change in late 2000.

Netscape Search

Netscape Search's results come primarily from the Open Directory and Netscape's own "Smart Browsing" database, which does an excellent job of listing "official" web sites. Secondary results come from Google. At the Netscape Netcenter portal site, other search engines are also featured.

Northern Light

Northern Light is another favorite search engine among researchers. It features a large index of the web, along with the ability to cluster documents by topic. Northern Light also has a set of "special collection" documents that are not readily accessible to search engine spiders. There are documents from thousands of sources, including newswires, magazines and databases. Searching these documents is free, but there is a charge of up to $4 to view them. There is no charge to view documents on the public web -- only for those within the special collection. Northern Light opened to general use in August 1997.

Open Directory

The Open Directory uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. Formerly known as NewHoo, it was launched in June 1998. It was acquired by Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement. Netscape itself was the first licensee. Lycos and AOL Search also make heavy use of Open Directory data, while AltaVista and HotBot prominently feature Open Directory categories within their results pages.

RAging Search

Operated by AltaVista, Raging Search uses the same core index as AltaVista and virtually the same ranking algorithms. Why use it? AltaVista offers it for those who want fast search results, with no portal features getting in the way.

RealNames

The RealNames system is meant to be an easier-to-use alternative to the current web site addressing system. Those with RealNames-enabled browsers can enter a word like "Nike" to reach the Nike web site. To date, RealNames has had its biggest success through search engine partnerships. See the Using RealNames Links page for more information about RealNames.

Webcrawler

WebCrawler has the smallest index of any major search engine on the web -- think of it as Excite Lite. The small index means WebCrawler is not the place to go when seeking obscure or unusual material. However, some people may feel that by having indexed fewer pages, WebCrawler provides less overwhelming results in response to general searches. WebCrawler opened to the public on April 20, 1994. It was started as a research project at the University of Washington. America Online purchased it in March 1995 and was the online service's preferred search engine until Nov. 1996. That was when Excite, a WebCrawler competitor, acquired the service. Excite continues to run WebCrawler as an independent search engine.

Yahoo

Yahoo is the web's most popular search service and has a well-deserved reputation for helping people find information easily. The secret to Yahoo's success is human beings. It is the largest human-compiled guide to the web, employing about 150 editors in an effort to categorize the web. Yahoo has over 1 million sites listed. Yahoo also supplements its results with those from Google (beginning in July 2000, when Google takes over from Inktomi). If a search fails to find a match within Yahoo's own listings, then matches from Google are displayed. Google matches also appear after all Yahoo matches have first been shown. Yahoo is the oldest major web site directory, having launched in late 1994.

Yahoo also has Regional Directories - When submitting your site, you should also submit to their appropriate regional directories for your site.

Webtop

WebTop is a crawler-based search engine that claims an extremely large index. In addition to listing web pages, WebTop also provides information from news sources, company information and WAP-related content in its search results. The company also offers the WebCheck tool (formerly called k-check), which is an Alexa-like search and discovery tool. WebTop is backed by Bright Station, the company that acquired some search technology and other resources from the former Dialog Corporation. The Dialog search service itself is now owned by a different company, the Thomson Corporation.

On the web, content is everything! Repeat after me, "Content is Everything." You’d be surprised how many web sites out there forget that they need to offer their readers something . . . anything in order to have an interesting site. Content often means lots and lots of information.

Without interesting information, only the most enthusiastic fan will return, and even then, probably not often or for long.

Content can consist of:

Information:
  Web design help, top ten lists, free stuff, and other news that helps you survive in today’s
world wide web

Entertainment:
  Shareware or online comics, music, photography or even stupid
web cams. That is all well and good, but there needs to be information behind that
entertainment. Without knowing what the shareware is for, or who we are watching on
the web cam, the sites quickly become useless. Even commerce sites need lots
information to sell their product and explain to people why they want or need the
product. "Content is everything!"