Traffic, Anyone?

When I began my first websites, I completed my HTML design work, saved the file and uploaded it to my server. The URL was submitted to the major search engines and I just sat back and waited to see what would happen. The results were slow in appearing and disheartening to say the least, as I found myself near the bottom of the listings. I knew I needed keywords in a meta tag statement, but I didn't know how those words should be related to the text. Michael Campbell's "Search Engine Position Reports" could have saved me many hours of frustration and rework if I had read it before I started. It is still a useful tool today.

Many webmasters talk about using the application program, "Web Position Gold", to design special pages catering the likes and dislikes each of the search engines in hopes to gaining a favorable position in the rankings. I downloaded their trial copy and found it an educational experience in serach engine philosophy. Unfortunately, I failed to tag these new generated pages so I could follow their popularity. Like anything worthwhile, it takes time to build these pages and properly submit them, but many webmasters claim to acheive higher rankings by this method. I do believe they are right.

Most recently I have been following discussions about "clean HTML" and its effect on the search engines. The proponents of this approach to web page design believe that if the rules of HTML design are followed, the search engines will see the pages as "friendly". "Friendly" pages are believed to rank higher in the listings than those with missing end tags and improperly nested commands. You can check your current work using a validator program which will tell you where you have errors. Some of these programs also suggest how to fix the error. I downloaded a free validator called HTML-KIT from http://www.chami.com and was amazed at what it found. Now, I regularly run my newly created pages until I have "clean HTML". Another free validator, "Bobby", can be obtained by http://www.cast.org. Note-Tab Lite 4.83 can be obtained free for a trial period from http://www.notetab.com. CSE Validator offers an evaluation version of their excellent product good for 30 days or 50 applications at http://www.htmlvalidator.com. I found the CSE product easy to use and friendly.

During the days of browser wars (that time before AOL bought Netscape), my web pages were designed to work on the lowest common demoninator of browsers, that is we used coding that all browsers could render in the same manner. We faithfully monitored the statistics on the what percentage of our visitors used Netscape, Internet Explorer, WebTV, AOL and others, including the version. We monitored those using Windows 3.2, Windows 95, Windows 98, MAC and a variety of other operating systems. Back in 1997-1998 more than 70% of the visitors to my genealogy site were using the Netscape product, but today that numbers have reversed with Netscape at 17% and Internet Explorer at 72.8%. The "Browser Wars" were declared over by one eZine contributor last week, saying Microsoft's Internet Explorer had won and the Netscape product is being used by only 15% of web. He went on to say that versions earlier than 4.0 of either browser comprise less than 10% of the users, so we can all start using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) without worry. That being said, the conclusion was that we designers should now abandon HTML 3.2 and move on the HTML 4.01. I successfully used CSS in both Netscape (with Java Script enabled) and IE browsers in a project last month and added Table Summaries benefiting the non-visual community to be in compliance with the US disabilities act. I did not know about the table summary attribute until the validators signaled their absence as an error!

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