Free Open Directory - Caboose Open Directory

I have added this page to share some of my knowledge that I have accumulated over the years of web page design and marketing. I will be bringing information monthly to you and will cover aspects in relation to design and marketing of your website. If you have any questions that you want answered, or a topic you want covered or just give feedback please email me.

May 2012: Backing Up Your PC

Are You Backing Up Reguraly?

Most of the users of this web site I would suggest, have an interest of some sorts in computers and website creation and promotion. Using a computer means that you would have information that is important to you, whether it is documents, music or your precious photos.

Computers are not indestructable and hard drives do fail, or a virus can attack and your informaton needs to be backed up for safe keeping. One of the ways to do this is via a external hard drive.

The Western Digital My Book Essential hard drive comes with an automated backup software that instantly backs up a file as soon as it created or changed. In my experience backing up of data needs to be simple, otherwise it may not get done. By having a simple system like the Western Digital My Book Essential and its associated back up software you will be more likely to have your information backed up.

Promo Code: $4.95 Sign up for 12 months at Dreamhost.

Dreamhost have been in the business of hosting websites since 1997, and pride themselves on being a carbon neutral company.

As I have spent some time and effort in reducing my Carbon footprint both in my private life and in my business dealings, it seemed only logical to move my web sites over to Dreamhost's hosting service.

Browse to dreamhost.com and use the promo code CABOOSE495 to pay only $4.95 per month for a year. ($59.40 per annum)

Dreamhost's service provide unlimited Bandwidth, Storage, Emails, Domains Hosted and Databases. With this hosting plan all your needs will be catered for.

April 2012: Meta Tag Description and Search Engines

What is a meta description tag?

The "meta tags" form part of the html on your web page, however they are not a necessary part of a web pages structure. The "meta tags" are used to pass basic information from your page to another page should it be requested.

Google, Bing and Yahoo access the meta description tag on your page and use it as a description of your web page on their search engines. The description is placed under your web pages URL on the search engine. Google, Bing and Yahoo also highlight any words in your description that form part of the search phrase.

The description meta tag is probably the most used tag, the tag is used by the major search engines as a brief description of your web page. The maximum amount of characters that can be used in the description meta tag is 150, more can be used but they may be not shown.

Some web page designers omit the the description meta tag, it may not improve your websites ranking, but it can give a clear consice description of your web page on the major search engines.

This is a screenshot of how this website, www.cabooseopendirectory.com where the meta tags are "Free Open Directory - Caboose Open Directory. Provides free listing of your web page, please add your site.". As you can see the description tags match the description of the site as per Google's search results.

March 2012: Making sure your web page is Valid

The list of reasons below is why valid HTML should be used to create a webpage.

SEARCH ENGINES. This is the most important as we all want to be listed on on the major search engines. Many search engines cannot properly catalog or index a site that has serious HTML errors. This may reduce the amount of traffic visiting your website.

BETTER, FASTER RENDERING. Properly written HTML will render better, be more friendly to more web browsers, and load your page faster than HTML with errors.

FUTURE-PROOF. Write your HTML properly, and your web site is more likely to work on future releases of web browsers.

THINK IT'S ALREADY GOOD? If you think your HTML skills are good and feel that it will pass any test, then visit http://validator.w3.org/ and check your HTML to prove your skills. Chances are that you'll be surprised and that your HTML has room for improvement.

BEWARE OF WYSIWYG EDITORS. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors are not a guarentee that your HTML will be correct, it is a good idea to review the HTNL and make the appropriate changes. Newer WYSIWYG editors are better but many still have problems writing correct HTML.

WRITE IT ONCE. Write it right the first time and write it once. Buy a copy of reputable HTML book like Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML

February 2012: What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

SEO is the process of improving the position of your website in search engines after specific keywords are typed into the search box.

The most popular search engines are Google, Bing and Yahoo. SEO improves your position on the free listings on the popular search engines.

The ultimate position to have after the keyword have been typed and the search button click is the first page that comes up with the relevant search results.

The traffic (visitors) from the search engine to your website is considered to be organic, that is that you have not paid for that visitor to reach your site.

There are many techniques that can be used to improve you position in the search results, one is to accumulate back links to your website from other websites. The back links increase the "popularity" of your website in the major search engines. This is where Caboose Open Directory can help you out.

I understand that the visitors to this site vary in knowledge. The book Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies can be bought at amazon either in the book version or the kindle version and will give you a solid base of SEO techniques that can be built on.