Tự học HTML và CSS trong 1 giờ - part 64 pptx

You need to be sure to add your site to the index when you pub-lish it so that search engines will start including it in search results.. As long as people link to your site, search engi

Getting Links from Other Sites

It doesn’t take much surfing to figure out that the Web is huge It seems like there’s a site

on every topic, and when it comes to popular topics, there may be hundreds or thousands

of sites After you’ve done the hard work of creating an interesting site, the next step is

to get other people to link to it

The direct approach often works best Find other sites like your own and send a personal

email to the people who run them introducing yourself and telling them that you have a

site similar to theirs that they may be interested in If they are, there’s a good chance that

they’ll provide a link to your site Oftentimes, there’s a quid pro quo involved where you

might link to someone else’s site and ask them if they’re interested in linking to yours in

return

This doesn’t mean that you should go out and pester people or email them repeatedly if

they don’t do as you request The subtle approach often works best Figure out what

kinds of people might be interested in what you’re publishing, and let them know what

you’re up to If you are launching a site for a new restaurant, it’s worth searching for

blogs that cover the city or neighborhood where the restaurant is and letting them know

about the site Many people are on the lookout for things to write about or link to, so if

you have something of legitimate interest, they’ll be glad to hear from you Just make

sure your email is to the point and that they know it was written to them personally, so

they don’t assume you’re mass emailing people like them

Promoting Your Site Through Social Media

First, what are social media? Most people define social media as websites that enable

their users to socialize with one another Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace

are popular examples Weblogs can be considered social media, too There are also link

sharing sites like Digg and Reddit, where users can submit links, vote for them, or

com-ment on them Links that get more votes are featured more prominently on the site

Social media is about people connecting to one another, and promoting a site through

social media is as simple as talking about your site on those sites The tricky part is

doing so in a way that makes you a valuable participant in the conversation rather than a

tedious self-promoter

In Lesson 22, “Content Management Systems and Publishing Platforms,” I explain how

you can integrate some of these social media sites with your own website, but first I

explain ways you can use these sites to reach people who might be interested in your

site Many people talk about “viral” marketing The concept is simple: Instead of

pur-chasing an advertisement that may be displayed for hundreds or thousands of people,

you tell just a few interested people about your site (or essay, or product, or movie, or

whatever it is that you’ve created), and then they in turn share it with people they think

606 LESSON 20: Putting Your Site Online

will be interested, and so on, until it has reached a large audience The advantage,

assum-ing that it works, is that it’s inexpensive, and that your message has been delivered by

people who the audience is actually willing to listen to—people they already know.The

difficulty is in creating something that is interesting to large audiences in the first place,

and in telling the right people about it so that they are interested in sharing in what

you’ve created Taking advantage of social media is one way to accomplish the second

part of the task

Regardless of the outlet, the two steps are to establish a presence and to be interesting

Twitter (http://twitter.com) is one of the most popular social media sites these days After

you’ve signed up for an account, you can follow other people on Twitter, and people who

find you interesting will follow you There are a lot of people on the Web giving advice

on how to attract large numbers of followers, and there are a lot of people on Twitter

who follow thousands of people in hopes that people will follow them in return

Focusing on follower counts is the wrong approach Remember, the goal with social

media is to establish an audience of people who actually care about what you’re doing

Let’s say you’ve created a new website for knitting enthusiasts, and in hopes of

promot-ing the site, you’ve created a Twitter account to go along with it

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Creating a Twitter account is easy and free To create a Twitter account, you need only supply an account name, a full name, an email address, and a password of your choosing The account name and full name can be anything you like After you’ve followed those steps, you’re all set.

For starters, you should create posts on Twitter with links back to your site whenever you

publish something new You should also follow people who say interesting things,

prefer-ably on the subject of knitting And you should respond to them when you have

some-thing interesting to say, too If you do so, eventually they may follow you in return If

things go well, eventually you’ll have a great outlet for promoting your site, and even if

they go poorly, you’ll be participating in a community of people who like to talk about

the subject of your site—knitting That’s social media in a nutshell

Creating a Facebook Page for Your Site

There’s an additional way to promote your site on the popular social networking

site Facebook You can create a page that represents your site to the Facebook

community To do so, you need a Facebook account After you’ve signed up, go to

NOTE

FIGURE 20.1

The Facebook

Create a Page

form.

608 LESSON 20: Putting Your Site Online

In the form, I’ve already selected Brand, Product, or Organization and then chosen

Website from the select list At that point, I just have to enter a name for my page to

cre-ate it The brand new page I crecre-ated for this book appears in Figure 20.2

FIGURE 20.2

The new Facebook

page I created for

this book.

After the page has been created, I can customize it in a variety of ways, controlling

who’s allowed to post on it and what kinds of content they’re allowed to post The

Facebook page gives Facebook users who are interested in this book a place to

congre-gate to discuss it, share links related to the book, and meet one another

Site Indexes and Search Engines

Nearly all web users know how to find things using search engines, and you’ll want to

make sure that they can find your site Search engines work by creating an index of all

the sites they can find You need to be sure to add your site to the index when you

pub-lish it so that search engines will start including it in search results As long as people

link to your site, search engines will find it eventually whether you tell them about it or

not, but asking them to index your site will ensure that it’s added immediately Here’s a

list of the top four search engines: :

I’m going to describe how to submit your sites to some of the popular search engines

There’s a set of interlocking relationships among search engine providers that can make

it difficult to keep track of who is providing search functionality for whom The search

engines listed previously maintain their own indexes After your site is included in their

index, it will be available via all the search engines that use their index, too

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The search engine descriptions are brief, and because of the rapidly changing nature of the search engine industry, may be out

of date by the time you read them For more information about search engines, I strongly recommend Search Engine Watch at http://www.searchenginewatch.com.

Google

Google is currently the most popular search engine Its search results are ranked based

not only on how frequently the search terms appear on a listed page, but also on the

number of other pages in the index that link to that page So, a popular page with

thou-sands of incoming links will be ranked higher than a page that has only a few incoming

NOTE

This search algorithm does a remarkably good job of pushing the most relevant sites to

the top of the search results It also rewards people who publish useful, popular sites

rather than those who’ve figured out how to manipulate the algorithms that other search

engines use Many sites that aren’t dedicated to providing search functionality use

Google’s index, so getting into the Google index provides wide exposure As of summer

2010, Google’s share of the search engine market is 65%

610 LESSON 20: Putting Your Site Online

How Search Results Are Ranked

Every search engine has an algorithm that ranks sites based on their relevance It

might take into account how many times the keyword you enter appears on the

page, whether it appears inside heading tags or in the page title, or whether it

appears in text inside links It might also take into account how high on the page

your search terms appear Such algorithms are trade secrets within the search

engine industry, but some of them have been unraveled to greater or lesser degrees.

Armed with this information, some site authors write their pages in such a way that

search engines will give them a higher relevance ranking than they deserve For

example, some sites have long titles with lots of information in hopes of appearing

first in search results.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! has been around since 1994 It provides both a human-edited directory of the

Web, which I discussed earlier, and web search Yahoo’s search engine currently uses its

own index, but it has an agreement with Microsoft to use the Bing index at some point in

the future Yahoo!’s share of the search engine market is around 17% at the time of this

writing

Microsoft Bing

Bing is Microsoft’s web search offering Like Google, Microsoft maintains its own index

of the Web Bing was launched in May 2009, and as of May 2010 had an 11% market

share among search engines

Ask.com

Ask.com is another search engine that maintains its own index Ask.com indexes fewer

pages than Google or Yahoo! Ask.com controls only about 2% of the search engine

mar-ket as of summer 2010, but is listed because, like the other sites listed previously, it has

its own index

Search Engine Optimization

Not only do you want to make sure your site is included in the popular search engines,

but you also want to make sure that it shows up near the top of the results when people

are searching for topics that are related to your site If you create a site about model

rail-roads, you want your site to appear as high as possible in the results for searches like

“model railroad” and “model train.”

Unfortunately, search engines don’t publish instructions on how to make your site rank

near the top of their index Before Google, search engines ranked sites mostly on the

basis of their content The more prominently a term was placed on your website, the

higher it would be ranked for that term So if your model trains page had “model trains”

in a page title, or in heading tags on the page, that page would be more highly ranked for

the terms “model train.” That’s why you sometimes see pages with lots and lots of words

listed in the title—it’s an attempt to improve search engine rankings for those words

At one point, search engines enabled you to provide hints about your site by way of meta

tags There was a tag that enabled you to specify a description for the page, and another

that enabled you to list keywords associated with each page The content of the tags was

invisible; it was only used to help search engines with indexing Unfortunately, people

who published websites immediately started abusing metatags, putting in keywords that

were not related to the page content, or putting in far too many keywords to try to gain a

higher ranking Now all the popular search engines disregard metatags entirely

Search engines now consider not only what’s on your site but also who links to it in

determining the relevance of your pages, so the more sites that link to yours, the better

your placement will be in search engine results A number of companies sell search

engine optimization services that attempt to exploit this method of improving search

rankings by paying popular sites to link to your site, or even creating fake sites and

fill-ing them with links to their clients You should avoid these types of services and be wary

of search engine optimization services in general

Instead of worrying too much about how to make your site more friendly to search

engines, you should worry about writing good HTML and making your site friendly for

users As your site gains in popularity, your search engine ranking will come along One

thing that can help is writing good, descriptive titles, and making sure to use heading

tags for headings rather than just using large fonts

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Paying for Search Placement

All the popular search engines have programs that allow you to pay for search

place-ment In other words, you can agree to pay to have a link to your site displayed when

users enter search terms that you choose Generally this service is priced on a per-click

basis—you pay every time a user clicks on the link, up to a maximum that you set After

you’ve used up your budget, your advertisement doesn’t appear any more

Most search engines display paid links separately from the regular search results, but this

approach still provides a way to get your site in front of users who may be interested

immediately You just have to be willing to pay

Business Cards, Letterhead, Brochures,

and Advertisements

Although the Internet is a wonderful place to promote your new website, many people

fail to consider some other great advertising methods

Most businesses spend a considerable amount of money each year producing business

cards, letterhead, and other promotional material These days it’s rare to see any of these

materials without web and email information on them By printing your email address

and home page URL on all your correspondence and promotional material, you can

reach an entirely new group of potential visitors

Even your email signature is a good place to promote your site Just put in a link and the

title or a short description, so that everyone you correspond with can see what you’re

publishing on the Web

When you’re promoting your website, the bottom line is lateral thinking You need to use

every tool at your disposal if you want to have a successful and active site

Finding Out Who’s Viewing Your

Web Pages

Now you’ve got your site up on the Web and ready to be viewed, you’ve advertised and

publicized it to the world, and people are flocking to it in droves Or are they? How can

you tell? You can find out in a number of ways, including using log files and access

counters

612 LESSON 20: Putting Your Site Online

Log Files

The best way to figure out how often your pages are being seen, and by whom, is to get

access to your server’s log files How long these log files are kept depends on how your

server is configured The logs can take up a lot of disk space, so some hosting providers

remove old logs frequently If you run your own server, you can keep them as long as

you like, or at least until you run out of room Many commercial web providers allow

you to view your own web logs or get statistics about how many visitors are accessing

your pages and from where Ask your webmaster for help

If you do get access to these raw log files, you’ll most likely see a whole lot of lines that

look something like the following (I’ve broken this one up into two lines so that it fits

on the page.)

vide-gate.coventry.ac.uk - - [17/Feb/2003:12:36:51 -0700]

“GET /index.html HTTP/1.0” 200 8916

What does this information mean? The first part of the line is the site that accessed the

file (In this case, it was a site from the United Kingdom.) The two dashes are used for

authentication (If you have login names and passwords set up, the username of the

per-son who logged in and the group that perper-son belonged to will appear here.) The date and

time the page was accessed appear inside the brackets The next part is the actual

file-name that was accessed; here it’s the index.htmlat the top level of the server The GET

part is the actual HTTP command the browser used; you usually see GEThere Finally,

the last two numbers are the HTTP status code and the number of bytes transferred The

status code can be one of many things: 200means the file was found and transferred

cor-rectly;404means the file was not found (Yes, it’s the same status code you get in error

pages in your browser.) Finally, the number of bytes transferred usually will be the same

number of bytes in your actual file; if it’s a smaller number, the visitor interrupted the

load in the middle

Most web hosts provide log processing software that will take the logs generated by the

server when users visit your site and turn them into reports, often with graphs and other

visual aids, that you can use to easily see how many users are visiting your site as well as

how those servers are finding your site, whether it’s through search engines or links on

other web pages You’ll want to check out the support site for your web host to

deter-mine how to set things up so that your logs are processed and find out the URL of the

reports that are generated

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Google Analytics

There are other ways to keep track of who’s visiting your site and what pages they’re

viewing, too Processing log files is one way to get an idea of who’s visiting your site

Another option is to use Google Analytics, a tool provided for free by Google that keeps

track of all the visitors to your site and generates reports about your visitors

The nice thing about Google Analytics is that you don’t have to deal with any log files

Google Analytics works by providing you with a code that uniquely identifies your site

On each of the pages that you want to track, you include a reference to a JavaScript file

that Google provides, and pass in the code for your site Whenever users visit the pages

with a link to the tracking script, Google records information about their visit Google

then uses this information to create the reports for you

One particularly nice thing about Google Analytics is that you can usually add it to your

site even if the site is on a server you don’t control So if you create a weblog (blog) on a

site like Tumblr, you can edit the theme of the site and paste in the Google Analytics

code

Installing Google Analytics

To get started with installation, you’ll need to go to the Google Analytics website,

http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for an Analytics account If you don’t

already have a Googe account, you’ll need to sign up for one, too

After you sign up for your account, you need to create a profile for your website Click

the Add Website Profile link on the Google Analytics home page to create the profile,

and you’ll see the form in Figure 20.3

To add a profile, you just enter the URL of your website in the form provided and choose

the time zone for your site After you’ve saved your new profile, Google provides the

code to paste into your own web page so that customer visits can be tracked The code

itself is a snippet of JavaScript that loads the Google tracking code To install the Google

tracking code on your site, copy the code that Google provides into your own pages

Google recommends that you paste the tag just inside the closing <head>tag on your

pages, but for reasons of performance, it probably makes more sense to paste it just

before the closing <body>tag To start out, edit the HTML for your site’s home page and

paste in the Google Analytics code Upload the page to your server if necessary, and then

visit that page in your browser

After the page has been loaded with the Google Analytics tracking code in place, Google

Analytics will indicate that it has started tracking visits to your site At that point, add

the Google tracking code to your other pages and upload them, too

614 LESSON 20: Putting Your Site Online

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FIGURE 20.3

Setting up a new

Google Analytics

profile.

Using the Google Analytics Reports

After Google Analytics has been installed, it will start creating reports for your site about

24 hours later To view the main report for your site, just click View Report for your site

in the Website Profiles list The Dashboard shows some basic statistics about use of your

site—how many visits you’ve gotten each day for the past month, a map showing where

most of your visitors come from, and which pages on your site are the most popular You

can see an example of the Dashboard in Figure 20.4

FIGURE 20.4

The Google

Analytics

Dashboard.