Layers

Spacers and multiple columns are natural extensions to conventional HTML, existing within a document's normal flow. With version 4, Netscape took HTML into an entirely new dimension with layers. It transforms the single-element document model into one containing many layered elements that are combined to form the final document. Regrettably, layers are not supported by Netscape 6 or any version of Internet Explorer.

Layers supply the layout artist with a critical element missing in standard HTML: absolute positioning of content within the browser window. Layers let you define a self-contained unit of HTML content that can be positioned anywhere in the browser window, placed above or below other layers, and made to appear and disappear as you desire. Document layouts that were impossible with conventional HTML are trivial with layers.

If you think of your document as a sheet of paper, layers are like sheets of clear plastic placed on top of your document. For each layer, you define the content of the layer, its position relative to the base document, and the order in which it is placed on the document. Layers can be transparent or opaque, visible or hidden, providing an endless combination of layout options.

H.3.1. The <layer> Tag (Antiquated)

Each HTML document content layer is defined with the <layer> tag. A layer can be thought of as a miniature HTML document whose content is defined between the <layer> and </layer> tags. Alternatively, the content of the layer can be retrieved from another HTML document by using the src attribute with the <layer> tag.

<layer> (Antiquated) Function Defines a layer of content within a document Attributes above, background, below, bgcolor, class, clip, left, name, src, style, top, visibility, width, z-index End tag </layer>; never omitted Contains body_content Used in block

Regardless of its origin, Netscape 4 formats a layer's content exactly like a conventional document, except that the result is contained within that separate layer, apart from the rest of your document. You control the position and visibility of this layer using the attributes of the <layer> tag.

Layers can be nested, too. Nested layers move with the containing layer and are visible only if the containing layer itself is visible.

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Multicolumn Layout

Multicolumn text formatting is one of the most common features of desktop publishing. In addition to creating attractive pages in a variety of formats, multiple columns let you present your text using shorter, easier-to-read lines. HTML page designers have longed for the ability to easily create multiple text columns in a single page, but they have been forced to use various tricks,

Netscape 4 neatly solved this problem with the unique <multicol> tag. While fancy unbalanced columns and straddling are not possible with this tag, as they are with tables, conventionally balanced text columns are easy to create with <multicol>. And while this capability is available only with Netscape 4, the <multicol> tag degrades nicely in other browsers.

H.2.1. The <multicol> Tag (Antiquated)

The <multicol> tag creates multiple columns of text and lets you control the size and number of columns.

<multicol> (Antiquated) Function Formats text with multiple columns Attributes class, cols, gutter, style, width End tag </multicol>; never omitted Contains body_content Used in block

The <multicol> tag can contain any other HTML content, much like the <div> tag. All of the content within the <multicol> tag is displayed just like conventional content, except that Netscape 4 places the contents into multiple columns rather than just one.

The <multicol> tag creates a break in the text flow and inserts a blank line before rendering its content into multiple columns. After the tag, another blank line is added and the text flow resumes using the previous layout and formatting.

Netscape 4 automatically balances the columns, making each approximately the same length. Where possible, the browser moves text between columns to accomplish the balancing. In some cases, the columns cannot be balanced perfectly because of embedded images, tables, or other large elements.

You can nest <multicol> tags, embedding one set of columns within another set of columns. While infinite nesting is supported, more than two levels of nesting are generally impractical and results in unattractive text flows.

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THE CONCEPT OF KEYWORDS

This is the most fundamental concept in SEO. Keywords and
keyphrases are the words that users might enter into a search engine
to find information which could potentially lead them to your site. They
also indicate to search engines what your site is all about.

Keywords can and should be placed in the meta tags, URLs, and
content of your site in order for search engines to ‘see’ them. This
means that the content of your site must actually be relevant to, and
contain your chosen keywords prominently (we’ll get to how to do all
this later on in the book).

An important factor to consider is that some phrases will be more
competitive than others ie. More sites will be targeting certain obvious
phrases and it will be harder for your site to rank highly when that is
the case.

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WHEN TO IMPLEMENT SEO

Ideally you should be considering these SEO concepts right from the
get-go; at the conceptualization and design stage of your site so that
you can integrate them into the design as it is executed. Some
designers are more SEO-savvy than others so you may even have to
educate your designer a little, or give him/her a copy of this e-book so
he/she can implement some of the ideas into the design.

However, I’m assuming that many of you already have a site up and
running that you would like to optimize, and that’s totally fine too.
These techniques can be implemented at any stage with little trouble,
and it’s never too late to start!

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Using powerful titles

Page titles are one of the most important elements of site optimization. When a crawler examines
your site, the first elements it looks at are the page titles. And when your site is ranked in search
results, page titles are again one of the top elements considered. So when you create your web site,
you need to have great page titles.
There are several considerations when coming up with your page titles. Here are some of the key
factors to consider:

Unless you’re Microsoft, don’t use your company name in the page title. A better choice
is to use a descriptive keyword or phrase that tells users exactly what’s on the page. This
helps ensure that your search engine rankings are accurate.

 Try to keep page titles to less than 50 characters, including spaces. Some search engines
will index only up to 50 characters; others might index as many as 150. However, maintaining
shorter page titles forces you to be precise in the titles that you choose and ensures
that your page title will never be cut off in the search results.

<title>A Descriptive Web Site Title</title>

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Managing PPC campaigns

When you consider management of your PPC campaign in the context of reducing the budget, there’s
a lot you can do to reduce your costs without decreasing the effectiveness of your campaign. Your first
step should be to replace any poorly performing ads. Monitoring your ads should already be a key
part of your PPC campaign, so determining those that aren’t performing well should be easy.
Another way to reduce your PPC costs is to reduce the amount of your bid per keyword. As noted
earlier, it’s not necessary to strive for the top advertising slot. And reducing your keyword bid by a
few cents per click can make a huge difference in the cost of the campaign.


Just remember that reducing your bid shouldn’t necessarily mean reducing your budget. Instead,
use your existing budget more effectively. If you cut your budget too much, you’ll lower the number
of times that your keyword ad is shown each day, which in turn lowers your conversion rate.
In addition to reducing the amount you’re bidding on keywords, you should also examine the
keywords you’ve selected to see if you can remove any that are general in nature or high demand.
“General” and “high demand” can be the same, but there can be a subtle difference. General keywords
are good for branding purposes (and branding purposes only), so they are automatically
high demand and high cost

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What’s the Robot Exclusion Standard?

Because they do have the potential to wreak havoc on a web site, there has to be some kind of
guidelines to keep crawlers in line. Those guidelines are called the Robot Exclusion Standard, Robots
Exclusion Protocol, or robots.txt.


The file robots.txt is the actual element that you’ll work with. It’s a text-based document that should
be included in the root of your domain, and it essentially contains instructions to any crawler that
comes to your site about what they are and are not allowed to index.
To communicate with the crawler, you need a specific syntax that it can understand. In its most
basic form, the text might look something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
These two parts of the text are essential. The first part, User-agent:, tells a crawler what user
agent, or crawler, you’re commanding. The asterisk (*) indicates that all crawlers are covered, but
you can specify a single crawler or even multiple crawlers.
The second part, Disallow:, tells the crawler what it is not allowed to access. The slash (/) indicates
“all directories.” So in the preceding code example, the robots.txt file is essentially saying that
“all crawlers are to ignore all directories.”
When you’re writing robots.txt, remember to include the colon (:) after the User-agent indicator
and after the Disallow indicator. The colon indicates that important information follows to which
the crawler should pay attention.
You won’t usually want to tell all crawlers to ignore all directories. Instead, you can tell all crawlers
to ignore your temporary directories by writing the text like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Or you can take it one step further and tell all crawlers to ignore multiple directories:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /links/listing.html
That piece of text tells the crawler to ignore temporary directories, private directories

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Picking the Right Keywords

Keywords are really the cornerstone of any SEO program. Your keywords play a large part in determining
where in search rankings you’ll land, and they also mean the difference between a user’s finding
your page and not. So when you’re picking keywords, you want to be sure that you’ve selected
the right ones. The only problem is, how do you know what’s right and what’s not?

Selecting the right keywords for your site means the difference between being a nobody on the Web,
and being the first site that users click to when they perform a search. You’ll be looking at two types
of keywords. The first is brand keywords. These are keywords associated with your brand. It seems
pretty obvious that these keywords are important; however, many people don’t think they need to
pay attention to these keywords, because they’re already tied to the site. Not true. Brand keywords
are just as essential as the second type, generic keywords.

Generic keywords are all the other keywords that are not directly associated with your company
brand. So if your web site, TeenFashions.com, sells teen clothing, then keywords such as clothing,
tank tops, cargo pants, and bathing suits might be generic keywords that you could use on your site.

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Anchor text for seo

Probably one of the most important elements of keyword use is in anchor text. Anchor text is text
found on a given web site that appears to be a hyperlink.
on web pages that companies often use it without any thought as to how it could affect their search
engine rankings.
How you use anchor text does matter, however, because anchor text is one of the most important
search engine ranking factors. When a search engine looks at your web page, it automatically follows
all the links that you have on the page. If those links (or even a large portion of those links)
are text-based links, that’s even better, because then what the search engine sees is not just the link
to another page, but also your keywords. It’s not enough just to make all your links text-based,
however. There’s a fine science to taking advantage of the power of anchor text.
The first thing you should understand is that there are two kinds of anchor texts: yours and everyone
else’s. I’m not being facetious here. It really is important that you consider not only how you link
with other people, but also how they will link back to you. For example, if you do a Google search
for the term “click,” you’ll find that the Apple QuickTime web site is at the very top of the list. This
isn’t because Apple loaded down the QuickTime site with the keyword “click.” What’s actually happened
is that many people link to QuickTime using the word “click” in their anchor text. This isn’t
hard to believe, because most web sites that use the QuickTime application usually include a text
link to “Click here to download” or something similar. As you can see, it’s not just your own anchor
text that matters. How your site is included in others’ anchor text is also important.

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seo for small business

Use your keywords: Including your keywords in your advertisements can increase the
efficiency of those ads. Additionally, if you’re using the keywords that you’ve selected,
then your ads are likely to appear in conjunction with related topics, making it easier
for you to entice traffic.
Qualify your traffic: Creating an advertisement that people will click on is not enough.
You must create an ad the right people will click on. Not all traffic is equal. Even people
who search with the same phrase might have different needs. One purpose of your ad is
to appeal to your target audience, while signaling to anyone else that your business would
not be a good fit for their differing needs.
List features and benefits: In your ad description, include at least one feature and benefit
for the product or services that you’re advertising with the PPC program. Generally,
you have very little space in which to include a description, so choose the words that you
plan to use very carefully.
Use a call to action: Too often, advertisements are created without including a call to action.
However, studies show that including a call to action will increase your conversion rates,
whereas ads that do not contain a call to action tend to perform less efficiently and effectively
than those that include it.
Stand out: Many PPC advertisers in the same areas will have very similar PPC advertisements.
If you can create ads that stand out from these other, more generic ads, you have
a much better chance of having an effective PPC program. It will be worth your time to
spend some planning hours creating an ad that helps you stand out from the crowd. That
extra effort will be well worth the results.

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