Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Crafting Easy Site Wide Changes

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

How do you make it easy to change your site? One simple solution is to use cascading style sheets to control the display of your information. When the Web was created, the idea was to keep layout and information separate from one another. Using external style sheets allows you to change virtually every aspect of your site by making changes to one file. To do this, put the layout in a sheet called ‘yourchosenfilename.css’ and reference it in your other web pages. A code similar to the following would go in the head section of your pages.

For an example of how powerful CSS is, take a look at the CSS house. A couple of the more popular resources on the web about cascading style sheets are the CSS Zen Garden and W3 school’s CSS tutorial page. You may also want to view the official W3C CSS guidance page.

Effects of Change on Branding

On a daily, weekly, or monthly basis you can choose to change your font type, layout, colors…just about anything. You can do it in minutes and track the results. Some branding experts, however, such as Rob Frankel, believe that changing too frequently could hurt your brand.

Make sure you have a distinct idea of why and how you want to change before you start altering things. If you realize many things are completely broken, then a complete makeover might be in order, but typically it is best to change and test only one thing at a time so you know the exact effects of any change.

How CSS Saves Time

You can link each page of your site to an external style sheet to control the display. Many of the repetitive changes that would be made on every page can be done simply by changing one file. This may not seem like a big deal while creating page five or six, but if your site has 200 pages you will be glad that you used CSS!

CSS are not necessary for smaller sites, but are a great idea if you are building a large content-based site. They also can help to improve the content-to-code ratio.

Server Side Includes (SSI)

Server Side Includes is an Apache server technology that allows you to include pages or parts of a page within another page without the negative side effects of using a framed-based navigation system. To include another file inside of a page, include the following code where you want the included page to appear.

The use of SSI for common elements, such as navigation or advertisements, work well to allow you to control your entire site by making simple changes to a single file. Between CSS and SSI, you can save literally hundreds or thousands of hours in your site design or re-design.

SSI also lets you include the date last modified or current date in the page. This is often how many of those generic one page sites have the current date in their sales letters.

On my Search Marketing Info site (Search-Marketing.info), I use SSI for the page footer, navigational tabs, local left column navigation, and right-side page ads.

SSI Without Breaking File Paths

Webmasters often start out with a smaller site and later decide that they should start using SSI or a dynamic content management system. To use SSI, many people change their file paths from .html or .htm to .shtml or .shtm. The problem with doing this is that it can break inbound links. You can get around this by modifying your .htaccess file.

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Changing Your Site

Changing Your Site

My Trial & Error

I was a “hack-and-go” sort of person off the start. I have re-made thousands of web pages, most of them by inefficient means. Some of my worst mistakes are: using frames, trying to become an affiliate of over 1,000 websites, free money scams, and generally creating garbage without learning about the web.

Business & Change

The Internet is a highly responsive, trackable medium. You should WANT to change to evaluate consumer response. Successful businesses evolve. Successful entrepreneurs keep learning. Few sites stay on top forever by being stagnant. It’s hard to think of change before you even start building your site, but right now I have thousands of pages that are reminding me of changes I still need to make.

Creating a Site Design

Seth Godin offered me some great advice for site design. He said, “The best way to make a web page is to steal an outlay idea from another website that is not directly competing with you.” When you go to make your first web page, do so as a sketch. After you have a good idea (which is at least slightly different than the site you got your idea from), recreate your home page as a picture in an editor such as Adobe Photoshop. From there you can pay a design firm to create your page, or create it yourself using a program such as Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Software such as Site Grinder and some companies like PSD2HTML and XHTMLized convert Photoshop images to websites for affordable rates.

If you do not mind using an existing template, OSWD.org is a website that has a bunch of free web designs you can chose from. Many content management systems, such as blogs, also have free template galleries. You can start with one of the designs and modify it to make it look unique.

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Tagging Search Results

Tagging Search Results

Both Yahoo! and Google allow users to sign into accounts and search. Searchers can also tag, or label, the results. Readers might tag my site using seo, search, or seo blog.

Here are examples of tags people use to describe my site: 

I do not believe the tags are being heavily used to influence search relevancy algorithms,

but eventually they may carry some weight. And many of the people who use tags also publish websites where they may link to some of the items they tagged.

As the user search history builds and search engines can cross-compare search histories between users, the tag data may be used to help understand what concepts and other documents a particular document is related to. For example:

•       When people tag or link to documents on their own, they are likely to use a variety of terms to describe a document. This type of somewhat random and sloppy information organization is known as a folksonomy.

•       If searchers tag my site SEO or Internet marketing then search engines may believe my site is about those topics.

•       If the same users frequently tag SearchEngineWatch.com and SeoBook.com, then a search engine may think that the two websites are related.

•       Yahoo! My Web allows you to share what sites you are tagging with your friends.

•       Google created a program called Google Co-op that allows groups of people to create a topical search engine by tagging relevant sites. Google users can then subscribe to allow those results to appear in their Google search results.

•       Yahoo! and Google both have feed readers that they can use to see how popular your site is and how frequently readers visit it.

•       If my site ranks well in search results and many users never click on the listing, search engines may want to demote my site. If most people who click on my listing immediately click the back button, search engines may want to demote my site or flag it for human review.

•       Search engines will be able to cross-compare user acceptance data (as described in the point above), what sites are being tagged, how those sites are being tagged, and linkage data to determine if the popularity of a site is natural or if it is being manipulated by human intervention.

•       Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars, and also owns many other services (AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Toolbar, etc.) that allow them to collect web usage data. As Google hosts more of the web’s content they will be able to refine their relevancy algorithms by incorporating more usage data into their algorithms.

•       If you can think of a way to create a site that people interested in your topic would want to tag, then you will be better off than 95% of your competition.

•       Tagging somewhat relates to link building. Much later on in the book I cover link building in depth.

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Why did I Make Search Engine Sites?

Why did I Make Search Engine Sites?

I am fascinated by search engines. I can build a site about search engines only because I am extremely interested in them. Reflecting back upon my decisions, I would probably be more successful today if I would have picked just a specific engine (most likely Google) or a specific type and expanded from there.

My general rule of thumb is to search for what you want to promote, using your favorite search engine. Click on the first listing. If it is not good enough, then you should be there. If they know more than you, learn from them. If you devote yourself to becoming a guru on a topic that you already love, there is no reason that you cannot eventually be the first listing. You are only limited by your own courage, creativity, and efforts.

You cannot learn too much about something that interests you. If someone wanted to make a network of local sites, I would tell them to research Craigslist. You need to know what worked and where your topic has been to be able to do well with it going forward.

Tragedy of the Commons & Being Worthy of a

Subscription

The Tragedy of the Commons is a story based upon farmers sharing a plot of land, with each owning a few too many cows. As the land exceeds its usable capacity, each farmer fights back by adding a few more cows. Eventually the land is destroyed.

Nothing of value can be universally accessible and free. Since it costs virtually nothing to create information (or have a machine generate code for you), a lot is lost on the web if we trust everything we read.

As more and more information is created, more and more unoriginal information is duplicated. It gets to the point where sorting through the mess becomes more than most people desire to do. This is part of the reason why people use and trust search engines so much. It also reinforces the value of the best channels in a marketplace.

The solution to the information overload problem is to be so remarkable and interesting that you capture the attention of the audience. RSS and newsreaders (such as Bloglines, Google Reader, and FeedDemon) make it easy for people to subscribe to select news channels or websites while blocking out redundant or useless noise.

If you cover a news topic that is saturated, you may want to use a news reader to help you organize your news and get the scoop on the latest news as it happens.

The people who are subscribing to RSS feeds are also the most likely to be people who comment on the contents of those sites, and write other sites that can link at your site. If you can figure out a way to get those people to desire to give you their attention, you quickly and cheaply reach the most influential voices.

If you did not own your site, is there any reason you would want to visit it multiple times each week? If you figure out how to make that answer “yes,” then you are ahead of over 95% of competing webmasters.

In most industries, many people will fail, or barely get by, while a few successful voices make themselves heard above the rest. Those people who gain many subscribers and have other people talking about them will be successful. Competitive markets are largely a game of mindshare. Ultimately, search engines follow people.

Controlling Costs and Leveraging Exposure

If you have a high attention portion of your site that is hard to monetize you can still leverage the value and trust associated with that section of your site without offending your regular readers.

Some search algorithms heavily weigh domain related authority scores. If you find yourself in a position of great authority, but fear losing your market position by placing too many ads or too much lower quality content in your main channel, then you can create a static part of the site of lower quality that is more aggressively monetized while still keeping your high authority channel noise free. Some content management systems also allow you to change page layouts based on content age, such that you can monetize archive content more aggressively than new content.

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Cheap Hosting

Cheap Hosting

There are many risks with bad, cheap hosting, but decent, cheap hosting of secondary type sites can help diversify your business model and lessen the risk if your main site goes down. One cheap host I have used is 3.75 hosting.

Once I renewed my credit card and forgot to give them my changed credit card details and my sites immediately went down without warning. That is just one example of the type of things you can expect from cheap hosting providers.

If you are unsure how reliable your host is, you may want to use a tracking service such as Internet Seer.

Host in Your Country

Many major search engines give sites a relevancy boost if they are hosted in the same location as the local search market. In some locations, local hosting may not be economical, but if you are promoting a site primarily geared toward the U.K., you would want to host that site in the U.K.

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Free Hosting

Free Hosting

I do not recommend free hosting. With the plague of garbage on the web many people may not be willing to link to sites that reside on a free host. Free hosts usually use your content to build link popularity or put some ugly banners on your site, which ruin the page flow and make it look exceptionally unprofessional.

A commercially-oriented website needs to show significantly greater quality for me to want to link to it if it resides on a free host.

I have seen some blogs that were hosted at Blogspot (Blogger’s free host) do all right, but that exception is based on the fact that blogs are generally more personal in nature and not so commercially driven. Even those blogs would probably be better off if they used a more feature-rich blogging engine. Plus, if they ever want to move their site, it is hard to consolidate the link popularity they built up if all those links point at a Blogspot location.

If you create a subdomain from a free site and eventually want to move your site, it may be hard to move some of that link popularity, and aged domain trust you developed, to the new location.

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Dedicated versus Shared Hosting

Dedicated versus Shared Hosting

I have found shared hosting to work well for me, although some people recommend using dedicated hosting (which is typically far more expensive). Shared hosting places many domain names on the same IP address and same server, whereas dedicated servers allow you to place just your stuff on a server.

Search engines such as Google usually place spam penalties on domain names, not

IP addresses. Although it does happen, rarely does a hosting network get penalized. I believe the SearchKing network is one example where a whole hosting network got penalized, but this is extremely rare.

If you are going to be making major investments into the web, then it may be worth it to buy a reliable dedicated server. Off the start, I could not afford one so I used shared hosting. As my business model progressed, and my traffic increased, I later bought a dedicated host for SEOBook.com. Most of my other sites are still hosted on shared hosting accounts.

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Common Hosting Problems

Less Common Hosting Problems

It is not common, but some hosts may be configured incorrectly with the wrong clock time or may be sending DNS errors that prevent your site from being indexed. You can use a server header checker to ensure that your clock time is not way off (like months or years), that your home page provides a 200 code, and that non-existent pages provide a 404 error code.

You also can use Web Bug or the Firefox Live HTTP Headers extension to check your HTTP headers. See the references section at the end of this chapter for a list of online tools.

Some hosts also improperly configure servers or place spammy subdomains on sites. Be careful if you use a host like iPowerWeb, as some of their clients noticed spammy subdomains that would appear out of nowhere. Search engines may penalize your site for this sort of activity. That is yet another reason to go with a reputable host.

Recommended Hosts

Most of my good sites are hosted by Dreamhost or Pair. Both have provided me with reliable hosting and responsive customer service. Dreamhost allows you to host unlimited domains on a single account for $7.95 a month. Pair costs a bit more for their developer account, but it allows you to host sites on different IP addresses, and I have NEVER had any issues with Pair.

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Domain Registration versus Hosting

Domain Registration versus Hosting

I like to keep hosting and registration separate.

Whenever you register a domain, make sure you register it at an ICANN accredited registrar. Whenever you host a domain use a reliable host. It is usually a bad idea to cross the two.

When people register a site at a host, it may be hard to renew registration if you want to change hosting providers. Buy hosting from a host and not from a registrar. Many registrars do not have good technical support and do not place enough value on their hosted clients either.

Hosting

Problems With Bad Hosting

There are a ton of unreliable hosts on the web. Hosting is one thing I recommend spending good money on. If your site goes down, you may lose customers, and search engines may not be able to index your site.

Some extremely low-quality hosts will place hundreds or thousands of domains on a single IP address on a single server. This may cause system lag and overload the server. Some hosts will not let you change some of your files or the configurations that you need to change when running your site. If you run into those sorts of problems, then it may be best to change hosting providers.

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Registering Domains

Registering Domains

I usually register a domains at http://www.GoDaddy.com because they have reasonable prices. Please note that GoDaddy has a shady policy of holding domains hostage if they suspect you of using the domain to spam. It has not hit me yet, but many of the more aggressive search marketers recommend Moniker.com.

If you know you want to stick with a domain name for an extended period of time, it makes sense to register the domain for a number of years.

Many low-quality crash-and-burn type sites are not registered for a number of years, so some search systems may give a small amount of additional trust to domain names that are registered through many years.

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