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 Issue #21 - May 5th, 2003 Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses
Brought to you by idesignbusiness.com http://www.idesignbusiness.com Issue #21 Monday, May 5th, 2003 In this Issue: ARTICLES: ONLINE POLL: FREE RESOURCE: Welcome back to another issue of the Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Business. For those of you that are reading this newsletter for the first time, I hope you enjoy it and make sure you check out the Newsletter Archive. This week's issue contains an article from a guest author. The article was originally published in October of last year, but the information is still very relevant today. As always, I want to hear from you! Please direct all newsletter correspondence to newsletters@idesignbusiness.com You can view all past issues of the Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses at the newsletter archive. Click below to visit the archive: Newsletter Archive Neal St. Clair idesignbusiness Advertisement Free Website Hosting! Sign up for an idesignbusiness hosting account by May 15th and pay nothing for your first month! We will waive your setup fee and handle all the setup for you. Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. If you are not completely satisfied after 30 days, you pay nothing. Get all the great features of more expensive web host at an affordable cost. Sign-up today, no Credit Card is required. Click here to learn more. Online Poll Have you ever paid to get your website listed in Search Engines? ARTICLE Every Search Engine Robot Needs Validation Daria Goetsch Search Innovation Original Publication Date - October 14, 2002 Your website is ready. Your content is in place, you have optimized your pages. What is the last thing you should do before uploading your hard work? Validate. It is surprising how many people do not validate the source code of their web pages before putting them online. Search engine robots are automated programs that traverse the web, indexing page content and following links. Robots are basic, and robots are definitely not smart. Robots have the functionality of early generation browsers: they don't understand frames; they can't do client-side image maps; many types of dynamic pages are beyond them; they know nothing of JavaScript. Robots can't really interact with your pages: they can't click on buttons, and they can't enter passwords. In fact, they can only do the simplest of things on your website: look at text and follow links. Your human visitors need clear, easy-to-understand content and navigation on your pages; search engine robots need that same kind of clarity. Looking at what your visitors and the robots need, you can easily see how making your website "search engine friendly", also makes the website visitor friendly. For example, one project I worked on had many validation problems. Because of the huge number of errors generated by problems in the source code, the search engine robots were unable to index the web page, and in particular, a section of text with keyword phrases identified specifically for this page. Ironically, human users had problems with the page as well. Since humans are smart, they could work around the problem, but the robots could not. Fixing the source code corrected the situation for human and automated visitors. There are several tools available to check your HTML code. One of the easiest to use is published by the W3C (http://validator.w3.org/). While you're there, you can also validate your CSS code at W3C's page for CSS (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/). The reports will tell you what source code needs to be fixed on your web page. One extra or unclosed tag can cause problems. With valid code, you make it easier for your human visitors and search engine robots can travel through your website and index your pages without source code errors stopping them in their tracks. How many times have you visited a website, only to find something broken when going through the web pages? Too many too count, I'm sure. Validating your pages makes everything easier for your website to get noticed. As I said before, what works for your website visitors works for the search engine robots. Usability is the key for both your human visitors and automated robots. Why not provide the best chance for optimum viewing by both? # # # Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing (www.searchinnovation.com), a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses. Besides running her own company, Daria is an associate of WebMama.com, an Internet web marketing strategies company. She has specialized in search engine optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O'Reilly & Associates, a technical book publishing company. Copyright © 2003 Search Innovation Marketing. All Rights Reserved. Advertisement Are you using email campaigns to market you products and services, communicate with customers, and generate leads? If not, you are missing out on the most affordable and effective marketing tool available to small businesses. The idesignbusiness Mail Manager handles everything required to execute a professional email marketing campaign including email collection, contact list management, email delivery, and reporting. Learn how you can begin sending e-Newsletters, greeting cards, email promotions and more today. FREE RESOURCE: Each issue of the Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses will include helpful free online resources to promote your website. This free resource was mentioned in the article above and I highly recommend that if you have a website you visit the link below. You have probably spent hours and hours carefully designing and coding your website so why not spend a few minutes validating your code to check for errors and typos. This free service will check all your code and tell you where the errors are. It is very important to fix these errors for your human visitors and Search Engine spiders. W3C Markup Validation Service ABOUT idesignbusiness idesignbusiness provides Web marketing and technology solutions for small businesses. We utilize a combination of consulting and technology expertise to create customized and flexible solutions. Please visit http://www.idesignbusiness.com for more information. SUBSCRIPTION NOTICE This newsletter is only sent to opt-in subscribers. If at anytime you would like to be removed from this list, please send an e-mail to newsletters@idesignbusiness.com with REMOVE in the subject line or click on the remove link below. Spread the word - Please forward to friends and colleagues. Copyright 2002 - 2003 idesignbusiness http://www.idesignbusiness.com |
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