This is an article I wrote in October of 2002, but I believe still contains lots of valuable information relevant to today’s website design. - Pam

Using fonts correctly on your page will help to ensure that all of your visitors view your page exactly as you intended. Visitors typically can only view the font you used *IF* they have that font already installed on their computer. However, there are ways to work around this and things you can do to better ensure that your page displays the way you want it to:
 
1. Specify more than one font in your font face tag:
Example: <font face=”Verdana,Arial,Helvetica”> 

Browsers will try each font in the order listed until it finds one on the user’s computer, so list your preferred font first, followed by two optional ones. This also gives you some flexibility to get creative with different fancy fonts!
 
2. If you’d like to expand your selection of fonts, visit any of the “free font” sites on the web and download some new fonts! Here’s how to install a new font on your computer: Click START/CONTROL PANEL/FONTS. Click “File” on the top toolbar and select “Install New Font.” Scroll to find the new font you just downloaded and select it to be installed. The path may vary depending on your operating system. You may have to close and reopen any applications you were using before being able to see the new font in your fonts list. Another option is to open Windows Explorer (right click on “start” and select “Explore”.) Find your new font file. Right click on it and select “Copy.” Then right click on the “Fonts” folder located under C:/WINDOWS and select “Paste.”
 
3. There is also a free tool available for download from Microsoft that will enable you to manually embed fonts into your page by creating “font objects” that are linked to your page. When a visitor views your page, they’ll see it displayed in the font style contained within the font object. Here’s the link: Microsoft WEFT3

4.  Finally, have you ever been curious as to which fonts are the most SAFE to use? In other words, which fonts can be found on MOST internet users’ computers? Following is a list of the fonts automatically installed on users’ computers by both Windows & IE3+:

Arial
Arial Bold
Arial Italic
Arial Bold Italic
Arial Black
Comic Sans MS Bold
Courier New
Courier New Bold
Courier New Italic
Impact
Monotype
Times New Roman
Times New Roman Bold
Times New Roman Bold Italic
Times New Roman Italic
Trebuchet MS
Trebuchet MS Bold
Trebuchet MS Italic
Trebuchet MS Bold Italic
Verdana
Verdana Bold
Verdana Italic
Verdana Bold Italic
Webdings Comic Sans MS

Pretty limited, isn’t it?  You can see now why using the three tips above will help to broaden your ability to get more creative with the fonts on your page!

This is an article that I wrote in September of 2002, but I feel the content is timeless and still very relevant today. - Pam

When designing an ecommerce site, there are several things you can do to help earn your visitors’ trust, a key factor in making sales and encouraging repeat visits:

1. Provide complete and accurate information about yourself, your company, and your service or product. One of the reasons often cited by consumers hesitant to shop online is the uncertainty of knowing exactly what they will be getting. Erase that uncertainty by providing product photos and detailed descriptions. Convey your expertise in the field to which your site is related. List your credentials. Let your visitors know why they should have confidence in you and your service or product.
 
2. Ease of navigation is extremely important. Don’t attempt to dazzle your visitors with design at the expense of site usability.
 
3. Project an image of honesty and sincerity. Include prominent links to your site’s policies, such as those regarding privacy, shipping, refunds, and customer service. Compose a brief narrative in plain conversational language to express your true, unbiased viewpoint on your site’s topic, as opposed to a page full of nifty slogans.
 
4. Be upfront with your visitors about pricing. State the price on the first page or include a link to your pricing page there. Your visitors will appreciate this, and you’ll earn points immediately with them. If your visitors have to conduct an extensive search to find pricing information, they will soon begin to feel that your service or product must surely be overpriced and will leave without wasting another minute of their valuable time.
 
5. Give your visitors something for free, even if only information or links to related resources. If they don’t make a purchase at this visit, they will at least leave with the feeling of having received something of value from having visited your site and will bookmark it for future reference.
 
6. One of the most effective ways of lending credibility to your site is for you to “get real.” Your visitors need to feel confident that you are a genuine company in the real world. This can be accomplished via “people photos”, place of business photos, bio, a real physical street address, and several contact options (i.e., phone number, email, fax number.) This goes a long way in helping your visitors to feel you are not just another fly-by-night website.
 
7. Promptly reply to all customer inquiries. Let them know their needs and concerns are important to you and deserving of your immediate attention. Reply within 24 hours, even if only to confirm receipt of their correspondence and to let them know when they may expect an answer to their question.
 
8. Don’t overdo banner advertisements. A few banners strategically and tastefully displayed are okay, but do not bombard your visitors with popups on entrance and exit and ads all over the place mixed with the site’s content. This will only serve to confuse and annoy your visitors, who will probably make a fast escape and a mental note to never return.
 
9. Project professionalism by performing a thorough site check. Solicit a few friends to double-check for you. Your site design may look professional at first glance, but tiny little errors such as typos and broken hyperlinks are glaringly obvious to visitors and ultimately spell “amateur.”
 
10. Use the exclamation mark sparingly and not at the end of every sentence. No one can be that happy!

This is an article that I wrote in June of 2004, but I feel that most of the content is still relevant today. - Pam

GOAL:  To put together an effective set of keywords for your keyword meta tag and to enter when listing your site at search engine AddURL pages. These should be words that are applicable to your site, exist in the text on your page, and words which people often search with to find information similar to that which your site offers. 

1.  You should, of course, review the actual text on your own pages to get ideas for keywords. Be sure to include every keyword you’ve used somewhere in the text on your page.  Get creative.  You can find a way to do this.  I’ve seen sites add a brief paragraph in the smallest font size at the very bottom of their page solely intended to use some of their keywords.  It was a readable paragraph with complete sentences that made sense.  That’s okay!  It’s acceptable.  Absolutely DON’T employ the use of hidden text (using a font color the same as the page background) or comment tags in your page source code filled with keywords.  Either of these tactics will get your site banned from the search engines.  SE’s are much smarter today in their ability to detect spam.
2.  You can also do a search at Google using the one most applicable keyword to your site.  Using the five sites at the top of the list in your search results, check the keywords they are using.  You can do this by visiting their site, right clicking on their home page, and selecting “View Source.”  It is a copyright violation to copy the exact keywords in their meta tags, but at least you can get some ideas for your own keywords.
3.  It’s always a good idea to browse a list of the most popular keywords being used by searchers on the internet: RankPulse.com. You can then edit your meta tags, page title, description, and page text to use any of these *proven* popular keywords that may apply to your site to help boost your ranking.
4.  Don’t include common words (i.e., the, and, from, like, a.)
5.  Don’t try to fool the search engines by including words that are not applicable to your site (spamming.) 
6.  Be careful about copyright infringement (registered trademarks, copyrighted names, company names, brand names) when choosing keywords. You could be sued.
7.  Besides single keywords, you should also include phrases that you feel others may use when searching (i.e., web design, webmaster tools.)  If your site is a match for the exact phrase a person has used when searching, this will give your site a boost in the search engine results displayed. 

This is an article I wrote in November of 2002, but I feel that much of the information below is still relevant today. - Pam

1. Many search engines are not frames friendly. Avoid using them if at all possible.
2. Optimize your page title. It should be no longer than 100 characters and should include several primary keywords relative to your site and optionally your website name.
3. Include a brief “description meta tag” that includes several of your keywords, while at the same time entices people to want to visit your site, as this tag is sometimes used as the site description beneath your link in search results.
4. While some search engines no longer pay attention to the “keyword” metatag due to spamming and other abuse, I still feel it is an important metatag to include.  It should contain applicable keywords and keyword phrases that searchers might use when searching for a site such as yours, which words are also included in the text on your page. Limit it to 500 characters.
5. Include several primary keywords in the first few lines of text that appear on your page if possible. (Check the HTML view of your page to see the text that appears first.)
6. Avoid flash intro pages if possible. While many of the major search engines are able to read flash pages, text on flash intro pages is not able to be crawled by all or crawled adequately. If you must use a flash intro page, at least add text below the flash file relevant to your site containing several of your top keywords or consider using a flash header instead.
7. Don’t submit your site to the same search engine more often than once per month. Some search engines may consider more frequent submission to be spamming, and you could possibly end up being banned. Use the “REVISIT-AFTER” metatag to instruct the SE spiders to return to your page and reindex on a regular basis, although many will do so anyway.
8. MY NUMBER ONE RANKING TIP: Exchange links with high-ranking sites (at least a 5 Google PageRank) containing quality content similar or compatible to that of your site.

This is a news article that I wrote back in October of 2004. However, much of the information contained in the article I believe is still relevant today. - Pam

The latest tweaking which Google has apparently done to its algorithms in August and September of 2004 has caused quite a stir, to say the least. Websites that have enjoyed high rankings for years are suddenly finding themselves demoted to the ranks of oblivion. Some webmasters have reported decreases in their traffic by 50% or more. Many have already hit the panic button. Will your site be next?I’ve done some research, including reading about some of the companies Google has recently acquired and reading the data on the new technology that came along with these companies. I, of course, mind you, do not have access to Google’s exact algorithm technology or any kind of special relationship with Google. I am simply conveying here my personal interpretation of some of the new algorithms Google apparently now has available to them and may be currently using or planning to use in the very near future.

FRESH IS BETTER: I’m not talking about vegetables here, but rather one of the technologies Google has acquired which could possibly be on the horizon. It involves the storage of information about each individual user’s previous searches via cookies, which cookies are then used to reorder the search results on the user’s subsequent searches. These subsequent search results will supposedly be divided into groups in the following order of priority:

1. Newly indexed sites which were not available at the time of the last search will appear first.
2. Those sites which the user visited during their last search, but which have had updates in the interim will appear next. Also, the extent of the updates will also determine the site’s ranking order within this group.
3. Those websites which were present at the time of the user’s last search, but which the user did not visit will appear next.
4. At the bottom of the list will be the websites which the user had already visited during a previous search which have not had any updates.

This doesn’t seem very fair to the websites that get blocked out of search results simply because they had already been visited in the past, but I would imagine there will be an option for the user to “include previously visited links.” No, it does not reward webmasters for the work they have put into developing their high-quality site, but then Google is not in the business of rewarding webmasters. Their primary goal is to make a user’s search experience as productive as possible by showing updated and valuable content. Therefore, my recommendation here would be to UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE! And do it regularly and to as large an extent as is reasonably possible.

[ Read more about this at the U.S. Patents website ]

CONTENT QUALITY: Along with Google’s acquisition of Applied Semantics last year came their CIRCA technology (Conceptual Information Retrieval and Communication Architecture), which presumably has now given the Googlebots the ability to intelligently think and learn almost like a human when it comes to determining contextual meaning, which intelligence is progressive over time as data accumulates. Therefore, while we may have already begun seeing the results of some of this technology, it is destined to become more refined as time goes on, with ongoing fluctuations in page ranking during the process.

These human-like bots will be capable of discriminating between individual words and groups of words combined together as a “meaningful” unit. If a webmaster fills a page with primarily keywords (to fool the search engines), the Googlebots are now able to tell that there is an illogical sequence of words on this page, called “word sense disambiguation algorithm”, and this page could be severely penalized. Pages filled with words grouped together in a meaningful and logical format will represent high user value. If a website has multiple pages containing “related concepts”, such as content covering various aspects of different issues, but which all relate to one basic theme, this will help to reinforce the value of each individual page even more. The website will then be deemed an “authority” on a given topic and it’s ranking will soar. As well, textual content can be assessed in even greater detail, that is, in terms of “strength” (how close the relationship of each word is.) For example, a “dog” is a kind of “pet”, as well as a kind of “species.” However, the relationship between the words “dog” and “pet” is closer (stronger) than that which exists between the words “dog” and “species.” The capabilities of this powerful new “intelligent” technology that “learns” is such that the days of fooling the search engines in any way, shape, or form are soon going to be history.

[ Read more about CIRCA technology ]

LINK QUALITY: The quality of a website’s linking system is carrying even more weight now. Besides evaluation of the content of your pages, the content of the pages linking to you and those pages to which you are linking are being evaluated. Just like the old saying, “Show me your friends, and I’ll tell you what you are”, your website is being judged more and more by the quality of your inbound and outbound links. A large number of acquired “random” backlinks will soon not carry the weight it once did, once thought to indicate a site’s popularity. Value will be assessed primarily on the quality of the content of the two web sites/pages that are linked, the degree of similarity of the content between the two linked sites/pages, and finally the current PR of each linked site/page. Now more than ever, it is going to pay to avoid involvement with web spammers, link farms, and other linking schemes, sometimes referred to as “bad neighborhoods”, which sites have little valuable “Googlebot food” (lots of high-quality, informative, well-composed, textual content.) In fact, a website’s ranking could be significantly adversely affected if involved in these types of linking schemes. Exchanging links with highly-ranked websites containing similar or compatible high-quality content is the key. This applies to both your inbound and outbound links, including your website’s internal linking structure. Totally unrelated links (assumed to be an obvious link exchange between two sites to inflate their ranking) and a larger than usual number of affiliate links on a page devoid of much other valuable textual content will significantly demote a website’s ranking. Finally, proper link “composition” can also earn bonus points. Although image linking (i.e, ad banners and buttons) with alt tags still count for something, text links composed of rich, meaningful words are considered even more valuable. In other words, “Click Here” should never be used as an anchor link.

SUMMARY: The above is great news for web searchers. But what does this mean to webmasters? Well, in my opinion, I think this means that the “wild west days” of the internet will soon be history. Quick and easy, unethical shortcuts to getting traffic will be something we only talk about to our grandchildren when describing the “early days of the internet.” If all goes as planned, the internet should become a web of primarily quality sites filled with valuable information that is all easy to find. Webmasters with hopes of high ranking will need to do the work to get the results. We all know what “the work” is, so I won’t go into the details here, but basically life online will soon mirror life offline. In other words, to succeed on the internet, we’ll need to “stay in school” and be open to learning all we can, obey the “traffic” laws, live in a decent “neighborhood”, become a “valuable resource” to society, and make sure that our “backlink friends” are people we’d be proud to introduce to Mom and Dad.

USEFUL LINK: RankPulse.com, which tracks the Google search-rankings of 1,000 keywords. Free information, charts, graphs reflecting the daily fluctuations of Google results.

USEFUL READING:
Getting The Search Engine Ranking Your Website Deserves : META Tags Yield To Google’s PageRank As Search Engine Standard
Author: John Henderson
Instant PDF Download: $7.00