Professional webmaster help needed

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anbow

Free Member
Jul 30, 2004
2
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  • #1
    I am building my own website to market my professional services. The core pages (about 20) are already ready. I started writing pages using a program Website Complete Deluxe Edition, offered by Godaddy, but later I discovered, that I could not add meta tags to individual pages with that program. As I became emotionally attached to my new creation and did not want to start all over again I tried to use Front Page 2002 to add Meta tags to my site. But unfortunately, I got stuck here and feel that I do not have enough knowledge to carry on. I am too busy with my current business and cannot dedicate proper time to learning all that right now. All the pages were written with the website optimisation in mind. Now I need a professional who could revise all my pages, add all the proper Meta tags to them, help me to publish my website and instruct me how and what I should do to maintain it highly optimised. I am ready to pay for this service. If there is anybody ready to help me please let me know. Thank you.
     
    K

    kyber

  • #2
    Have you uploaded what you have done so far to a website we can look at?

    Getting a webdesigner to help you is obviously a good idea given your time constraints. I would not want you to think that meta tags are hard though nor of for you to focus a lot of attention on them. The biggest search engines do not pay much attention to meta tags these days because of past abuses - they are much more interested in overall content and links in/out.

    Just for information, you can add meta tags to a webpage very easily using Windows basic text editor Notepad. Just use it to open an example.html file. Meta tags go in the header section of a web page.

    This section starts with a line with just this text:

    <head>
    and ends with the a line with just this text
    </head>

    To add a description, you would enter something like this on a line in between the head tags above.:

    <META Name="description" Content="UK Business Forums - A free UK business forum, UK e-commerce forum, business advice, discussion, chat, networking and meeting other business people in the UK.">

    Keywords:

    <META Name="keywords" Content="business, message board, chat, discuss, discussion, forum, business,ebusiness,ecommerce,e-commerce, business uk, uk business, britain, british, small business, businesses, small, sme, SME, e-commerce forum, ecommerce forum">

    Frontpage (until the most recent version anyway) tends to add all sorts of crap to pages and make them slower to download.

    Oh, the title you see on the windows box is also set in this section:

    <title>My very good webpage</title>

    There are lot of tags for all sorts of things. I doubt you will need more than these basic few though.

    Ideally, each page should have a custom description and set of keywords but very few websites bother with this.

    You can see examples of these on any website simply by clicking on the view option in your browser menu and selecting the option to look at the page source.

    There are a lot of web delevelopers on here who will have skills in creating highly optimised websites and no doubt they shall be along shortly.

    Stuart
     
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    A

    anbow

    Free Member
    Jul 30, 2004
    2
    0
  • #3
    Hi Stuart,

    Thank you very much for your detailed reply. I have not published my website yet. I did try to do it, but something did not work out, I guess I did something wrong somewhere. That will be my next challenge: ).

    I wrote my pages with a website optimisation in mind, full of good and interesting content each one focusing on certain keywords. I will start linking campaign : ) as soon as I have my website published.

    The thing is that when I look at the source code of my pages I see that there are plenty of things which I think must have been automatically added by Website Complete, the program I used initially to build my pages, and may be by Front Page as well. The only reason I decided to use Front page is to be able to add proper meta tags to each individual page and then to be able to publish it.

    But now I have another problem: too many things in my source which I am sure do not need to be there. Here is my home page source (its section from the very beginning)

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
    <HTML xmlns:st1 = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:eek:ffice:smarttags" xmlns:eek: =
    "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:eek:ffice:eek:ffice"><HEAD>
    <meta name="KEYWORDS" content="XXX">
    <meta name="AUTHOR" content=" XXX">
    <meta name="COPYRIGHT" content="XXX">
    <meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="XXX.">
    <meta name="CLASSIFICATION" content="XXX">
    <meta http-equiv="PUBLISHER" content="XXX">
    <meta http-equiv="ABSTRACT" content="XXX">
    <meta http-equiv="REVISIT-AFTER" content="14 days">
    <meta http-equiv="AUDIENCE" content="ALL">
    <meta http-equiv="DISTRIBUTION" content="global">
    <meta http-equiv="RATING" content="general">
    <TITLE>XXX</TITLE>
    <META content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0" name=GENERATOR>
    <meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
    <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1251">
    <META content=Customize1_1 name=ThemeName>
    <META content="5, 0, 7, 3" name=CreatedAppVer>
    <SCRIPT language=JavaScript src="gdsImageSwapping.js"></SCRIPT>




    <SCRIPT language=JavaScript id=gdMouseOverScript>
    <!--
    var gdsImageArray = new Array;
    gdsImageArray['Button2'] = new gdsObjImg('Button2','images/Nav3.png','images/Nav77.png','images/Nav77.png');
    gdsImageArray['Button6'] = new gdsObjImg('Button6','images/Nav5.png','images/Nav6.png','images/Nav6.png');
    gdsImageArray['Button3'] = new gdsObjImg('Button3','images/Nav9.png','images/Nav10.png','images/Nav10.png');
    gdsImageArray['Button4'] = new gdsObjImg('Button4','images/Nav3.png','images/Nav4.png','images/Nav4.png');
    gdsImageArray['Button6'] = new gdsObjImg('Button6','images/Nav5.png','images/Nav6.png','images/Nav6.png');
    gdsImageArray['Button7'] = new gdsObjImg('Button7','images/Nav7.png','images/Nav8.png','images/Nav8.png');
    gdsImageArray['Button3'] = new gdsObjImg('Button3','images/Nav9.png','images/Nav10.png','images/Nav10.png');
    gdsImageArray['Button8'] = new gdsObjImg('Button8','images/Nav11.png','images/Nav12.png','images/Nav12.png');
    gdsImageArray['Button5'] = new gdsObjImg('Button5','images/Nav13.png','images/Nav15.png','images/Nav15.png');
    gdsImageArray['Button10'] = new gdsObjImg('Button10','images/Nav16.png','images/Nav17.png','images/Nav17.png');
    //-->
    </SCRIPT>
    </HEAD>

    All those meta tags which are in capital letters were added by me. In front page I
    1) opened file-properties-general and added a title and
    2) opened file-properties-custom and started adding all sorts of things I found from Internet as important meta tags or possibly important.

    What I noticed while looking through my source code after all that activity was that my title tag was not at the beginning where it is supposed to be, but somewhere in the middle and I have no idea how to move it, as it was placed there automatically by Front Page after I have done what I described above in p.1)

    What I also noticed was that all other meta tags are also lacking any order and again, I have no idea how to move them to the proper places.

    I hope I managed to describe my problem and would be very grateful if we could fix it.

    Thank you
    Anna
     
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    K

    kyber

  • #4
    I don't think that the Title tag is supposed to be anywhere in paticular other than within the header and I do not see any search engine implications for it not being the first thing in the header.

    If you really do not like it not being at the top, why not simply move it? The html is just a text file. Start!Programs|Accessories|Notepad can edit these files. You can also edit in source code mode in FrontPage and make the changes directly.

    The various meta tags you have added are interesting. I am fascinated to know what it is you are publishing as this degree of completeness of meta tags is usually only seen in scientific/academic publishing in which case a sophisticated document management or publishing system is usually working away behind the scenes to populate these fields based on complex database entries.

    The graphics being loaded for your navigation menu is simply a feature of the menu system you have chosen to use. Personally these days, a simple text based menu that uses CSS to enhance its appearance and functionality is much better for reducing page weight and complexity and improving the desirability of your pages for search engines. For more information on such menus, see http://www.stunicholls.myby.co.uk/menus/index.html - such menus are usually defined as lists.

    Similarly, it is better to put such menu code/content at the end of your pages rather than at the bginning. This is to allow the core content of your page to appear sooner - many search engines prioritise the earlier parts of pages. Most search engines also give a lot of weight to good use of headings (<h1>heading</h1>, <h2>sub0heading</h2>, etc - if your headings have lots of crap about fonts and the like around them you are doing it wrong).

    If this is too technical for you, you really do need a web designer as you said. I am surprised that one has not come along yet... (the best web editor as far as many designers are concerned is a text editor - after pencil and paper anyway - but if you do want something more sophisticated then it needs to be something that does not add loads of stuff or change things without permission; personally I use Macromedia Dreamweaver which is the market leader).

    If you want some more help from me (and I am not a web designer) then feel free to me a PM rather than posting further here.

    Stuart
     
    Upvote 0
    V

    vigo

  • #5
    Hi Anna,

    First off I'd get rid of most of those meta tags, unless as Stuart mentioned they are required for some kind of formal indexing system, they add unnecessary weight to the page and serve no useful purpose.

    Personally I'd move the title tag up to the top of the head section so it's the first thing search engine's see - make it important, keyword rich - mention a set of keywords you think people will search for when you want them to find this page.

    Thirdly, move the Javascript into its own file, this allows it to be cached by the browser so it doesn't get downloading everytime (saves time and bandwidth) and means the S.E's don't have to wade through it, use something like
    Code: 
    <script type="text/javascript" src="script.js"></script>

    Next job, as Stuart mentioned, is optimising your content and make sure you use properly structured XHTML so search engine's can properly evalutate your content and users with "non traditional" user agents (browsers on PDAs or screenreaders for example) can work their way around your site easily... of course at this point you should be using a proper XHTML editor like Dreamweaver, EditPlus or Notepad (in decreasing order of cost).

    I'm happy to lend a hand to start you off in the right direction, drop me a PM and we can talk.

    best wishes,

    Nath
     
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