Internet Librarian–Keynote Day 3

Shari Thurow
Web Presence for Internet Librarians

Shari is the Webmaster/Marketing directory at Grantastic Designs
She says she loves librarians.
She’s working on a PHD in Library Science
She says that librarians will be the heroes of the web

Goals of this presentation:
Define a search engine friendly web site design
Search engine optimization essentials
Other design considerations

Search engine friendly design:
-is not a design that increases Google ranks
-rather, it si a user-friendly design that can be easily found on both crawler-based and human-based search engine
Search engines are the “third browser”

5 basic rules of easy desing
-easy to read
-easy to navigate
–people should know where they are at at all times
-easy to find
-consistent in layout and design
-quick to download
–the majority of the web page needs to download in less than 30 seconds on a 56k modem

FAQ page
You put the question at the top of the page, which then links to the answer below (with and anchor tag)

Search engines:
they index text
they follow links
they measure popularity

If you make a flash-based site, your site will not get rankings in search engines
-search engines don’t like to index javascript based links

Do your words or phrases on your page match what your target audiences type into search engines?
Do you provide easy access to keyword focused text that spiders can easily follow?

successful search optimization depends on:
text component (index text)
–giving lots of keywords on page
–average search query is 2.3 words
–every web page should have a unique title tag
–breadcrumbs links on page
–use hyphens not underscores
link component (follow links)

If you need to figure out what text the search engines are indexing, select all on the web page, then paste into NotePad.

Link Component
Site & Page Architecture

Link component essentials include:
-site navigatgion scheme
-cross lining

types of site navigation
-text links
-navigation buttons
-image maps
-menus (form and DHTML)
-flash
these are ordered from most search engine friendly to the least friendly

Search engines do not fill out forms, so they do not index drop-down menus

Shari stresses that you need to design for your users, not for the search engines.   If your users want flash (for example, the entertainment industry) then use flash
–always have two forms of navigation on your web site
–combination of graphic images and graphic links

Most important rule in marketing
MPABS
“Most People Are Basically Stupid”

Site map should not be a bandaid
–if the search engines can only access your site via a site map, then your site needs a redesign

Informational pages
–contain information your target audience is interested in
–do not contain a lot of sales hype or industry (library) jargon
–often have a simpler layout

15-20% of search queries have location qualifiers

Cross-linking is very important
Cross linking communicates that you think a page is important

Technorati Tag: IL2006

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