MMOW.biz

MMOW.biz straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines and automatically submit your site to Google Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.  With this in mind it is still necessary you understand what search engines are looking for so you can optimize your pages for best results.

The formula

The general rule of thumb is that most engines use a “formula” to determine keyword relevancy. Each  search engine has its own unique formula that it uses to rank pages.

Generally, this magic formula consists of your page title, overall body content and the number and quality of links pointing back to your site, how long people stay on your site, etc.

It’s important to note that every engine is different. Some may look at inbound links (number of people linking to you), others may place more emphasis on your body content.

Content Talks

Search engines can’t “see” a site. They can only “read” a site. Pretty does not talk to a search engine. What “talks” to a search engine are the words, the content, the material in your site that explains, shares, informs, educates, and babbles. Make sure you have quality word content for a search engine to examine and compare with all the parts and pieces to give you a good “score”.

Write Your Content with Searchers in Mind

How do you find information on the Internet? If you are writing something that you want to be “found” on the Internet, think about the words and phrases someone would use to find your information. Use them more than once as you write, but not in every sentence. Learn how search engines scan your content, evaluate it, and categorize it so you can help yourself get in good favour with search engines.

Content in Links and Images

Your site may not have much text, mostly photographs and links, but you have places in which to add textual content. Search engines look for alt and title in link and image tags. While these have a bigger purpose of making your site more accessible, having good descriptions and words in these attributes helps provide more content for search engines to digest.

Link Popularity

It is not how good your site is, it is how good the sites are that link to you. The more site that links to you and the better they are the higher your search ranking.

Good Navigation Links

A search engine crawls through your site, moving from page to page. Good navigational links to the categories, archives, and various pages on your site will invite a search engine to move gracefully from one page to another, following the connecting links and visiting most of your site.

The Big three

There are a handful of engines out there that bring traffic, but the reality is a very large percentage of search engine traffic comes from Google, Yahoo and MSN.  Yes, there are other engines like AOL, Netscape etc., but they pull their results from the Big 3.

So in other words, once you start getting traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN, you’ll rank well in the others automatically.

No matter how attractive a site’s design, if it isn’t practical, it’s not doing its job. Design for the screen involves a new set of requirements to deal with and pitfalls to avoid.

There are many good and bad things you can do in web design, the following is a list of some of those options and how you should deal with them.

1. No page counters. Page counters do nothing except make you look like an amateur, mess with your design and tell people information about your site you probably don’t want them to know!

2. Forget blinking or flashing text. The only place you see blinking and or flashing text is on the neon signs of naked bars or websites made in the mid 90s! People don’t like them and expect to see naked people inside sites or buildings that have them … enough said.

Let’s discuss an important point about online content/text versus print. People read text off a computer screen at about 1/4th the speed that they do paper.

This important fact tells us that we should keep what we want to say on the web short and sweet. If some of my articles have been too long, I apologize for my flapping mouth and keyboard!

3. Make your titles on your web page make sense. One of the core attributes of a web page is its title. The page title is what users will see in there search engine results. People pay attention to page titles, so you should make sure that they are clear.

4. Flash intros. I am guilty of this as much as the next guy. A few years back Flash intros where all the rage, not sure if anyone knew why we needed them, but as it turns out the ‘skip intro’ button is the 2nd most clicked on the web today. Don’t waste your time on Flash intros and in my opinion Flash should be only used in special situations.

5. Under construction pages. Just forget it, if the page is not ready, don’t put it up. If you have links that are pointing to the pages, disable them until your page is ready.

There is one exception, MMOW.biz uses an Under Construction page as a placeholder for newly created site, this is to allow you the site admin to find and login to your sites backend. I recommended you don’t disable this page until you have some content in your site.

What ever you do, don’t put one of those cheesy ‘under construction’ images on the page.

6. Do keep a common layout throughout your website. Some web designers get bored with what they’re doing and decide to create different layouts for web pages within same website.

People like things consistent, so your web pages should be too. That’s why all windows programs have the same look and feel, the same goes for the Mac programs.

7. Don’t create automatic pop-up windows! JavaScript pop-up windows are probably one of the most annoying things you can do to someone visiting your website. If you want to annoy your visitors go right ahead.

Pop-ups are typically used to present ads and other ‘non-core’ material to users. If you use pop-up windows, you have to learn how to integrate those elements into your main pages and forget about pop-up windows.

8. Do create a site map page. A site map is a simple web page with text links to all the websites sub-pages organized in proper categories, a lot of people will use a site map if they can find one. MMOW.biz provides a site map plugin to help you create and manage your site map.

9. Don’t centre everything on your web pages. Centred text on pages is just hard to read, just think about having to read a book where all the text was centred! Print rules have been refined for well over a hundred years now, and they work well. When in doubt about layout, think about how they do it in print.

With that in mind, for western cultures, left justified text (text that is lined up on the left side of the page) is the way to go. You can centre major titles or something similar, but do it very sparingly.

10. 10. Don’t use too many colours in your website. Colour is a way that people identify things, that is why the Coke label dominantly red and the Pepsi label is dominantly blue. Keep the colour scheme of your website limited to a couple of colours and keep it consistent across your site unless you want to denote some major section.

11. Always try and make things as clear as possible to your visitors, what may be obvious to you may not be to your visitors!

12. Keep your site fresh. Unlike printed matter, a website is not a one-time thing it is an ongoing experience. Be prepared to update your site, at least once a month, adding new information, discarding anything out-of-date.

Repeat visitors are always desired, so give them something to come back for. Try to include a “hook”: a service or current information tied to your expertise that will bring users back to your site regularly.

13. Be backward compatible. Using cutting edge technology can exclude readers. Many if not most users will be at least one generation behind, so don’t shut them out.

14. Test your site as visitors will see it. This means viewing your site at several resolutions (640×480, 800×600, 1024×768) and color depths (256, 16-bit, 24-bit), on several browsers (Netscape 2 and later, Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 and later) and OS’s (Windows, Mac). While no site looks identical on all monitors, browsers, and computers, you can design sites that look good on all—but only if you test the site on all. will help you do this in one simple step.