Creating Friendly Websites and Pages

by Walt Stoneburner

These are a number of secret and unconventional rules and guidelines that help make a site popular and keep visitors coming back. Make your sites friendly to visiting humans, make your sites friendly to search engines so people can find your sites.

Understanding How Web Engines Work

Search engines that operate by a database of categories, like Yahoo, rank sites depending on when you registered, how the operators manually rank you, and how much you pay for your listing. Free listings typically get ranked below paid listings, unless there is something very special or popular about the site.

Search engines that operate by combing through the entire web, such as AltaVista, index on keywords found both in the header and body of documents.

Search engines that operate by looking at how many other sites are pointing at you, like Google does, make the assumption that the more other people link to you, the more useful you are, and thus more deserving of a higher ranking.

Trying to Trick the Search Engines

Some techniques people have tried are:

Registering to a zillion search engines. Save yourself the time and money, pick a few popular search engines. Many of the "register with 1000 search engines" are special purpose ones that are targeting foreign countries and specific interest groups. Visit somewhere like DogPile, which is a search engine that searches other search engines, and see where it's looking. Go register at those sites, which are usually free. Search engines quite often rip off the database of other search engines in order to be a superset; hit just the popular ones.
Registering over and over at the same engine. Search engines will come and visit you once, grab a few pages, and come back later (as not to tax your server). Continual resubmissions are usually ignored, and at worse can get your site blacklisted. Register once. If your site does a major overhaul, then consider resubmitting.
Duplicating keywords. Search engines are on to this trick, and fold out duplicate words. Even better, some search engines are refusing to list people who do this. Salting the mine usually has the opposite effect than you intended.
Adding suffixes, plurals, and case changes to keywords. Search engines are getting much smarter; you need only use just the root word. Keywords are typically case insensitive these days; case changes are another form of duplicated keywords and can get you excluded from listings as well.
Adding lots of different keywords in the header section. Search engines have combated this by assuming that pages with a lot of keywords are more generic. You can get better listing results by splitting up your work and making individual pages with distinct keywords that are focused to a topic.
Keywords in comments. By putting keywords in comments, , people have tried to bloat up their document's body artificially. Good search engines parse the HTML code and eliminate comments from candidate indexable words.
Using white text on a white background. To get past comment exclusions, people have tried to use the same color text as the background. Search engines are on to this and may opt to exclude you in their listings.
Tiny, tiny, print. By adding lots of visible, but very, very small text (usually scuffled off at the bottom of a page), people have gotten past the same-color exclusions. This trick appears to be effective, until you realize that the more generic your page's content, the less likely you'll be listed. Visitors who see your page instantly know they're being scammed.

In summary, search engine technology has gotten a lot smarter, and the best way to get listed -- after all, that was the goal -- is to have specific content that's well described by a terse set of meta-tags. There is just no substitute for good content, well described content, and sharing links with other sites.

Site Analysis

By nature or design, the majority of your site's visitors won't reach you through the front door. Thus your domain name is not as important as you think! People typically go to a search engine, click a link and bookmark it without bothering to read the URL.

Consequently, the most popular pages on your site most likely won't be your main page ...they will be the best indexed and most interesting page(s) you have!

What you want to do is ask your web site administrator for your site's usage statistics. Aggregate them across the pages and produce counts. A small handful of these pages will have an astronomically higher hit rate than your other pages.

Use this information to your benefit.

These are the pages you want to use as sub-portals into the other areas of your site! You know people are getting to these pages, so capitalize on that knowledge -- provide more links, even if in an unrelated sidebar.
For whatever reason, your popular pages can quickly turn you into an authoritative source of information. Consider adding more of that information to your site -- as you're already indexed for it. You can use the additional pages as secondary portals as well.
Revisit the meta-tags on pages that you want to have more hits. Give the pages a more interesting title. Consider partitioning the information into several different pages and link them.
Save yourself a lot of wasted and unappreciated effort. By knowing what doesn't interest people and what's being neglected on your site, you can reclaim a lot of time.

The Big DOs

Separate Content from Presentation. Whether by use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Personal Home Page (PHP), or mod_layout, it is easier to maintain and automate pages when the content that's displayed isn't polluted by the mechanism that provides the format. Tags should convey what something is, and styles should convey how the client wants to display it in form (layout) and presentation (color and graphics).
Hints for Search Engines: A Links Page. Make a links page that isn't intended for human readers but rather for search engines by listing the important URLs at your site in a bland and terse style that a simple search engine can parse. Then submit that page to the search engines and let them comb your site. Since the search engine is going to read the links and go visit them all, it's a clever way of submitting a batch of links all at once. This way you can list multiple entry points into your site.
Make Readable Links. It's considered bad form to say something like "for more information, click here" rather than indicating the nature of the link -- even though it appears from statistical sampling that this technique is more effective. The reason isn't that there's a bunch of lowest common denominator users floating at the low end of the gene pool, it's because site authors don't help readers by saying what's at the other side of a link. Construct sentences that allow a reader to dig for more information or examples, letting the context of the sentence imply where the link goes.
Keep the Site Fresh. A site that changes, via automation, is more exciting to users, more apt to be linked to by other users, and demonstrates the need for search engines and users to come back more often.
Show How New Something Is. Ever revisited a site, but you didn't know what changed? Ever been to a site where "new" splashes were themselves stale? Don't just use the concept of new or old, instead show how new something is. This attracts visitors to click through, and it acts as a passive nag reminding you to give your site the attention it needs. See an example.
Keep Pages Small. Keep your HTML small and tight to make your pages load fast. Visit www.the5k.org and see how HTML masters make very elaborate and interactive pages in a small amount of space. You can learn a lot by doing a View Source on other people's pages; this is perhaps the single best way to learn HTML.
Trust Yourself to Hand Roll Your Pages. Tools like FrontPage and exporting Word documents are convenient, but they generate huge volumes of unnecessary tags that slow load times and introduce browser compatibility rendering errors. Learning the underlying raw HTML, using a simple text editor, a compliant browser, and validating your pages will provide fast, small, easy to maintain, and attractive pages. There are even tools to help tidy your HTML and check your pages for dead links.
Reflect Header Keywords in Your Document Body. Search engines score your pages more highly when the keywords in the body match the keywords in the header. This may mean you have to edit your content a bit to use certain words, but it helps people find your pages easier. Think of what someone will type into a search engine to find your page, then include that wording in a sentence.
Have a Good Opening Paragraph. Some search engines will display the first paragraph or sentence of your page. If your page starts with a short synposis, overview, or description of what's on it, it will get more hits.
Use HEIGHT and WIDTH in Image Tags. If the browser doesn't know how large an image's dimensions are, it has to wait for the image to finish downloading before it can render the rest of the page correctly. When you provide image sizes, it can render the page and fill the image later.
Don't Use the Browser to Scale Images. Browsers are usually pretty poor about scaling images with decent quality, so make your HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes exact. Too small, and you load more image data than you really needed to, giving the appearance of a slow page. Too large, and the picture becomes blocky. Have multiple images on your server if several sizes are needed.
Take Advantage of Image Caching. Once your browser has loaded an image for a page, you can use it repeatedly without penalty within the page. Browsers are also good at caching between pages, so if you have the same graphic on another page, it should load ultra fast.
Learn to use META-information. Each web page consists of two parts, the header and the body. Many web search engines get their clues from META tags in the header section. Learn to use these:
Tell Robots When To Visit Again. Register with a few primary web pages, but also use the META tag REVISIT to influence browsers to keep revisiting; don't be greedy by setting too small a value. (Robots and spiders are different from WebSnakes which download a site to the local hard drive.)
Have Consistency in Design. Related areas on your website should have a similar design theme, so it's noticeable when you've left an area.
Avoid Forcing Readers to Click More Than Needed. Breaking tightly related information into multiple pages, forcing readers to click for more information, etc. are all sources of unnecessary interactive distraction. Longer pages read and print better than ones with artificial boundaries. Consider the Internet a new kind of media with its own rules. Where the physical size of a book forced us to have to turn the page to continue, that's no longer necessary -- even with comic books.
Use Color Wisely and Sparingly. Use a simple yet consistent color scheme. Visit Visibone for great posters, discussions, and add-ins for web-based palettes. Additionally, The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations is a great textbook resource for theme-based colors.

The Big DON'Ts

Avoid Font Soup. Just as color can be abused, having too many fonts, or mixing the wrong font families can create a terrible look. This is definitely a case where more isn't better.
Don't Throw Technology Around for Technology's Sake. Recognize that advanced features limit your audience. Every ActiveX control cuts you off from the very large non-Microsoft world (this is a good way to lose foreign visitors and businesses that are using Linux). Every Cascading Style Sheet, JavaScript, graphic, Flash, and Java app you add reduces your audience further due to bandwidth and capabilities. Some people can't display these things, others are impatient, and some people have to pay for local phone service (especially outside the USA). Help them. You need to decide upon a proper balance; consider having a plain vanilla page in addition to the snazzy GUI. It takes effort to make a good site. Evaluate if the return on investment is worth your additional time, expense, site maintenance, and lost visitors by pushing the envelope too far. Content wins over presentation in all but a few exceptional cases.
Avoid Advertisements. We know from experience that people do not get rich off of selling ads on their website. Ads unrelated to you are annoying, distracting, space consuming, and usually slow down page load times. Besides, serious surfers use ad killing software. We hate ads in ICQ, we hate them on web pages.
Avoid Remote Resources. Anything that's not local to your server, such as a counter or a graphic, means that the browser has to go look up information from another site. If that site is slower, or congested, your page loads slower. If that site is down, or temporarily unavailable, your page is broken.
Avoid Large Graphics. Learn how to use GIF (though many people have valid political issues with this format), JPEG, and PNG files optimally; keep the file size for any given graphic to under 32k if possible. If you have multiple graphics, try to keep the total size in this range. Most visitors are using modems, and many aren't getting 56K connections. Be bandwidth friendly, because a visitor who's bored waiting for a page to load will go browse elsewhere.
Avoid Lots of Small Graphics. Most web browsers, to reduce load on a given server, can only download four to eight graphics concurrently. Thus it can be better to download one larger graphic than dozens of smaller ones. This is why many photo albums take so long to load.
Avoid Clip-Art. Clip-art usually conveys amateur; only add graphics if it adds to a page's readability or content. Otherwise, you're just chewing up bandwidth. Problems with clip-art are:
- it's the wrong size (often too big)
- it's usually blocky (poor resolution)
- it's the wrong color
- it's usually flat
- it doesn't match the page's style or theme
- it doesn't match the page's topic
- it isn't unique
Avoid Motion. Movement is distracting on static text pages because it diverts the eye's attention while trying to read. The evil <BLINK> attribute should be used ultra-sparingly, if at all. Animated graphics pose similar problems.
Avoid Frames. It takes a lot of hard work to get frames to operate correctly, with the biggest problems being:
- recursing into your own site
- printing the browser window
- invoking JavaScript that hasn't loaded yet
- the open-link-in-another-window problem
There are also legal considerations about wrapping someone else's site in your frames; courts are usually well behind the times in rational thinking when it comes to citizen rights and drawing parallels between technology and the real world. More importantly, frames consume a lot of screen real estate - if you want a toolbar, just put it in somewhere in the document; users have continually shown they don't mind scrolling to get to it.
Avoid Background Sounds and Music. Pages with sound usually take longer to load, depend on users having sound cards, and it is darn annoying to have the same "welcome" message playing each time the user presses the back button from a link on your page. Consider the fact that users "power browse" by visiting more than one site or page at a time. But the worse offense is that it limits when a visitor will be able to visit your site: if it's late, he make wake the baby by going to your page; if she's at work, her boss may hear her surfing non-work related pages. Even at lunch, this disturbs co-workers. Make the sound something they can get to, not an insupressable default.
Don't Use Wide Pages. Forcing your page width, for example by enclosing the body of the document inside a fixed size table, can cause a page to be too wide to print. Wide pages also create long lines of text, which are harder for the eye to follow.
Avoid Counters. Ask yourself, when visiting other people's pages, if you really care how many visitors they have? No. You don't. You are interested in content. It's hard to find useful, accurate, non-intrusive counters that don't slow a page down, which fit the color, theme, and size of the page. Without using browser cookies, sessions, and other advanced techniques, counters are going to give an artifically inflated number. If a user uses a different browser program, has dynamic IP addresses, or accesses your pages from different locations, even at different times, it taints the actual visits. Instead, work with the web master to do an analysis of your site's logs. After all, just because several thousand people have read a page doesn't make the information on the page have more value (though it does make he location of that page valuable to potential advertisers).

If you have corrections, ideas you'd like to contribute for credit here, spotted a dead link, or would like to suggest a useful resource, please feel free to send them to the author.