This week's goal:
Some would say that what any person wants in life is to be validated. We each want to be assured our work is really good. Unfortunately, it is unusual to find convincing validation in our lives. As web authors, however, at last we can get validation, at least for our coding. Validation services are also a good way to solve problems with your page and learn html.
Once it is finished you usually will want to attract as many viewers as possible. As we start refining the class projects, we are going to do some teamwork to help each other promote our sites.This week you will master ways to both validate and promote your site.
What to do this week:
1. Read the article by Alan Richmond at Web Developers Virtual Library about Validating HTML at http://WDVL.com/Authoring/HTML/Validation/.
2. Read one or both of the articles about search engines at Search Engine Watch at http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/index.html or at Submit-It at http://www.submit-it.com/subfaq.htm.
3. Read the comments in the "Validate" link below. This includes the page about "keywords" you read for topic 3. The ideas about using "keywords" may have more meaning now. The Readings link includes other articles about search engines that you may find useful.
4. Try submitting some of your pages to the W3C Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org/ and either Dr. HTML at http://www2.imagiware.com/RxHTML/ or Web Mechanic at http://www.netmechanic.com/. Compare the results. If you learn something especially useful from validating or if you have a lot of problems, send a message to the ListServ sharing your experience.
5. Try to find one web ring that relates to the topic of your site or a site that you would like to ask to link to yours.
6. Write a press release about your web site. Either do this in html and post the draft on the web where classmates can read it and respond, or send it as a message to the ListServ. Please read the draft press releases from your classmates and post suggestions or send suggestions to them.
7. Let's divide the class into teams of three students each. Go to the class directory and count down from the top, with each group of three students making up a team. I will assign each team a search engine to research. Please contact each other, do the research, and send a report to the ListServ. For the assigned search engine, each team should report:
- where should URLs be submitted? Or does the search engine only do its own searching?
- what criteria does the search engine use for ranking pages?
- does the search engine use "keywords" or "descriptions"?
- are there particular forms to be filled out for search engines or web hosts they reject?
- should people submit URLs from deeper in the site?
- how long before we should expect results from this search engine?
- are there any hints for improving ranking with this search engine?
Some of this information is already summarized at Project Cool's Developer's Tips about Search Engines. Your team should dig deeper to find ways to improve rankings.
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Intro
to Topic 9