Tips for web designers and publishers
 
1 Make sure people find your web site - hand shaking with crawler's go
2 Search Engines you should submit to  
3 Checking Incoming Links to your website  
4 Fresh look - Webometrices:  Ranking of World Universities – July 06  
5 Site testing for any website  (BROKENLINK.ZIP) :  
6 USING Local Search engine (search.zip) :  
7 USING sample page for faculty (Sample1.zip) and Smaple2 (How to use it ?  
8 Enter the URL and check the popularity.  
9 Assistance to web masters:  
11 Search Engine Optimization DHTML Menu Case Study  
10 Google's Newly Independent Sitemaps Standard is Boon to Publishers  
 

 

Make sure people find your web site (Additional Reading )

There are 4 most important  tags:

    <META name=“description” Content=“VLSI Database Design and Implementation”>
 

     <META name=“keywords” Content=“VLSI, Database, Design, Implementation”>
 

    <Title> This page is about VLSI Design </Title>
 

     <H2>  This the heading that appears on top of the PAGE</H2>   ( Heading - may be H2, H3, H4...H6)

The title of a page is the name that appears in the title bar of most of the  Web browsers, page banners, and link bars. The title can be different from the file name. For example, the title of your home page could be "My home page" even though the file name is " Default.htm."

 
Add/Change the title, description, and keywords  of a Web page - FrontPage 2003
  1. On the View menu, click Folder List.
  2. On the Folder List, click on the page you are interested. Open it design view. Right click on page --> Properties, and then click the General tab.
  3. Enter the title, description and keywords ( each word is separated by comma). 
Adding heading :
Open you page in design mode -- Type the text on the top of your page and select it . Change the font from  Normal to : Heading 1  or Heading 2 or Heading 3 or...  Heading 6 ( Smallest )

Search Engines you should submit to
Google , Google Scholar  
dmoz Open Directory Project

The two listed above are absolutely essential.

Alltheweb/Fast

NOTE: If you submit your site as http://www.mysite.com it will only be seen that way if you wish it to be seen without the www ie http://mysite.com you must submit it that way. Whatever way you submit ALWAYS present your site domain in the exact same way not only to search engines, but on your signature lines for emails, lists and forums. Though in forums you can use a keyword and link the text to your domain, thereby obtaining backlinks with each of your posts.

Search results on AlltheWeb are now provided by Yahoo!. If you are interested in submitting your site to be considered for free inclusion in the Yahoo! Search index, please Click Here. (Yahoo! registration required).

Inktomi
LookSmart
Yahoo! Directory

Follow their guidelines exactly to submit your site. (ONLY AFTER OPTIMIZING)

If you do want to submit to more sites here is a listing of many more search engine add pages. Search Engine List


Checking Incoming Links to your website:

Open yahoo.com à In Search type  link:www.kfupm.edu.sa/math ( change this as you wbsite)

Once the search is over you see all incoming links to your site

Better if you  select “Except from this domain” in Show Links dropdown.

See the interesting results. For web administrator it is very good tool to know

Know from where you have given links. You may put this to your chairman and ask him assign some senior faculty in the department to find “ Lists of the Places where your deserve to be given linked ( Not in the list shown by yahoo) – may be society, journals etc. Then you can go their web site and make request – it  may be paid or free. This is going to enhance the  web - ranking contribution of your department to KFUPM.
Fresh look - Webometrices:  Ranking of World Universities – July 06
Top 100 from Middle East
1/100        HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM –                145/3000
16/100      AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT  -                  1,230/3000
25/100    King Fahd  University of petroleum and minerals   1,681/3000

                                                               

RANKING CRITERIA

WR      =4*Rank (Visibility)      + 2*Rank (Size) +1*Rank (Rich Files)+Rank(Sc) (by Google Scholar ( papers and citations in domain)

Smaller the number – better is rank

 

 

Let us have close look as below

145 Hebrew Uni. Jeruselum: 199(vi) 162(si) 49(ri) 223(sc)

1230 American Uni. Beirut: 1,628(vi) 1,291(si) 1,052(ri) 1312(sc)

1681 KFUPM:     1,308(vi) 2,534(si) 766(ri)    998(sc)

 

TRAGET: Raise KFUPM ranking above American Uni. Beirut

 

Our weakest part is 2,534 (si)  ( THIS NUMBER SHOULD BE SMALL )

 

It means   we want  to improve our ranking by size( Smaller the number, better is rank).

 

Let us see how it is calculated:

Number of pages is calculated using four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and   Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalised to 1 for the highest value. Then for each domain, maximum and minimum results are excluded and every institution is assigned a rank according to the combined sum.

 

In simple Words:  IF WE CAN ASK EVERY FACULTY TO PUBLISH AS MANY AS PAGES – OF ACADEMIC USE, THEN OUR RANKING WILL IMPROVE.

 

ALSO, LET THE FACULTY UPLOAD THEIR COURSE RELATED DATA, PUBLICATIONS – ABSTRACT ( Minimum) TO IMPROVE RANKING DUE TO RICH FILE.

 
 

 

Site testing for any website  (BROKENLINK.ZIP) :
 
BROKENLINK.ZIP is program that can be installed by all Department Web Developers.
I am using it everyday to improve the system and generate statistics.
Also, when run it is for your website: you will see all pages where title is missing and list of broken links to fix them.

USING Local Search engine (search.zip) :
 
    It gives very valuable Information: Item found  and Page title missing..
    If search item is NOT found and it is in website then why ???
               
USING sample page for faculty (Sample.zip) :
  1.     Avoid Java Script based - Menu ( Faulty will have difficulty to manage it )
  2.     Avoid Applet based menu
  3.     Avoid Frameset based

Enter the URL and check the popularity.

http://tools.webmasters.sk/link-popularity.php

Assistance to web masters:
 
A committee can be  formed in each department  with short term  and   long long term goal and  members from faculty and staff/research assistants who can work - together with  webmaster.
  1.      Recommend the Name of Societies and Associations who can be requested to add
         our website link
  2.      Someone with task to find school/colleges and Universities - request for exchange link
  3.      Make department page - content rich, collect keywords - based on research areas, fields and add these in 
         the keyword meta tags appropriately - based on the content of the page
  4.      Assign some one to review all faculty pages and prepare the list of websites of faculty who need urgent 
         follow up and help from committee to develop their website.
  5.      Recommend for Department website - improvement
  6.      Recommend the sample page - for use by faculty members.
  7.      Give presentation to faculty in one of the  Council Meetings - where everybody is there "
         Where committee can explain the things QUICK ITEMS - TO BE DONE " including the  things,  
         Webmaster have learned from ITC- in meetings and seminars
  8.      Assign someone - to help  in Upload items ( scanning Abstract and change to PDF and upload Explain 
         Visibility and Web ranking - How it can be improved with faculty cooperation ?.
  9.      Add a page for student projects, Ph.D. thesis and M.S. thesis - where abstract can be uploaded.
 

Google's Newly Independent Sitemaps Standard is Boon to Publishers

The world's three largest search engines agreed this week to support the same protocol for submitting Web pages to their crawlers.

Google created the protocol, known as sitemaps, in June 2005 as an experiment  to help webmasters increase their visibility in Google's search index.  Microsoft and Yahoo agreed to support the protocol yesterday. As part of the announcement, the existing sitemaps protocol from Google gets a version upgrade to Sitemaps 0.9 and moves to sitemaps.org, where it will be maintained as an independent standard with an Attribution/Share Alike creative commons license.

Fourth place search engine Ask.com is not taking part in the standards process. Ask.com does not currently accept site maps submissions from webmasters.

By agreeing to support one set of standards, the search engines are making it easier for publishers to maintain one XML file that describes the content of their site. Given that webmasters are most likely to create site maps first for the largest search engine and can be reticent to maintain different copies for each engine, Microsoft and Yahoo were effectively forced to support the standard or risk falling further behind in terms of pages indexed. The search engines have long argued over which indexes more pages.

>From the press release:

A Sitemap is an XML file that can be made available on a website and acts as a marker for search engines to crawl certain pages. It is an easy way for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. It does this by conveniently allowing webmasters to list all of their URLs along with optional metadata, such as the last time the page changed, to improve how search engines crawl and index their websites.

Sitemaps enhance the current model of Web crawling by allowing webmasters to list all their Web pages to improve comprehensiveness, notify search engines of changes or new pages to help freshness, and identify unchanged pages to prevent unnecessary crawling and save bandwidth. Webmasters can now universally submit their content in a uniform manner. Any webmaster can submit their Sitemap to any search engine which has adopted the protocol.

The Sitemaps protocol used by Google has been widely adopted by many Web properties, including sites from the Wikimedia Foundation and the New York Times Company. Any company that manages dynamic content and a lot of web pages can benefit from Sitemaps. For example, if a company that utilizes a content management system (CMS) to deliver custom web content – (i.e., pricing, availability and promotional offers) - to thousands of URLs places a Sitemap file on its web servers, search engine crawlers will be able discover what pages are present and which have recently changed and to crawl them accordingly. By using Sitemaps, new links can reach search engine users more rapidly by informing search engine “spiders” and helping them to crawl more pages and discover new content faster. This can also drive online traffic and make search engine marketing more effective by delivering better results to users.

For companies looking to improve user experience while keeping costs low, Sitemaps also helps make more efficient use of bandwidth. Sitemaps can help search engines find a company’s newest content more efficiently and avoid the need to revisit unchanged pages. Sitemaps can list what is new on a site and quickly guide crawlers to that new content.