Microsoft’s Live Search Engine Updated
Microsoft Corp has updated their Live Search engine and has focused mainly on improving searches related to entertainment, shopping, local and health.
“With this update to Live Search, our engineering focus is on the areas that matter most to our 185 million consumers who use our service every month. We have made dramatic progress in delivering a better search experience to our customers,” said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of the Search and Advertising Platform Group at Microsoft. “We know what kinds of things consumers are searching for, and we have invested in those key high-interest verticals, including entertainment, shopping, health and local search. With the core platform in place we intend to win customers and earn their loyalty one query at a time.”
[ Read full Press Release from Microsoft ]
Live Search Homepage
What does this mean for Caribbean Web Developers?
Google is the undisputed king of search right now with Yahoo a distant second and Microsoft third. Microsoft is focusing on improving it’s search engine to prevent further slippage in it’s already small market share as well as to keep up with improvements being made by Yahoo and Google to their search products. This is good news for Caribbean Web Developers, especially those who follow proper web standards and understand the importance of proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google is on top and more than like many of us receive the highest percentage of our search engine traffic from Google, but improvements in other search engines allows us to receive good traffic from all major search engines, not only Google.
W3 Schools – vital resource for Web Professionals
W3school.com is a free online resource for tutorials related to web development, web programming, scripting and other web building topics. The information on w3schools.com is vital to any web developer looking for a free, easily accessible and professionally created resource.
Newcomers or Professionals
No matter what level of web development you are at or how many years you have been professional you will always find this website as a useful tool to acquire new information and skills or to practice or brush up on existing skills. If you are new to web designing or a student your learning experience will be helped by the streamline and step by step format of each lesson, complete with examples, tests and quizzes.
Technical Terms and Abbreviations Explained – RSS
RSS stands for really simple syndication. It allows users who frequently access the internet to get updates from sites they frequent without having to visit the site. The content of RSS Feeds can be can be displayed in software called RSS Readers, these software may be online based or desktop based. Feed readers check feeds that you have subscribed to at regular intervals to see if there is any new information added to the website.
Most popular websites have RSS feeds and if you are a web developer you should ensure that your website supports and displays RSS feeds.
How does your website look on a Mobile Phone?
In 2008 over one billion users are expected to access the internet via a mobile phone. Ever wonder how your website(s) display on a mobile device? The dotMobi has a very useful online JAVA emulator that allows website owners to see how their site would display on a cell phone. With such a large and growing market, it’s not a bad idea to register the .MOBI extension of your website(s) for future use.
Caribwebdev.com displayed on a Mobile Phone
Google Webmaster Tools Simple Tutorial
Google Webmaster Tools is a free online toolkit provided by Google to website owners. It provides important information to website owners related to their website(s) which allows them to better optimize their websites to attract traffic from search engines.
Registration and Verification
Anybody with a website can sign up for and use Google’s webmaster tools. After signing up users will have to verify each website they add to their account by added a generated html file to their web server or by adding a special meta tag to one of their pages. Once verified users can configure many options related to their site such as how often they want Google’s bots to index their pages, stop certain pages from being indexed, set a preferred format to represent their domain and so on.
Diagnostics, Statistics and Linkage
After registration and verification it will take a few weeks for sufficient data to be collected about your domain but after this waiting period you will be able to access detailed information about your domain. Web crawl errors will point you to troublesome pages which are missing, unreachable, timing out, or returning errors to Google’s crawlers. Top search queries and clicks for domains are displayed so that website owners can track their SEO progress and optimize their content. The Index Stats display the various pages already indexed by Google while the Crawl Stats display average pagerank of your pages while noting the page with the highest rank. Subscriber Stats show a link to any RSS feed or any other form of syndicated content found on your pages by the crawler and the amount of users subscribed to them through Google’s services such as Google reader. The very important links tab allows you to view links within your site as well as links from other sites that point to pages within your website.
Screen shots of Help Page, Homepage and Dashboard
Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file which lists links that are available for crawling on a domain. Some websites have a special page where all links on a site are listed where users can go to better navigate the pages available on a domain, but technically such pages are not sitemaps although they do allow easier access to domain links by site users and search engine bots. Google Webmaster Tool’s supports the adding of text, XML and even RSS sitemaps to a domain listed as long as it is verified and the sitemap file is listed in the root area of the domain. For Example:
http://www.sitename.com/sitemap.xml - correct placement of sitemap
http://www.sitename.com/sitemap.xml - incorrect placement of sitemap that will return an error
Help Centre
Visit the excellent Webmaster Help Centre to find help any issues related to Google Webmaster Tools, adding sitemaps or getting your site listed in Google’s search engine.
Nofollow Attribute
The “nofollow” attribute was created by Google in 2005 as a measure to control the large amounts of spam and “link plugging” that was overrunning sites such as blogs, guest books, forums and any other site that offered site visitors the opportunity to post any information or feedback directly to the website. Please note that “nofollow” is a non-standard HTML attribute value.
Google gained the support of it’s competitors and other two major search engines MSN and Yahoo who also had problems with the high volume of spam being indexed by their spiders. The nofollow attribute basically marks a link, telling search engines not to index the link or include it in any of it’s rankings and sometimes even search results.
Nofollow Attribute Example
<a href=”http://www.websitecom/info.html” rel=”nofollow”>text for link</a>
Regular Hyperlink Example
<a href=”http://www.websitecom/info.html”>text for link</a>
When to use the Tag
The Nofollow tag should be used anywhere on a page where site visitors have the ability to add links to to the page such as guest books and blog comments. The tag can also be used when linking to sites not supported or even to competitors as to not contribute to higher rankings of their website.
Web Browsers, Explanation and Market Share
What is a web browser?
A web browser is a computer software that enables computer users to view and interact with information such as images, text and videos displayed on a website which is accessible via the internet or a local area network.
The Web Browsing Analogy
It is important for web professionals to stay abreast of happenings, news and updates related to web browsers. A good analogy which can be used is that we the web developers create the roads called websites and web browsers are the vehicles that visitors traverse or web creations, so it’s important we stay up to date with changes related to these “vehicles” to ensure compatibility as well as to be able to take advantage of any new features and/or technology that may become available in regular updates.
Web Browser Market Share
There are various entities that track the types of browsers that web surfers use to traverse the world wide web and so the statistics available are varied and offer different data. Caribwebdev.com has taken the time to browse through, compare and analyze many of these statistics available online and averages can be viewed below:
- Internet Explorer - 82%
- Mozilla Firefox - 12%
- Safari, Opera, Netscape etc. - 6%
The importance of ensuring your web creations are compatible with various browsers and screen resolutions will be covered in future articles.
How to Register a Domain Name
Over the years the process of registering a domain name has become cheaper and easier. There are many licensed domain name registrars in operation today that are there to help and guide you through the process of selecting, registering and managing your domain name.
What is a domain name registrar?
A domain name registrar is a company authorized by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and/or by a national Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLD) authority to register Internet domain names. ICANN has control over Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs). Examples of Generic Top Level Domains include .com, .net and .org. ICANN does not have authority over Country Code Top-Level Domains, though it is quite common for domain name registrars to provide ccTLD registration services as well.
The domain registration process
Popular domain registrars such as GoDaddy.com, Register.com and NetworkSolutions.com offer a search feature where you can check to see if the domain name you are interested in is available or already taken by another person or company. Domains may be up to 63 characters long and must contain only alphanumeric characters, underscores and dashes. If your domain name is available registering it should be a simple process cost effective process as a .com (dot com) name should cost less than us$10 per year and should be available minutes after it is registered.
Depending on your registrar you name should be parked and ready for use, now all you need is a host right? More info on web hosts in a future article.
Caribbean Web Development Blog Online
We’d like to announce to the world that the Caribbean Development Blog is now online. Please stick around and watch us grow.
