Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Best of the Blogs Award

Deutsche Welle, is looking for the best digital logbooks. With "The BOBs - Best of the Blogs" awards, we plan to honor the best Weblogs in 11 different categories, including Best Weblog, Best Topic, Best Design, Best Weblog Innovation and Best Journalistic Weblog. A total of seven of the Best Journalism prizes will be awarded -- one in each of our competition languages. Weblogs from all over the world can be nominated for the awards, provided they have been written in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese or Arabic.

Friday, September 10, 2004

Get Listed in Google

Consider these design guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
Check for broken links and correct HTML.
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?' character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small.
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).