thisismyurl.com
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A personal blog with technology advice and marketing information for small business owners.
Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Optimization’
26
Nov
2009
Nov
2009
15
Sep
2009
Sep
2009
How to start your own business, easily.
Making money online is really a lot simpler than most people would ever imagine, it really comes down to three easy steps.
First, you need to have a product people want to buy.
Second, you need to be able to sell the product to people.
Finally, you need to be able to collect money from people effectively.
What’s great about the Internet is that all these things are already completed!
Let’s say for example that you want to sell t shirts online. The first thing you’ll need is to find a t shirts wholesale supplier. Luckily, you can pick up a blank t shirt or several hundred blank shirts from a good company. The beauty of ordering blank t-shirts is that you can literally print straight from you computer to meet the needs of custom orders!
The second step? Using WordPress, a simple store can be setup which allows you to sell products to users locally or around the world. WordPress is a perfect solution for many small business owners because when it’s setup correctly it can take care of organic marketing, search engine optimization, site maps and other technical aspects automatically.
Finally, you need to be able to accept payment and ship the goods to users. Using PayPal, you can quickly and easily accept online payments plus PayPal has built in integration to the US Postal Service for easy printing of mailing labels. PayPal even lets you buy and print stamps directly from their easy to use website.
So there you have, three easy steps to finding a supplier, building a website and accepting online payments for small business owners just venturing onto the web. If you have questions, I’d love to hear from you or if you’d like to add to the discussion please feel free to contribute your thoughts.
05
Sep
2009
Sep
2009
Getaway Graphics
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About Getaway Graphics
Designed to appeal to small restaurant and hospitality businesses, Getaway Graphics is owned by and managed by Ross Creative although many of the projects are delivered in collaboration with our design partners to ensure the highest quality, rich media designs.
About the Design
Getaway Graphics web design is a simple, two column layout with a key highlight image and easy navigation. The website was designed to mimic the look of a tourism website itself with rich colors, clean design and a browser friendly interface.
Photography by Ross Communications
Throughout the Getaway Graphics design, rich photographs adorn page headers and enhance the user experience. These photographs are key to adding a strong, attractive feel to the website. In this case, the photographs come from the company archive but in most web projects Ross Communications makes use of photographers or stock banks to find the best images for a clients website.
Search Engine Optimization
Like all websites by Ross, the Getaway Graphics website makes extensive use of Search Engine Optimization techniques and user friendly feature sets from keyword friendly page addresses to integrated article tagging, this website is packed with rich SEO friendly content.
Visit Getaway Graphics online today for your restaurant web design needs.
04
Sep
2009
Sep
2009
Stan Cassidy Foundation
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About the Stan Cassidy Foundation
The Stan Cassidy Foundation website is built to make the most of WordPress as a dedicate content management solution along with a custom website design and search engine optimization.
Visit the Stan Cassidy Foundation online.
31
Aug
2009
Aug
2009
Four Quick SEO Tips
I received a great question this week via my Model Mayhem account (it’s like Facebook for models and photographers) from a website owner named Bella Valentine, here’s her email and what I had to say about it, I’m sharing this (with her permission) because I believe Bella’s questions are the same questions many people have about Search Engine Optimization and online marketing.
Hey,
Saw your post in the forums and I was hoping you could help me out with a few questions that I have…
- How do you find related blogs?
- Do you write your site’s link as the signature when posting a comment on such blogs? (I’ve been looking for blogs that have the slot for your website’s url but have come only across one that was set up that way)
- Wouldn’t that be considered spamming?
- Should I try to stay away from sites that have a worst ranking then mine on Alexa or do all links back help?
Thanks,
Bella
Hi Bella, thanks for asking!
You can find related blogs using Google’s blog search function, it’s found under the “More” tab on Google or at http://blogsearch.google.com/. If for example you’re hoping to improve your ranking with Denver models, search Google for that phrase and you’ll see 92,000+ blogs appear but you’ll want to play with the keywords until you find the right combination to return the best results for you.
Many of these blogs will have a comment form at the bottom of the page and on these forms you will see a space for your name, email, website and comment. Now you have to be careful, some web masters such as myself frown on “keyword spam” which is when you replace your name with keywords such as “Denver Model”, so instead I always suggest people using their name in addition to the keywords they’d like to leave. For example, I will always delete people using “Denver Model” but look the other way for “Bella, the Denver Model” or “Bella a model from Denver”. I appreciate self promotion is part of the game, but not at the cost of my site’s reputation.
On that point, I will also point out that 75% of people surveyed prefer the Ben & Jerry’s brand vs. Häagen-Dazs yet … 75% of people surveyed prefer Häagen-Dazs ice cream. Why? Because as people, we like people … so website owners and other surfers are far more likely to “connect” to you if you’re a person rather than a keyword.
There is a fine line between blog spam and self promotion. I tend to think of it as the same line men often cross in a bar, keep it genuine and nobody gets hurt but when your comments are fake, false or generic … web site owners will reject you. Instead of leaving generic comments which will get flags as SPAM, only leave comments which add to the texture of the article or benefit the website owner. You’ll be surprised how quickly your comments get you traffic when you’re helping others in a positive way.
Commenting on websites with a lower PageRank value will not hurt your website, in fact each successful link regardless of where it comes from is either positive or neutral, but never negative. This is because Google knows that you can not control who links to you, so they don’t punish you for poor incoming links.
That said … the higher the PageRank of a link coming to you the better.
For example, if you can get a link from Model Mayhem (5) to your website it’s better than a PR 1, but a link from Apple (9) is better still. There’s a complex math formula that is used … way to complex for me to explain or even understand but basically, in the simplest terms possible assume that every PR point is worth double the value before it so … a link from a PR1 is worth 1 point while a PR2 is 2, a PR3 is 4, PR4 is 8, PR5 is 16, PR6 is 32, PR7 is 64, PR8 is 128, PR9 is 256 … OK, so that scale is completely made up but it holds some analytical water and more to the point, it reinforced that incoming links from high ranking sites is better but lower ranking sites are not worse.
Chris
If you have a question about SEO, why not ask me? I’m always happy to answer your questions and look forward to hearing from people!
Want to learn more about Bella’s website? Visit her at http://www.BellaValentine.com.
29
Jun
2009
Jun
2009
Great Chefs, Great Website
A while back, I mentioned that I went down to New Orleans to help a friend out on his website and since early April, I’ve been consumed with the Great Chefs website, it’s not completely finished yet and I’m sure there will be many changes over the coming months but I wanted to share the progress with you and explain some of the choices so that other restaurants and chefs could see how the Internet can be better utilized for their business.
Rich Search Engine Friendly Content
For those who are regular readers of my blog, you know that I’m a huge fan of content. In fact, I don’t believe there’s anything more important on a website and when it comes to making a website successful, content truly is king.
SEO Features
Search Engine Optimization isn’t about tricking Google, it’s about helping Google understand what’s on your website and that’s exactly what we do with Great Chefs. Take for example the recipe page, this page has been carefully designed to contain significant value for Google and other search engines without taking away from the value of the page for the reader. In fact, the page was designed to provide the reader with quality navigation before worrying what Google found.
This is the true strength of a website, serving the needs of the user, your customers while ensuring the information is easily read and understood by popular search engines. The Great Chefs website includes SEO tactics hidden from the general public but optimized for search engines including:
- automated sitemap.xml creation and optimization which helps major search engines find deep pages it might otherwise miss;
- automated notification services to major search engines of page updates, additions and changes to the structure of the website which ensures an accurate listing on engines;
- creation and maintenance of META data tags for search engines including the powerful META description and META keyword tags for all pages;
- optimized nofollow and noindex META data for duplicate content to avoid being penalized for content appearing in multiple areas;
- W3C compliant xHTML 1.0 publishing structure;
- canonical URL’s to indicate content which appears on Great Chefs website as original
- enforced www. to ensure all pages are only indexed on the main (www.greatchefs.com) domain, not a secondary domain such as greatchefs.com.
In addition to these hidden tactics for optimizing the website, the pages also feature a wide variety of tactics clearly visible to users of the website.
- rich pages with links to free giveaways, each containing descriptive titles and appropriate attributes (rel, title, href);
- proper use of the HTML <title> tag to inform search engines that a webpage is about specific items. For example, Bermuda Wahoo and Lentils with Foie Gras as a title;
- use of attractive website addresses such as http://www.greatchefs.com/bananas-foster-bread-pudding/ instead of http://www.greatchefs.com/?p=4507 to help visitors find content;
- proper use of the <h1> and <h2> heading tags to ensure the webpage structure is clear to both visitors and search engine robots;
- deep linking from products and free giveaways to similar content on the website, designed to help users locate items of interest;
- inclusion of a comprehensive sitemap for visitors to locate content easily;
- an easy to use search tool, providing easy access to all areas of the website
Promoted Content
Beyond simply deep linking content (the process of ensuring pages other than your homepage are linked to), I also wanted to highlight and feature the great programs Great Chefs Television has created over the years and add some distinct color to the pages. To accomplish this, I added a special highlighted content at the bottom of the pages. This area is automatically generated each time a page is cached (we’ll get the that in a moment) and randomly selects three products from the store, tests to see if there is a featured graphic and displays it along with a text description. This way, each webpage has a different collection of three great TV shows at the bottom, giving both users and search engines the ability to find distinctly different content.
Interlinked Content
One of the things which pleased me most about the way the Great Chefs website turned out is it’s ability to automatically link and re-link content from other areas of the website. For example, the free daily videos are linked from both the easily accessible free cooking videos page as well as each individual series.
This allows visitors to quickly locate videos which have been published from a given series (for example, Great Chefs Great Cities) to determine if they would like to buy the series similar to how the video game industry would let you download a free trial version.
Free Recipes
With over 700 amazing chefs in the Great Chefs family, the television program has thousands of award winning recipes and books to share with the world. Every day, the people at Great Chefs select three wonderful recipes from their archives and post them for free on the website.
To make sure you never miss a great free recipe, I’ve built in a number of tools:
Subscribing to Great Chefs
To help ensure people have access to all our great free recipes, the website automatically published the latest recipe links to both Facebook and Twitter. If you’re familiar with RSS readers or have an email account, you can also receive free daily updates to the recipes via email subscription or RSS feeds hosted by Google.
Free Videos
What kind of television station would put up a website and not give away free, award winning cooking shows? Every day, Great Chefs posts two recipes from their hit TV show directly to YouTube where fans can subscribe to be kept up to date and watch the program in High Quality.
You can also receive notifications via Facebook and Twitter, email subscription or RSS feeds. In fact, if you really want to make the most of the Great Chefs Television free videos, you can even subscribe to the service on your iPhone or iPod via the iTunes store or the PodCast service!
Chef Biographies
With over 700 chefs appearing in 2,100 series episodes and hundreds of more specials the Great Chefs website is home to biographies on the vast majority of the chefs who have graced the television program. Of course no index is complete, so if you know any links or projects these Great Chefs are involved in, why not comment on their profiles!
Blog
Each area of the website, including the videos, recipes and biographies includes the ability for visitors to leave comments and links to related content. Soon, the website will also feature a daily blog for those interested in cooking shows and the industry as a whole.
DVD Store
Perhaps the most important part of the website is the store. While most people never reach the sales pages of the Great Chefs store, it’s critical that visitors are made aware of the fact it’s possible to purchase the product. Simply put, while you can watch the show for free online the purpose on the website is to sell DVD’s.
With that in mind, each free DVD (or recipe) page has been designed to offer links to the DVD from which it was created and the homepage of the website is set to promote the DVD’s upon each visit.
On the DVD pages themselves, navigation makes it easy to purchase the discs as either a complete set or individual items, with the focus being on ensuring customers are able to purchase online using Googles secure checkout system or via a toll free telephone number.
Each collection shows a 3D rendered collection of exactly what customers can expect to receive in their order, including an accurate depiction of the number of discs in the set. Since it is possible to also order each disc as an individual item, the recipes included on each disc are listed for visitors to choose from.
Google Integration
One of the major differences between the Great Chefs project and many other previous websites that I’ve worked on is the level of Google integration that I went with on this particular project. In addition to ensuring the Webmaster Tools was fully supported by the website, we’re also using:
- Google Analytics to provide daily tracking of website traffic, page testing and optimization settings;
- Google Feedburner to provide easy access to daily RSS and email subscriptions
- Google AdWords with integration with Analytics to promote and market the website;
- Google AdSense to sell advertising in the footer of most pages as well as on free content located throughout the website;
- Google Checkout for online shopping cart integration and to offer a fast, safe and secure means to order online;
- Google GMail to host the email for the Great Chefs web domain and finally;
- YouTube to host the video files displayed on the website
Automation
Running a website is hard work, in fact it’s not just time consuming it’s also extremely technical and the great people at Great Chefs Television all have tons of work to do already without having to learn about Search Engine Optimization, Organic Marketing, keyword density and all the other things that make promoting a website successful. That’s why the vast majority of the website is completely automated.
Easy Updates
Knowing that the team at Great Chefs do amazing work on their television series, I wanted to ensure they had the ability to do the same on their website without having to make any of them learn extensive HTML programming. To do this, I used the powerful WordPress content management tool to build a robust solution capable of serving their needs while making it easy for them to update content.
Fast Pages
A website is useless if it’s not fast, that’s why the website makes the most of caching technology to rapidly build and store dynamically generated content. Instead of rebuilding the webpage each time a visitor comes to the site, the Great Chefs website rebuilds the pages only when needed.
Service Integration
When the staff of Great Chefs updates their website, it automatically generates Email and RSS updates for people who are subscribed, as well as informing Twitter and Facebook of the recent changes. Podcasts and Apple iTunes are automatically updated within minutes of fresh videos being posted to YouTube. This ensures that quality content is distributed to all areas of Great Chefs, without having to spend countless hours reproducing the same content in multiple sources.
The Future of Great Chefs
Over the next few months, there will be a lot of great new features added to the Great Chefs website, I hope you’ll join me in supporting the wonderful television series and as always I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improving the website!
17
Jun
2009
Jun
2009
Marketing Blogs you should read.
Talk about getting in a rut, sometimes I find it’s great to ignore the 100+ awesome websites that I’ve subscribed to and reach out to the Internet and read something completely different, here are 25 awesome articles that I found this week on websites I’ve never seen before.
- The Essential Role of Marketing in Working for Good | Intent.com – call it healing or spiritual or what you’d like but sometimes it’s good to read positive stories instead of bad news all the time.
- Cigarette Makers: Major Marketing Changes
- Internet Marketing or Search Engine Optimization
- 10 Essential Features Of Internet Marketing Courses
- Facebook & Marketing Your MLM – I hate MLM but I like this article, go figure.
- Marketing your Music with Topspin – This is a cool look at how to use Topspin for bands
- Maria’s Art Blog – I like this one a lot because it reminds us that marketing yourself on the Internet should be easy, Maria doesn’t complicate her website but it does exactly what she needs it to.
- Why Twitter is a Great CPA Marketing Tool
- Search Engine Positioning
- Music Business: Starting and Marketing a Music Record Label – I’d always wanted to start a music label but alas, I have no talent
- Digital Video Marketing
- Quebec is proposing a marketing board for its timber – I’ll admit it’s a good article but it made the list because now I’m whistling classic Montey Python as well.
- The Different Types Of Affiliate Marketing – this is why I love searching for random articles. This one actually taught me things I’d never considered
- Search Engine Marketing
- Barter for Cash
- Guide To Effective Internet Marketing Courses
- Effective Internet Marketing Video Training
- Anyone Can Make Money Online With Internet Marketing
- Real Easy SEO
- How To Make Money With Network Marketing
- How to Use the Power of Article Marketing – Article marketing is one of those areas of promotion that’s often overlooked but always a powerful tool
- Multi Level Marketing – the problem with MLM is that it works, frankly I can’t stand it (smells fishy to me) but I do learn a lot from reading about it.
- Website Marketing For New Webmasters
- The Affiliate Marketing Formula That Works Best Right Now
- The Price of Internet Marketing Products is Highly Exaggerated – an interesting look at the market.
05
Jun
2009
Jun
2009
Free WordPress Theme – One Night in Paris
This is a complete edit of my earlier One Night in Paris theme for WordPress, I build the original theme over a year ago and have spent a lot of hours improving my skills since then, so here’s my latest free WordPress theme release for everybody to download and enjoy.
The theme features a rich, three column layout for the homepage and a large single column for content within the website. I’ve purposely left formating to a minimum on this theme to allow web designers to rapidly introduce their own creative elements to the theme and make changes.
You can preview the theme live here on thisismyurl.com or download and enjoy the theme free of charge on your own website.
02
Jun
2009
Jun
2009
Free Community Friendly Theme
Well it’s been a little while since I uploaded a new theme but as before, this one is fully optimized and ready to help you community or non-profit group show up in the Google rankings.
The theme design has been created as a basic, no thrills piece which can be easily added upon for most community groups, churches and non-profit organizations which are seeking an easy way to get their website online.
I’ve included a lot of Search Engine Optimization tricks in this theme by default.
28
Apr
2009
Apr
2009
Easy Technorati Tags for WordPress
There are a few other Technorati Tags generators for WordPress out there but I found most of them overly complicated and fairly difficult to use, often requiring custom fields or complex processes. What this plugin does is takes the native tags from WordPress and generates a list of Technorati tags for your blog.
Usage
To use the Easy Technorati Tags for WordPress plugin, simply download and install onto your WordPress website. You can then add it to your theme by inserting the code <?php echo timu_technorati_tags() ;?> to your blog theme files or to a sidebar widget.
Output
The tag generates a comma separated list of tags complete with Technorati links. I choose to return it as a value rather than write it directly so that if you’d like to make changes or process the results, you can do it easy.
You can download the plugin directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Don’t forget to rate the plugin if you’ve enjoyed it.
How You Can Help
I love developing plugins for WordPress and do my best to always keep them free but of course it take a lot of time and effort to build these plugins so if you’d like to say thanks, the best way is to take a few moments and write about the plugin on your own website, include a link to my website from your posts or download and rate the plugin on the official plugin directory.
Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.
24
Apr
2009
Apr
2009
Isaac’s Way Restaurant
I recently had the pleasure of finishing up a new website for the wonderful people at Isaac’s Way Restraurant, located in the heart of Fredericton New Brunswick. The restrauant has a large involvement in the local community and runs an onsite art auction to support local charities as well as many contests in the comminity. It was critical when putting together the site to ensure staff had the ability to easily update the website and change menu items, art pieces as well as blogs with minimal effort.
The site uses WordPress as a content management solution with a host of plugins to help ensure the website is an effective tool for the business owners. In addition to standard anti-spam and caching scripts, the site also features full integration with Twitter, automated keyword suggestions and search engine optimization techniques, Google sitemaps and the Simple Image Grabber to help keep pictures fresh.
Objectives
As with all websites I work on, the site was built around the business objectives and uses a simple design to help communicate the warm family friendly nature of the restaurant, the cheerful staff and the wonderful menu but the real question I asked myself as I scanned dozens of restaurant websites around the world was … why do people come to a restaurant website?
Here’s what I came up with:
- To gain a sense of the establishment and the food at the restaurant
- To find out about employment or partnership opportunities
- To learn about special deals, contests and selection
- To get contact information, location and parking details
With that in mind, I wanted to ensure the visitor had easy access to the physical location of the restaurant and included the Google map tool as an insert on their website. The map tool from Google is a self contained application linking directly to Google’s website. By using it on the webpage, visitors may access standard features such as the Map, Satellite or Terrain maps (as well as Street View when it is available) but more importantly they will also gain access to the Get Direction feature or be able to link the restaurant to local hotels and convention centers.
Throughout the website I’ve included links in both the sidebar and footer to the directions page to ensure visitors are always capable of finding the business quickly and easily.
You can visit Isaac’s Way restaurant online at http://isaacsway.ca.
15
Apr
2009
Apr
2009
The Secret to Building Website Traffic
There are a lot of blogs out there that talk about how to build website traffic but most of them are pitching an ebook or trying to get you to buy some elaborate Search Engine Optimization strategy that relies on complex (often underhanded) strategies to accomplish something that is fundamentally easy, yet time consuming.
That’s right … building an online presence is actually one of the easiest things a person will ever do in the lifetime of business, much easier than building a website or opening a retail location so why do so many people do it so badly? Fear, ignorance, uncertainty and shame.
Fear of the unknown, being ignorant of the unknown and being uncertain of where to start learning. It’s exactly the same reason I didn’t learn to cook until I was in my thirties or why I still don’t know how to change the gasket in my car. In fact, I don’t even know what a gasket is or which part of the car it might be found in but what separates me from most is that I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t know anything about my car.
The Secret
A very complex UML diagram of the process.
So what is the secret to building web traffic? It’s radically simply, building web traffic is as simple as telling people about your business. Building quality web traffic is about telling the right people about your business and building sustainable web traffic is about telling the right people about your business and treating them with respect once they’ve taken the time to visit your business. It is the easiest thing you will ever do. Let’s break it down again in a more conventional lesson plan format:
- Tell people whom you believe will benefit by your business about your business.
- Ensure people are richer for having visited your business.
- Repeat.
Telling People About Your Website
If you’re proud of your website (and you should be), telling people about it should be a pleasure for you. It should reflect your personality and be an extension of your business so why not tell the world?
If you tell people about your website, they’ll come visit your website, it’s honestly that simple. So the art of building your online web presence is about telling as many appropriate people as you can about your website and help them easily find your website.
Telling the Right People About Your Website
The problem with telling people about your website is that many of the people you tell are simply not the right people and this is where SEO practices often fail. People tend to measure success by how many clicks their website gets but that’s a pointless statistic since you don’t really care about how many visitors you get … you care (or at least you should care) about the amount of money you get from that traffic.
In order to get the right traffic to your website, you first need to know who your traffic is. Many people start websites assuming the ‘right people’ are everywhere in the world but the simple truth is that most websites would be better off using the Internet as a method for their traditional market (local or regional) to access information faster so the first step in attracting website traffic is to determine if your business is better off appealing to:
- a neighborhood,
- a city,
- a region,
- a state,
- the entire country,
- local counties or
- the entire world
Once you know that, ask yourself if your website appeals to men or women more. If it’s equal that’s great but you should be able to honestly determine it (for example, my website appeals to ~60% men but why?). Is your website for consumer or business traffic, people living in the suburbs or businesses in the heart of the city? Do you appeal to a specific industry or ethnic group? By narrowing these categories many might feel they’re limiting their market but it’s actually a process called niche marketing and allows your business to spend more money per prospective client while lowering the overall cost of a marketing campaign.
Now that you know who your market is, your goal is to Increasing Website Traffic for Free by participating in communities and building your relationships with others. Take part in forums, leave valid compliments on blogs and build traffic by helping others, this leads to a tremendous influx of quality traffic but more importantly it leads to an influx of legitimate business.
Giving the Right People a Reason to Tell People About Your Website
The biggest secret in building website traffic? Let others do it for you. Produce high quality content designed to help people and watch your website statistics sore as people tell their friends about your great tutorials, free downloads and useful tips.
20
Feb
2009
Feb
2009
How to build a free website
There’s a secret that many web designers don’t want you to know, it’s that there’s no cost to building a website. In fact, you don’t even need special software to do it, everything you need is already installed on the most basic computer available today. In order to build a website, here’s all that you need:
- On a Windows computer – NotePad
- On an Apple Macintosh – TextEdit
Now that you have all the tools that you’ll need to build a web page, you need to understand a few things about building web pages.
How to Format a Web Page
Web pages are divided into two specific areas, the <head> and the <body>, each of these two areas does something specific and before you can build a web page, you need to understand the basic purpose of each section.
Setting up Your First Web Page
For a web page to be recognized by a web browser (the software application used to view a web page) we first need to tell the browser that our document is an HTML document. To accomplish this, all we need to do is place the code <html> on the first line of our document followed by </html> on the very last line of our document.
Once those tags are in place, most web browsers will understand that the content being displayed is an HTML document. I say most because technically, there is a bit more that you should put in there if you want to ensure the site is 100% compatible with all modern web browsers, but explaining the fine details of DOCTYPE structure is a little beyond the scope of today’s tutorial. Needless to say, placing the tags <html> and </html> will tell web browsers what your document is but if you’d like to technically perfect, place the following code instead:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
</html>
Once that’s done, remember that all other code must be placed between the two <html> tags to be recognized as valid HTML.
The <head> Section
The <head> tag of a web page is the reserved for things which other computers and software applications require to understand your web page properly. For example, when a web browser loads your web page there are specific things that it looks for in order to understand what language your site is in, what your web page is about and the name of your page. Within the head section, we want to include details such as:
- Links to alternative content such as RSS feeds, XML site maps and mobile interface files
- Javascript links and or content to help the functionality of our page
- META data for robots to read including a page description, keywords and generator
- Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) details or links
- The document content type
- Codes and robot commands for foreign applications
- Pingback processing directives
- The web page icon file location
- Canonical labels for search engine optimization
- Base directory directives
- The title of your document
Sounds like a lot right? Well it is, and it’s all very important stuff. Essentially, the <head> section of your web page stores all the mechanical and client side information required to properly index, label, categorize and distribute your web page as well as the information needed to successfully display your web page in a users browser. I could write a whole post on each of the items above but for now, it’s simply important for you to know that the <head> is used to store those pieces of information and you can add them at a later date.
Adding data to the <head> of the document is done the same way as all elements of an HTML document, by opening and closing an HTML tag. In this case, the <head> tag must be opened and later closed </head> in order to store the appropriate content. Between those tags, you may store a series of HTML or xHTML (we’ll talk another day about the differences) data devices for use in rendering your pages. For example, here is a basic <head> element for a common web page:
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>
You will notice that in this basic example we only store the basic information required to make a web page work, the http-equiv which tells web browsers that the document being served is in text/html format (as opposed to text/rtf which is a Rich Text document or text/javascript which would be a JavaScript file) so that the web browser looking at this document understands it is an HTML page. 
Additionally, the <head> contains the <title> tag which closes (</title>) after labeling the document Untitled Document. If you loaded the source code into a web browser, you would now see a blank document with no content displayed to the user but a new title at the top of your browser, labeled Untitled Document. This document title is the label being fed to the web browser from the <title> tag contained within the <head> of this document.
Additionally, the <head> contains the <title> tag which closes (</title>) after labeling the document Untitled Document. If you loaded the source code into a web browser, you would now see a blank document with no content displayed to the user but a new title at the top of your browser, labeled Untitled Document. This document title is the label being fed to the web browser from the <title> tag contained within the <head> of this document.The <body> Section
If the <head> of a web page is the content being presented to other computers, then the <body> is the content being displayed to human eyes (or text readers) visiting your web page. Creating content on a web page is wonderfully simple. If you’d like to have a web page say hello, simply add the code:
<body>
hello
</body>
Presto! You now have a fully functional web page, albeit a little dull. The <body> section works by displaying exactly what you type as content, so anything (and everything) you add between the two <body> tags will appear on your web page but you have to be careful, HTML needs the content marked up (labeled) to be properly viewed in a web browser. Just in case you didn’t know, HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, a Markup Language is simply text that’s been formated to be read by computers. For example I can create my own Markup Language right now called Chris Ross’s Markup Language (CRML) that looks like this:[-open-]Hello World![-close-]
Now I have my own Markup Language but since nobody uses it, it’s pretty much useless. On the other hand, everybody with a web browser uses the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) so let’s look at it. HTML has a handful of common codes used to display content effectively, they are:
- <p>, always followed by </p> which displays text in paragraph format
- <br>, which never has a </br> but instead is written <br/> in xHTML and represents a line break (where a paragraph is often displayed as two line breaks to separate content)
- <ol>, which always needs a </ol> for ordered lists (numbered lists) and <ul> with a </ul> for unordered list (bullets), both also require <li></li> tags for each list item in the list to work
- <b></b> or <strong></strong> tags mark text as important. The <b> tag was replaced with the <strong> tag a few years back since not all languages bold words to make them more important
- <i></i> makes a word italics but like the <b> tag, was also replaced. These days, you can use <em></em> to place emphases on a word or phrase
- <h#> tags are special and always need an corresponding </h#> tag where the # symbol can be replaced with the numbers 1 through 6 (<h1>,<h2>,<h3>,<h4>,<h5>,<h6>) which represents the level of a header in your document
- <img /> will allow you to place images in your document but requires special parameters we’ll talk about another time
- <a> followed by a </a> tag will hyperlink the text between the tags to another document but also requires special parameters.
- <table> tags can be used to display tabular data (like charts) on a web page. It needs to end in a </table> tag and can include headers (<th></th>), rows (<tr></tr>) and columns (<td></td>). Why columns are <td> is beyond me, but that’s what they are.
- <div> tags use a closing tag of </div> to divide content into various areas of a page, much like the <span> tag, the <div> tag has no visual effect on content but is used by programmers and designers to affect content.
Essentially, the ten tag structures above represent the HTML code found in every single web page on the planet. There are other tags, but have either been replaced or are simply bad tags. For example the <u></u> tag will underline content and the <blink></blink> tag is simply wrong … even the creator of the tag, Lou Montulli (it’s odd to think somebody actually invented a tag eh?) appears to wish it would simply die.
When put together, the <html> document label tells a web browser the information is a web page, the <head> indicates content reserved for other computer systems to read, while the <body> shows content to the end user.
In total, the 26 tags here represent the whole of the content required to build your own web site for free. If you’ve found this post at all useful, please feel free to leave me a comment below, thanks for reading.
