Directory Services and Search Engines When people need to find information on the Internet, and don't already have an exact URL to go to, they usually

Directory Services and Search Engines When people need to find information on the Internet, and don't already have an exact URL to go to, they usually turn to a directory service or search engine to start looking. As a web developer, you can use them to help people find your site.

Directory Services A directory is a comprehensive, categorical list of Web pages. Unlike search engines, directories are created and maintained by humans. To be listed, you must submit the address of your website to the directory's caretakers. If the people in charge of the directory consider your site worthy of listing, they'll assign it to an appropriate category within the directory. The two most widely used directory services are: 1. Yahoo: http://dir.yahoo.com/http://dir.yahoo.com/ 2. The Open Directory Project: http://www.dmoz.org/http://www.dmoz.org/

Now there's no requirement for including your website in a directory service. But it does cost money on Yahoo (about $299 a year). The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) is quite popular, and it's completely free! You don't want to put your site in there until your site is completely finished, finalized, and on the Internet where people can get to it with a URL. If you don't already have a website, that means you wouldn't do this until after you've completed your site and also published it

Listing your website For our hypothetical example, suppose you've developed a site dedicated to an unusual type of aircraft called an Ornithopter. Your site is complete, and you'd like to have this website listed in the Internet's premier Web directory, The Open Directory. Here's how you might go about doing just that: 1. Browse to http://www.dmoz.org/.http://www.dmoz.org/ 2. Scan through the list of categories until you see a category that might work for you. Let's go with Science for this example. Click Science. 3. Maybe the technology page would be a good subcategory for this example. Click Technology. 4. Looks like we need to narrow things down a little more. Click Aerospace. 5. Hmm, there are still some categories showing up. Click Aeronautics. 6. Aha! Now on this page, you see Ornithopters as its own category, the very topic of your website. Click Ornithopters. Your closest competitors will be listed on this page. You most definitely would want to be here as well. 7. At the top of the page, you'll see a link (blue underlined text) that says Suggest URL. Click on that link, and you'll receive instructions on how to submit your site for consideration.

Search Engines Search engines are websites that don't use people to create an index. Instead, they use computer programs called Web crawling infobots or just bots, crawlers, or spiders for short, to analyze sites and add them to the search index. This search index is kind of like the index you see at the back of some books (or the Course Index you see under References near the top of this page). In a book, important concepts (words) from the chapters are listed in the index, along with the page numbers where you can find these concepts in the book.

Search Engines Each page on the Web has a unique URL (address), and that's what's in the search index: keywords and page URLs. Unlike the index in a book, a search engine doesn't have a place where you can see a huge long list of alphabetized words to choose from. Because the list would be millions of words long, and nobody would have time to scroll through such a thing. To use a search index, you type the word (or words) you're looking for, the search engine then displays information from its index, and you click on links to look at the sites it finds.

Popular search engines There are quite a few search engines out there. I imagine you're probably familiar with at least one. But here's a few you're welcome to check out at your leisure: 1. Google: http://www.google.com/http://www.google.com/ 2. Bing: http://www.bing.com/http://www.bing.com/ 3. Yahoo Search: http://search.yahoo.com/http://search.yahoo.com/ 4. AltaVista: http://www.altavista.com/http://www.altavista.com/

Chuckles candy example You've probably used Google or some other search engine. to work through an example here, so you can observe what's happening with a more critical eye. For the sake of example, let's say you suddenly get an overwhelming urge for an old-time candy named Chuckles, and you'd like to find out if you can still buy it

Ask google Let's ask Google. 1. Browse to www.google.com to start your search. 2. Type chuckles candy in the search box, and then hit the ENTER key or tap the Search (magnifying glass) button. In almost no time at all, you get some search results

Near the top of the page, you might see something like About 752,000 results (0.05 seconds). This means that there are about 752,000 pages in the index that contain the words chuckles or candy, and it took about 5/100 of a second for Google to find that out for you. Slightly below that (still near the top of the page), you might notice the word Ad (or Ads). Those links are ads. Unless you have a huge advertising budget at your disposal, there's probably no need to be thinking paying for ads right now.

Organic search results The entire right column is ads. To the left, only the items with a slightly tan background are ads. Below that are the organic search results There doesn't seem to be anything "organic" about them. That's the term used to describe the regular search results that aren't paid-for ads. The one thing that all the search results have in common is a title (which is also a link you can click to visit the site), and a description.

Organic Searches Another thing that all the organic search results have in common is that they all seem to have the phrase "chuckles candy" (or some slight variation) in abundance in the title and description. When you do a search from Google, it tries really hard to find pages that provide the information you're looking for. One way it does that is by finding pages that have those words in the title and description (and elsewhere on the page).

Using Meta Tags When you type a word (or words) in the search engine, Google gives you a list of titles and descriptions (and links to) sites that contain that word. Every Web page (even one that looks like a blank sheet of paper in a browser) contains at least these HTML tags:

The Web-crawling infobots that create the search indexes assume all pages contain those tags. The title you see in the search results is the text between the... tags. The description is either the first few words under the tag, or a description of your own choosing. Typically, it's best to provide your own description, because people often read titles and descriptions before clicking a link to visit a Web page.

The Description Meta Tag The way you provide a description is with a meta tag. Why do we call meta tags meta tags? Three reasons: It defines metadata, which is information about the Web page rather than information that's on the Web page. It's always in the metadata section of the page, between the... tags. The syntax is where x is the type of metadata being provided (description, author, or keywords), and y is the specific text.

Meta tags It's not required, but it's a good idea to put a description meta tag in your pages, because Google and other search engines display their content in the search results. To create your own page description, use this between the... tags:

Most people will put this under the... tags And of course, you want to replace Your page description here with an actual description of the current page. Keep it brief. Many search engines will cut off anything beyond 155 characters. But be sure to type it as an actual sentence or two, not just a random collection of words!

Other Meta Tags The author meta tag. The author meta tag has its roots in the early days of the Web when it was all about publishing scientific and academic papers. Here's the syntax: The author name you provide won't show up in the browser. Meta tags are for metadata about the page, and metadata never shows up in a Web browser. The search engine indexing bots will catalog it, and once the site has been online for a while, people will be able to find the page by author name.

The keywords meta tag. The keywords meta tag is another popular one. Here's the syntax: In your page, you would replace key1, key2, key3,.. with a list of keywords, separated by commas. Those keywords should be words you think someone searching for your site might type into the search engine's Search box. The tag is likely to have no effect at all on search engines. In the early days of the Web, it didn't take long for developers to figure out that when people used a search engine, it was usually to find celebrity gossip or other popular topics And this business of tricking search engines even has a name it's called spamming the searching engine.

The robots meta tag If you don't want people to find your site, then that's when you'd use a robots meta tag. The robots meta tag is designed to tell the Web crawling infobots to go away and mind their own business. That might be the case if the site is still under construction, or if it's just intended for a group of people with who share an interest rather than for everyone on the world. The most common use of the robots meta tag is this: And the indexing bot works by looking at the code in your site's home page, and indexing that. Then, it looks at links to other pages within your site, follows those links, and indexes those pages too. Putting that robots meta tag between the and tag of your site's home page tells the indexer "do not index this page" (noindex), and "do not follow links or index other pages in this site" (nofollow).

The charset meta tag Another meta tag (and certainly the strangest one you'll see) looks something like this...... where x is replaced by something as strange-looking as the rest of the tag, often UTF-8 like this... This tag tells the user agent (the Web browser, or whatever program is going to look at the code and page content) that the page is a text file containing HTML code, and it's written in English or a language that uses an alphabet like English (Spanish, for example, as opposed to Chinese, which uses a completely different alphabet). If you omit it, the user agent will just assume the page is written in English or some other language that uses the same alphabet. Most user agents default to assuming our alphabet if they're not specifically told to expect Chinese, Japanese, or some foreign set of characters.

Top 10 Tips Let's take a look at the top 10 tips for getting your website noticed on the Web! Tip 1: Build a Collection of Keywords and Keyphrases A keyword or keyphrase is a word or phrase that somebody searching for your site would be most likely to type into a search engine. Your name or the name of your organization would qualify, of course, as would words and phrases describing the types of products, services, or information your site p

Tip 2: Learn What Keywords and Keyphrases Your Rivals Are Using With your keyword and keyphrase list in hand, hop on the Internet and visit the following sites: Google http://www.google.com/ http://www.google.com/ Yahoo Search http://search.yahoo.com/ http://search.yahoo.com/ Bing http://www.bing.com/ http://www.bing.com/ At each search site, type in a few of your keywords and keyphrases and see who comes up. Many of the listed sites will probably be similar to your own. And many may be direct competitors of yours. Take a look at some of the words they use within their page to see if you can think of any other words people might use to search for sites like your own.

Tip 3: Incorporate Your Best Keywords/Keyphrase Into Your Title If the keyword a search engine user seeks happens to appear in your title, some search engines will give your Web page a big boost in the listings. Therefore, you'll want to make sure your title includes your best keywords or keyphrases. Remember, those words show up in the search results and in the browser program window. Whateveryou type needs to make sense as a titleit can't be a random collection of words Trampoline Springs and Covers from Acme While this probably isn't so good, unless you think people would be specifically searching for that brand: Acme Web Site

Tip 4: Create Multiple Titles You can improve your chances of your website being listed by creating a different title for each page on your site (assuming, of course, that your website consists of more than one page). If any one of the titles you use contains the keyword a person happens to be searching for, at least one page from your site (the page containing that title) will have a better chance of being listed in that person's search results.

Tip 5: Incorporate Your Best Keywords/Keyphrase Into the Page Description Sprinkling a few well-chosen keywords (or a keyphrase) to your meta name="description" tag could help boost your page's rankings each time someone searches for the keywords or keyphrase. Some search engines stop reading descriptions after 150 or so characters. Be sure to try to get your most important keywords near the beginning.

Tip 6: Write Your Description Like a Sales Professional When writing your description, keep in mind that many people will read it in the search results page before deciding whether to click the link to your site. That description offers you an opportunity to make your site look more attractive than the competition's, so take advantage! Use the opportunity to sell yourself. Try to convince the user they really want to click that link to see your site

Tip 7: Use Keywords Everywhere, Even in Filenames Whatever keywords or keyphrases you come up with, it's important to use them in the text that people actually see when they view your page. The search engines give precedence to those words. But keep in mind that people will assume they can read whatever text you put into the body of your pages. Try to use keywords and phrases in titles (the kind you make with h1, h2, and tags and such), tables, lists, and paragraphs in any way that makes sense. Don't be afraid to use them in places that aren't so obvious, like the alt= attribute of an img tag. When naming your files, you might even consider using keywords in your filenames.

Tip 8: Try to Get a Domain Name With Your Keyword The domain name you choose will be part of the URL that people type to get to your website. For example, Apple Computer's domain name is apple.com, and their site's URL is www.apple.com.www.apple.com It's hard to get a good domain name these days, as we'll discuss in Lesson 11. Because the search engines will often give a high ranking to a site that has the keywords or keyphrase right in the URL.

Tip 9: Never Try to Trick the Bots Many people believe that repetition is the key to success, and they'll repeat the same small group of keywords over and over. Perhaps in the alt= attribute of an img tag, or even in a paragraph of text that's colored to match the background so as to be invisible to the person viewing the page in a browser, like this

Tip 10: Cultivate Links Once your site is complete and published for the world to see, the next step is promotion. Many search engines base their rankings, at least in part, on a site's popularity. And so now, many other sites link to your site. Of course, that will be nobody when you first publish your site. So as part of your marketing and promotion, you may need to do a little public relations.

Getting Started The Internet is made up of millions of interconnected computers. Most of those computers are peoples' personal computers We refer to such computers as client computers, since they use (or consume) services provided by the Internetmuch the same way the client of a professional or business uses the services provided by that professional or business.

Clients and servers Not all computers on the Internet are client computers. Many computers are servers rather than clients. As the name implies, a server computer is one that provides the services that the client computers use. For example, there are email servers that do the job of serving up email messages by transferring them from one computer to another. We all use email servers whenever we send or receive email messages. There are also Web servers, and as the name implies, these serve up any Web page you request to see.

Tip If you envision the Internet as something "above" your computer, that might help you remember that upload means to copy from your computer (up) to the Internet. The opposite term, download, means to copy from the Internet (down) to your computer.

To publish your website, you're going to need to some space on a Web server in which you can store your files. To get that space on a Web server, you'll go through a type of business called a Web hosting provider (also called a Web hosting service, hosting provider, Web host, or even just hoster for short). That's a business that makes its money by providing Web server space to people who want to have a website on the Internet.

Choosing a Hosting Provider Web hosting services can cost anywhere from zero to thousands of dollars a month, depending on what you need and how much traffic your site has. For a beginner, "free" is certainly good and sufficient. There aren't any companies out there on the Internet giving away free Web hosting solely out of the goodness of their hearts. They usually make their money by "renting" Web server space to people who want a website. But they can also make a little money by giving away free hosting and putting a small advertisement on every page you publish. They charge the advertisers for that ad space on your page and keep the money, to offset the cost of giving you the Web hosting service for free.

Web hosting services There are hundreds of Web hosting services. Not too many are willing to give you anything for free. Of the few that do offer free starter packages, I'm going to suggest using 000webhost.com because the site is relatively easy to use, and so far they don't even put ads on free sites. You can keep your free site for as long as you like.

Make Sure You Have a Home Page When people come to visit your site, the first page they'll see is your site's home page. Most hosting providers require that you name your site's home page index.html or index.htm. It usually doesn't matter which name you use, because they'll accept either. Just make sure that when creating your site's pages, you give the filename index.html or index.htm to the very first page that people will see when they visit your site.

Note The.htm and.html extensions are the same as far as all computer operating systems are concerned. The older.htm extension is just a leftover from the early days of computing when filename extensions were limited to three characters. Your page will look the same whether you name it index.htm or index.html. There's no advantage or disadvantage to either filename.

Your Site Needs a URL We talked about how you get to websites by using an address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator). In most cases, the domain name in the URL is the same as the company that owns the website. For example, Apple computer owns the apple.com domain name, and you can get to their website using http://www.apple.com. Pepsi owns the domain name pepsi.com, and you can get to their website using http://www.pepsi.com.

You can get a custom domain name from a domain name registrar. But it's not free. Before you go hunting for an expensive domain name, be aware that it's not entirely necessary to do so. Rather than buying a custom domain name, you can use an address in the form of yournamehere.DOMAIN.com (where yournamehere is a name of your own choosing, and DOMAIN is a name provided by 000webhost.com you don't get to choose that part). That won't cost you a penny.

Your Site Password You wouldn't want just anyone to be able to come along and change your website. To prevent that from happening, your site will be protected with a username and password. Anyone will be able to view your site without a password. Only people who know the password will be able to change the site contents.

Creating Your 000Webhost.com Account In this chapter, you'll go through the necessary steps to set up your 000webhost.com account. Basically, what you're doing here is getting an account with them, which includes a folder on their Web server that you can upload your website's files to. Again, don't worry if you don't have a site to publish right now. There are no deadlines or time limits here. You can set up the account now, and it'll be yours forever. You can publish to it whenever you're ready in the future!

Here are the steps to set up your free 000webhost.com account: 1. Browse to http://www.000webhost.com/ the same way you'd browse to any other website (and don't forget about the zeros). 2. If necessary, scroll down a little, and then click Order Now under Free Hosting (the button pointed out in the screen shot below). 3. Start your free hosting account 4. On the next page, type in the requested information, as shown below. Use the option under "or I will choose your free subdomain" to fill in your chosen site name. Where you see host56.com in the image below, you may see some other domain name they own. You can't change that or choose a different one when using the free Web hosting. 5. Provide information about your account 6. Fill in your name and your email address where shown. You must type your email address correctly, and it must be an address where you receive email, because part of the process of setting up your site involves responding to an email message from 000webhost.com. 7. Type the password you decided on earlier, twice, where indicated. Make sure you have written it down somewhere or stored it in your contacts so that you can easily find it if you forget it in the future. 8. A little further down on the page, you must type the requested captcha text. You may have seen this before. It's used to keep automated spam programs from posing as humans and infiltrating a website. Basically, it ensures that a human is filling in the form. 9. Select (check) the checkbox to agree to terms of service. 10. Click Create My Account.

Confirm Your Account Before you go any further, you must confirm your request by responding to the email message that 000webhost.com will send you. So make sure you check your email until you find it. The subject line starts with "Confirm your registration... " and the sender is [email protected] or something similar, depending on how your mail client shows the information.

Accessing Your 000Webhost.com Account You now have a place on the Internet where you can store Web pages and pictures for public viewing. You don't need to repeat any of the above steps in the future. Those steps were just to create the account and get the space on the Web server for publishing. In the future, you'll just copy files to the Web server provided by the account you've just created. You don't need to create a new account to publish changes to your site after you've published the first time.

Accessing Your 000Webhost.com Account You now have a place on the Internet where you can store Web pages and pictures for public viewing. Typically what happens is that you publish your site by copying all the files from your MyWebsite folder to the Web server. You may want to change some pages or add new pages in the future, so you may be revisiting the site often. (You're not required to do that, but most people do.) Make sure you know the URL, your username, and your password for accessing the site. If you already have a place where you keep such information, you should add your 000webhost.com information to that.

Accessing your website For easy access to your site, use the member's entrance at the URL they provided in the email, which is: http://members.000webhost.com/ Your username will be the email addresses and password you provided when you signed up.

Publishing Your Site As webmaster, it's up to you to decide what gets publishedand when. You do that by uploading the Web pages and pictures that you want the rest of the world to see. Upload these pages and pictures to your folder on the 000webhost.com Web server. The pages and pictures will never upload themselves.

You learned how to create a basic layout template for all the pages in your site so that you could start each new page in the site by copying the template. That's certainly a lot quicker and easier that typing each page from scratch. Just remember that the home page for your site must have the filename index.htm or index.html. Make sure you have a page named index.htm or index.html and that it contains whatever you want people to see first when they browse to your site. Also, if your site will have only one page, you don't need a navbar because the purpose of that is to allow people to navigate to other pages within your site.

Publishing your website When you're ready to publish your site for the first time (or update a page you've already published but that has since changed on your own computer), your first step is to log in to your account at 000webhost.com. Here's how: 1. Browse to the members page at http://members.000webhost.com/. 2. Type your email address and the password you created when setting up the site. Remember that passwords are case-sensitive.

There are some things you need to understand at this point if your public site is going to work correctly. You may want to take notes and keep them handy for whenever you're uploading files to your site. First, the public_html directory you see on the File Manager page is where all the files that make up your website go. So before you start uploading, click the public_html link or folder icon to open that folder. The path at the top of the display changes to let you know you're now looking at the contents of your public_html folder on the Web server. The file list shows files that are already there. Those are not files you created. However, they must remain where they are because they include information used by the Web server.

To upload a file, double-check to make sure you're in the public_html folder at 000webhost.com, as shown in the image above. Then click the Upload button (just above the Name column heading in the image above). You'll probably need to enter your password again. You'll see a username that's different from your email address. Don't worry about that username, and don't change it. It's a username that's assigned automatically, and it's only used for uploading files. Just type in your password, and click Continue.

Clicking Continue should take you to the page for uploading files. If you picture the Internet like a cloud in the sky, think of uploading as copying files from your computer up to the Internet. Downloading is copying files from the Internet down to your computer. To make your site visible to the public, you need to upload (copy up to) the files that are currently on your computer to the public_html folder in your 000webhost.com account. So make sure that's still pointing to public_html as shown below, and click the Browse button. Depending on your browser, your button may say something different, such as Choose File. But don't worry; it works the same regardless of the name on the button. (The button to the right of the Upload to directory field is for uploading archive files only, such as.zip or.tar. You don't need to use that option and can ignore it if you're not familiar with archives.)

Clicking Continue should take you to the page for uploading files. To make your site visible to the public, you need to upload (copy up to) the files that are currently on your computer to the public_html folder in your 000webhost.com account. So make sure that's still pointing to public_html as shown below, and click the Browse button. Depending on your browser, your button may say something different, such as Choose File. (The button to the right of the Upload to directory field is for uploading archive files only, such as.zip or.tar. You don't need to use that option and can ignore it if you're not familiar with archives.)

Next, you'll see a dialog box for navigating and choosing files on your own system. This will be the same as the Open dialog box you use in your operating system to open files. Its exact appearance depends on what operating system you're using. Regardless, your first step will be to navigate to the folder that contains your website files, most likely your MyWebsite folder if you've been following along and keeping all your site files in that folder.

When you've selected all the files you want to upload, click the green checkmark, and the files will upload to the Web server. How long that takes depends on the speed of your Internet connection and the number and sizes of your files. But it shouldn't take more than a few seconds. When the upload is complete, you'll get some feedback about the upload.

To see the contents of your public_html folder now, click the blue arrow to the left of the green checkmark. You'll see the original contents of that folder, plus the names of any files you've successfully uploaded. Remember, only files that you upload to that public_html folder will be visible to the public. And pictures you forgot to upload won't show in their pages. Any pages you forgot to upload won't be accessible to the public either.

After you log out, you can visit your site by typing its URL into the address bar of your browser, the same way you would to visit any other site. Don't bother trying to search for it with Google, Bing, or any other search engine yet. There are thousands of hosting providers and billions of pages on the Web, and no search engine is quick enough to notice a new site that quickly. Besides, you only need to use search engines like Google when you don't know the URL of the site you're trying to visit. When you do know the URL, just type it into the address bar.

Troubleshooting If you have trouble with your site, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind. The home page for a website must be named index.htm or index.html. The home page is the first page that opens when you (or anyone else) browses to the site. So verify that you've named your home page index.htm or index.html and have uploaded it to the public_html folder on your site.

If the problem is with images not showing or links not working, make sure you've uploaded the image or page that's not working to the public_html folder. Also, keep in mind that filenames can be case-sensitive on Web servers. That, in turn, means that the uppercase and lowercase letters of filenames in the href= and src= attributes of tags in your code must exactly match the uppercase and lowercase letters of the actual filenames.

The best way to change, update, or correct errors on a website is to first make the change in the files on your computer. Test it there too (but remember, even though filenames aren't case-sensitive on your computer, they are case-sensitive on the Web server). Then upload any files you've changed or added using exactly the same procedure you used to upload files the first time. The newer files will overwrite (replace) the files on the Web server. If you then browse to the site and don't see the correction in your browser, be sure to click the Reload or Refresh button in your browser to download the very latest copy of the page.

Any time you need to make changes to your site, always make the changes to the files on your system, and then upload them to the Web server. That way, the files on your computer and the files on the Web server will be identical and serve as backups to one another. If some calamity wipes out all the files in one copy, you'll still have the other copy, so you really haven't lost anything.

Documents

Directory Services and Search Engines When people need to find information on the Internet, and don't already have an exact URL to go to, they usually