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April 16, 2003  
 
Feature Article
How to Boost Your Search Engine Ranking, Part III
In the previous two articles, we explained how to perform the Keyword Analysis and Website Modification steps of search engine optimization.
Now we're going to tackle the third step, Search Engine Submission.
Show Me the Money
Gone - long gone - are the days when you could simply "submit your site" to to the big search engines.
Today, search engines need to show a profit, and most of the major engines expect to be paid for their listings. Google is the exception, and will index and list your pages for free. (Google makes its money from pay-per-click advertising on the Google site.)
Paid listings can be expensive. To submit a single URL to all of the major engines will cost you in the neighborhood of $500!
To reduce costs, I suggest you visit each of the paid search engines (and  those that repackage them under a different brand). Rank them based on your their likely appeal to your website audience, and only submit to those you think will deliver.
Choose Your Partners
Here are the search engines and directories I suggest you evaluate:
Engine Fee Renewal
Open Directory Project (DMOZ) free n/a
Yahoo! Express Directory $299 annual fee annual
Google free n/a
Inktomi via PositionTech $39 1st URL; $25 each additional annual
FAST/Alltheweb via PositionTech $34 1st URL; $15 each additional annual
AskJeeves via PositionTech $30 1st URL; $18 each additional annual
Altavista via InfoSpider $39 1st URL; $29 2nd – 10th URL, $19 thereafter 6 months
For a complete view of search engines and how some "package up" the search results and directories of others, see the search engine relationship chart on the WebmasterWorld site.
Are You Missing Links?
The DMOZ and Yahoo directories are relevant because some search engines (notably Google) also evaluate incoming links to your pages when calculating your search engine rank.
If the external "linked from" pages and your "linked to" pages have similar keywords, then your pages will get a boost in search engine rank - for those keywords. The size of the boost depends on the existing page rank of the external pages.
Because Google and other search engines see the DMOZ and Yahoo directories as "important" for the topics they list, links from them to your site will boost your rank for the keywords associated with both your "category" and the actual text of your listings.
The Waiting Game
After you submit, you can expect results from the paid listing within 48 hours. This makes it easy to check the results, and to "tune" your keyword density or rethink your keyword choices.
For Google submissions, you must wait patiently until the next Google indexing (the "Google dance"). These occur roughly every 30 days. For an informal listing of recent Google dances, see the Google Update History, also on the WebmasterWorld site.
For DMOZ submissions, you just have to wait and see. There is no requirement that they list you, so you may need to try more than one submission to get listed. But don't give up - this directory is worth it. Several search services base their directories on DMOZ.
We'll, that wraps up this brief introduction to search engine optimization. There's a lot more to discuss, particularly with respect to your "incoming link strategy".
Please join us in the Search Engine Optimization forum with your questions, comments and suggestions.

- John Gaffney
J. Gaffney Associates, Inc.

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Did You Know...
… you can copy entire pages from one site to another using MyStuff?
Have you ever wanted to take a page from a website you’ve made and use it in another? Using MyStuff makes it easy. Here’s how.
Open your page in WebStudio. Choose SelectAll from the Edit menu. Choose Copy from the Edit menu. This puts all of the objects on the page onto the clipboard.
Next, click on the MyStuff tab in the WebStudio galleries. Move the mouse over one of the thumbnails in the gallery and right click the mouse button. Choose Paste from the resulting menu. This places the page’s objects in the MyStuff gallery. You can drag and drop that page’s object on to any other page you want now that it is in the MyStuff gallery.
To add that page’s objects to another site, close the currently open site, and open the site you want to add the page to. Create a new page by clicking Add Page on the PageList.
Then drag and drop the objects from the MyStuff gallery onto the new page. All of the objects will be added to the page. Note that they are all selected for you so you can move them to your preferred location on the page.
Note that any background you have on your original page won’t be copied to the new page. You’ll have to do that manually.
A Little Known Tip
A side effect of clicking on one of the items in the MyStuff gallery, or just about any other gallery, is that the object or objects in that gallery item are immediately placed on the WebStudio clipboard. So, if you simply clicked on the objects in the tip above, instead of dragging and dropping them, you’d have all of those objects on the clipboard.
Here’s where it gets interesting, especially when moving pages.
Once you’ve clicked on the objects in the gallery and they are on the clipboard, you can choose the PasteInPlace command to put the objects back on to the page in the exact positions they were copied from.
That’s it!
Paste In Place
We’ve had many people ask what the PasteInPlace command is for. This command pastes whatever is on the clipboard back into the location it was copied or cut from.
Users of WebStudio 1.0 and 2.0 may remember that WebStudio would paste everything back in the same position it was copied/cut from. With WebStudio 3 we took the industry standard approach of offsetting pasted objects from their original location.
The reason for this is so there is a visual clue that something has happened. We then added the Paste In Place command to enable you to take objects or groups of objects and paste them into the identical place on other pages in your site.

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HTML Corner
Creating Email Links
Adding a link that brings up a person’s email with your “To:” address already in it is simple.
You’ll use the MyLinks list in the Links Gallery as described in this month’s Tips and Techniques article.
The difference between adding a “normal” link and an email link is the link you enter.
To make an email link, all you do is prefix the person’s email address with "mailto:".
So, if your email address was george@webstudio.com, the link to add to the MyLinks dialog is this:
   mailto:george@webstudio.com
Enter that into the MyLinks dialog and then drag and drop it onto any text or object as described in Tips and Techniques and you’ll have email links!

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Manage Your Subscription
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To subscribe or unsubscribe from this newsletter, please visit our subscription management page.

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President's Corner
We’ve got a new look on our home page this month. To be honest, we weren’t after a new look, we were after the results we could get from following John Gaffney’s methods for driving more traffic to our site.
Even though the home page seems to read quite a bit like the previous one, it has a much higher percentage of keywords than it did, and it still makes sense! A great example of how you can make a page more search-engine friendly and still readable by humans.
Our Affiliate program up and running and continues to gather steam with new people signing up every day. We have graphics, text, reviews and pages on our website that you can use on yours to help you add WebStudio to your site. Send an email to affiliates@webstudio.com to request the Affiliate Information Package. The signup is simple, and there are no costs involved.

Steve Cochard
President
Back to the Beach Software, LLC

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Site of the Month
Lynda's Knitting Page
Congratulations to Lynda! Lynda's site is a personal site detailing a hobby.

She's created a pleasant design and incorporated good navigation. There are nice descriptions of her work, and the overall layout remains intact throughout the site.

As your browse her site, you'll notice she goes father than the norm with a lot of neato tutorials too...lots of work there. It's really a pure WebStudio site!
If you want to know how Lynda did it, visit the Web Studio Forum and check out the WebStudio Site Of The Month Contest section. Lynda and our moderators are waiting eagerly to answer you detailed questions.
And for those of you thinking of submitting a site, this is a reminder that we're halfway through April - so click here to submit your site now!

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What's New in Web Studio 3
FInding Page Sizes and Download Times
Web Studio 3 will tell you how large your pages are and how long visitors to your pages will have to wait while you pages download to their browser.
Right click on the background of any of your pages and choose Page Properties from the resulting menu. Click on the Size & Download Time tab in the dialog. WebStudio will then create the HTML for the page and give you the results.
First you’ll see the size of the page in kilobytes, or thousands of bytes. You’ll want this number to be as low as you can make it, with an upper limit of about 100k. You’ll see why in the list of Download times below the Page’s file size in the dialog.
The Page’s Download Times are given for various type of internet connections. Remember this is your visitor’s internet connection, not yours! If you have about 100k on a page, it will take about 1 second to download with high speed internet such as cable, DSL or a T1 line. With an ISDN line it takes about 11 seconds. With a 56k modem, which is what most people have, it will take 15 seconds to download your entire page. How long do you wait when you go to pages that are slow to load?
If you have a large page, what can you do? Sounds are usually the largest thing on a page. Use sounds sparingly. Graphics are next on the “big” list. Use smaller graphics, like 300 X 200 maximum size. You’ll be able to put about eight graphics of that size on a 100k page. If you want to put more than eight graphics of that size on a page, consider using Thumbnails from the Special FX gallery. What about text? Don’t worry about text, it has the least effect on page size. Whatever you do, don’t use a full page graphic as a background for you page, it will take forever to download, and no one will stay to see your site!
Now you have some tools to help you minimize your download times and keep visitors on your site.   

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What's New Online
Re-Downloading Software You’ve Purchased
Some people have a concern that since our software is downloaded from the internet, they’ll have to buy it again if they have a hard disk crash or some other big problem.
That’s not the case. Our system remembers you and what you’ve purchased and allows you to re-download your purchases when ever you need to. Here’s how…
  • Click the "MyAccount" text link of any of the pages on our website
  • Enter your email address and password, then click "ID Log In" button
  • Next, Click the "Order History" link on the top right of the page
  • Click the "Download" text link.
  • Find the product you need to download and click its "Click Here to Download" text link

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Tips & Techniques
How to Add Hyperlinks to WebStudio Objects
We get many questions about how to add links to buttons, text and other objects with WebStudio. It must be a difficult task to perform with other software, but it is just like everything else in WebStudio…drag and drop. Here’s how…
All the link secrets are in the Links Gallery. So, click on the Links Gallery's tab first. Then look for the "Site Links" list in the Links Gallery. This list has all the names of the pages in your site. To add a page’s link to a graphic or button, simply drag the name of the page from the SiteLinks list onto the button or graphic and drop it. That's it!
To add a link to text you have a few more options:
  • To add a link to an entire text object, drag the link directly onto the text object.
  • To add a link to a word, double click on the text object to enable it for editing. Then drag the link directly onto the word where you want the link to be.
  • To add a link to multiple words, select the text as you would to change its font or style. Then drag the link directly onto the selected text.
  • To add a text link directly to your page, just drag the link onto the page's background. A new linked, text object will be created where you drop it.
You can add links to external web sites by Right Clicking on the MyLinks list in the Links Gallery. Then choose AddLink from the resulting menu.
The Add Link dialog will come up. Enter a name for the link, this will be the name visible in the MyLinks list. Then enter the full URL for the link. You can then add a description of the link if you like. This is for your convenience only. The press OK.
You can drag and drop links from any of the lists in the Links Gallery as described above.

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