Web Design & SEO For Small Businesses

Validation in Website designing provides guidelines for the web designers to prepare well structure and browser friendly website. Website validation ensure that the websites comply with web standards. A validated web page defines which version of html or XHTML is used to code the website.
It is necessary for browsers to process the document correctly. Here are valuable Firefox adds on for web page validation.

1.  HTML Validator – Validates HTML documents using the CSE HTML Validator engine for Windows. This addson require CSE HTML Validator for Windows. It is very simple to use and efficient in its performance. This is a great tool for web developers and web admins who want to go an extra mile. An excellent add-on!

2. W3C RSS Validator -
Validates a page using the W3C RSS Validator. Once you open the RSS feed into the browser window, you can right click on the page or goto the Tools menu and validate the RSS feed. The results will open in a new tab.

3. W3C CSS Validator – Validates a page using the W3C CSS Validator. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the CSS of the current page. Opens the results in a new tab. Will only work on pages that have a CSS file associated. For example it will work with http://www.w3.org/ as the URL has a CSS file.

4. W3C Page Validator – Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the current page. Opens the results in a new tab. This is a simple extension that will work only for online pages.

5. W3C XML Validator – This is a very simple extension that validates W3C XML schema documents.

6. W3C Offline Page validator – Validates the source of a HTML/XHTML page via the W3C Markup Validation Service using the direct-input form. Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service, even if the page is not public.

7. Validaty – One Click Validator. Provides you a button to validate a page using a validator like…

8. Total Validator – Perform multiple validations and take screen shots in one go. This 5-in-1 validator works with external, internal, or local web pages using the Total Validator service or local copy of the desktop tool…

So that’s my list of 8 extensions for web page validation which will make your validation experience better. Some of them are very useful and essentical for every web designers. What Firefox Validation addons is your favorite please leave your comments.

Creating a website is only a part of the requirement for a successful online business. You have to also know how to make the website search engine friendly so that it gets a good ranking on search engines. So if website ranking is important to your website, you have to remember these tips to ensure that your website is search engine friendly.

1.    The first point to remember is to use unique tags that identify the content of the respective web pages of your website. Make sure this is generated automatically for your site as it will make a huge difference in the ranking of individual pages and products.

2.    The content of the website should be well structured and keyword rich. In addition to it, it should also have bullet points, highlighted words and heading tags to help search engines in crawling them.

3.    It is better to place your straightforward menu at the top of the page to make it easy to navigate the page. And if you have various deep level pages in the website, have a sitemap that is linked to the homepage for search engines to easily find it.

4.    Update the website regularly to keep the website fresh. This can be done with a cms (content management system) or blog. Fresh content on the website boost your keyword combinations and improves the chances of visitors finding you in their searches.

5.    Don’t use the same keywords on different pages as it reduces the value of a keyword on a particular page. It also makes it difficult for search engines to decide on which page to show on searches.

6.    Though Flash gives flashy ads for your website, it should be used sparingly as it does not help in improving the page ranking of your website.

7.    Make the layout of your website as clean as possible. This makes it easier for search engines to access your website. It is better to use Cascading Style Sheets for design implementation and to store scripts in external files.

8.    As search engines can’t read text in images, don’t do this. Instead use ALT tags to embed text in images.

9.    Your website should have a meaningful directory and file names with keywords in them as search engines pick them up faster.

10.    When linking to your home page, make sure the link is linked to the full domain name and not just to the file name. This increases the flow of traffic to your website.

Please leave your comments or if you have any other tips related to search engine friendly web design.

Robots.txt is a special file which is located in the root of each server which is a plan text file which allows the administrator of a website to define which web content need to be allowed and disallowed for the bot which visitors their website.

All major search engine like Google, Yahaoo and MSN agrees to the Robots Exclusion Protocol. There are several elements that every website owner need to understand for a easing crawling of their website. Following are the top 10 common mistakes to be avoided while create a robots.txt file.

1. Adding robots.txt not under the root directory - This is one of the common mistake webmaster do. They upload the robots.txt file at the wrong place it must reside in the root of the domain and must be named “robots.txt”. A robots.txt file uploaded in subdirectory is not a valid one since blots check for robots.txt file only in the root of the domain name.

User-agent: *
Disallow:

2. Wrong syntax in robots.txt – Another explanation is that the Webmaster used the wrong syntax when creating the robots.txt. Therefore, always double check the robots.txt file using tools like Robots.txt Checker
Here is an example

User-agent: *
Disallow: private.html

We advise you to start a file/directory name with a leading slash char (Example: /private.html).

3. Adding comment at the end of the sentence instead of at the beginning – If you wish to include comments in your robots.txt file, you should precede them with a # sign like this:

# Here are my comments about this entry.
User-agent: *
Disallow:

4. Empty robots.txt file almost like not having one – If you have created a robots.txt file under your root directory and there is nothing in it, then it is similar like not having one. Because nothing is disallowed or no User-agent is given, everything is allowed for every bots.

5. Blocking the pages which you need to get indexed - If  you are blocking spider bots and pages using robots.txt you should have thorough understanding of the syntax to be used any mistake can cause you huge problem with the spiderbots.

6. URL’s Paths are case sensitive – URL paths are often case sensitive, so be consistent with the site capitalization WARNING! Many robots and webservers are case-sensitive. So this path will not match any root-level folders named private or PRIVATE.

7. Misspelled robots/user agent names – SpiderBots will ignore mispelled User-Agent names. Check out your raw server log to find User-Agent name which you need to be blocked. Check out UserAgentString.com for a list of User Agent name.

8. Don’t add all the files in one single line – Some of the common mistake is adding all the files under on disallow.
For example

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/ /images/ /javascript/

This is a wrong syntax and robots will not understand this format. The correct syntax is given below.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /javascript/

9. No allow command in robots.txt - There is only one command that is Disallow: and there is no command called Allow: So if you want to allow the bots to visit the page just don’t add the files.

10. Missing the colon – Missing the colon in Disallow and User-agent entry. Here is one of the example of a missing colon entry.

#This is a wrong entry
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow /

#The correct entry
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /

Please leave your comment if you find any other common mistakes which need to be avoided while generating a robots.txt file. Also below are few robots.txt useful resources and tools.

http://www.mcanerin.com/en/search-engine/robots-txt.asp
http://webtools.live2support.com/se_robots.php
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/03/speaking-language-of-robots.html