Finishing Touches

Placement of Files

This is a topic I should have covered in the beginning, but better late than never. Where exactly do I put all my files? There are many methods for placement of files. Some are more organized than others. If you are simply building a one web page site, with nothing fancy going on, you could put all your files in the same directory or folder. While this method may be fine for very small sites, one finds that when it comes time to upgrade or change your site - things can get a little hairy. The directory becomes so cluttered, it's hard to tell one item from another. Here's a method I find works well. I make a directory I call Web. This becomes my root directory for all my files. Now I put subdirectories under it - one for my html files, one for my pictures, one for my audio files, and one for my cgi files. If you allow people access to your site via bbs or ftp, you may want to assign specific folders for those functions as well, just to keep them out of your more important folders. Three files should exist in your main folder: Your index.htm file, which is your MAIN web page. If you name your main web page index, and put it in your main folder, it will automatically load when your domain is called up. Also, the favicon.ico is the little icon that appears in the top left of the subject bar. Finally, is your robots.txt file which is the first file a webcrawler looks at. It tells the webcrawler any directories you DON'T want people to see - like confidential files. It can also tell the bot (search engine webcrawler) how often you want your page re-investigated, as well as some other important data.

Now that you've created the perfect web page - what are you going to do with it?

All web pages out there have potential; The potential to teach, the potential to sell, the potential to change the world we live in. The problem is, that some web pages will never be found. That's because the folks who wrote the page just don't understand how the internet works.

There are basically 2 ways to find a web page.

One is to actually type the URL of the web page directly into the locator bar. This works great for facebook or google. This doesn't work quite as well for Joes Egg Farm incorporated, who's web page could be located at: www.poindexter.com/cityofpoindexter/businesses/farms/poultry/eggs/~poindexter/joesfarm/index.htm

If Joe's Egg Farm is ever going to be found, he's got to use the power of the internet to his ad-vantage (pardon the pun). He's got to make the search engines on the internet look at his site, so that when I type EGGS into google, his site comes up in the top 10 listings.

How exactly do we do that? Remember in the beginning of the course we said that every web page has a HEAD and a BODY. The head is where we put the addressing information.... just like the addressing information placed at the top of a business letter. If we put additional addressing information in the HEAD of the page, webcrawlers, working with search engines can find Joe's site, so we don't have to type the address in.

Here's how it works:
Within the head, we put "META" tags. Meta tags are tags that webcrawlers look at. Webcrawlers are automated scanning programs that scrub the web looking for what's out there. When it finds Joe's Egg Farm site, it looks it the HEAD of the file at the META tags and sees this:

<HEAD>

<HEAD>

When Google, Altavista, Dogpile, Lycos, Excite, or any number of other search engines out there point their webcrawler at his web page, they gather that information and organize it, so that when you type in the right combination of his keywords, like "Egg Farmer", it will bring up something like this:

Worlds Greatest Eggs
www.poindexter.com/cityofpoindexter/businesses/farms/poultry/eggs/~poindexter/index.htm

And give you a link to get to his page.

Now Joe isn't a stupid man, so he included a couple of odd keywords, like "User Friendly". Now he can type in "User Friendly Egg Farmer", and with most probability, he'll be the only one that comes up. Now he can quickly and easily find his own site, click on it, and in the process - move his site upward to the top of the list. you see, the more a link is clicked on, and the more the site is visited via the search engine - the further up you go on the search engine's list. This, of course, is kind of a circular argument, because the further up the list you are, the more people click on it... until finally, you are the number one hit on the search engines, and you become king of the internet. So even though he may have an undesirable web address, he can STILL be a number one hit - if he plays the game right.

But now it is a waiting game. Assuming he has written perfect code, has all the right keywords and even has the only product like it on the internet - HOW does a search engine find the site?

Random Chance
By Design

Now as you can imagine - the first method may take YEARS, considering how large the internet is. The second method requires you SUBMITTING your URL to the search engine to sick its bot on. You can either do it one search engine at a time, manually, or go to

Who will gladly add your site to all the search engines at the same time - free of charge. I suggest you don't buy into their paid plans - not worth it in my humble opinion.

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