Seminar 6: 14th June 2007
No news is bad news presentation
Q+A
Do you need permission to reproduce other people's RSS feeds on your own website?
Generally speaking you should quote it as is and include the link, and that's acceptable as reasonable use on your website.
How long should you keep news on your site?
If it's a link to something, and the original goes, you need to make sure that your link goes. But your news should stay forever, as long as you're archiving them so that the latest articles are the most available ones - this helps to grow your content gradually over time.
Should you change metadata on the home page frequently?
No, only when the content is changing. The metadata should reflect the content of the page.
Should I blitz my home page with the names of all the different products I'm promoting?
You can construct the home page to be attractive to users but still include product names, but you should really consider having a special page about each product, so that search engines recognise that the page is specially about that product. Be careful never to do anything for search engines alone.
Are small businesses using social networking sites to their advantage? For example to connect with customers?
We know of small businesses who use free web pages as websites. Businesses have also used utube videos to connect to customers. It's sometimes useful to connect these services up. We know some sports related companies who use online videos as part of their marketing, You should be careful with blogs not to start off on the wrong tone for the business or brand.
I'm thinking or running a photo competition on my site, can I password-protect the entries?
This is a bad idea in terms of search engine optimisation - each photo will have a title, etc., and this information is of interest to search engines.
Should I ask my users for email addresses before I give them content?
The more valuable the information, the more possible this is - but do give something away for free! If you're on the other end of this, why not use a temporary email address (see Web Tools presentation)?
Can search engines search PDFs?
Yes, if they have embedded text - and Google tells you if a pdf is returned in search results, and can translate to HTML for you. However, web pages are better at containing extra information, so generally better for performing well in search engines.
