Windshield cards and etiquette

[Brett Dikeman]

At 11:34 PM -0400 7/25/04, Huw Powell wrote:

>even after page 3, all I am getting are random geocities indivdual 
>sites and various audi clubs.
>
>So there is obviously something wrong with audifans.com search 
>engine profile.  Can't help that there are no keywords on the site 
>files, but still!  Surely linkage to the site has not dropped so 
>much as to make it invisible?  Heck, I found audifans.net and still 
>haven't found audifans.com.....

The best way for listers to help with this is to list Audifans on 
their homepage; we actually have a huge number of links to lister's 
homepages, and I think a good number of them return the favor, 
although I don't think anyone has gotten quite bored enough to figure 
out how many :-)  If you'd like to do this, point the link from your 
homepage to http://www.audifans.com

You can do the same in web forum signature files (won't do any good 
for posts here).

Google works in part by counting(roughly) how many people link to a 
particular site.  The source for determining what keywords to 
associate with a particular URL is influenced by what keywords are 
used in the link itself.  For example, this is one of the reasons 
"moron" and "idiot" return a number of sites about Bush; people will 
write something like: "And I am disgusted that our country is still 
in the hands of [an idiot] with big ears" (where [] represents the 
actual link).  The W3C says it best in this tip for webmasters:

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere

(incidentally, that Tips section has lots of good stuff, and I 
-highly- recommend it to anyone that would like to spend just a few 
minutes sprucing up their homepage or whatnot).  The tips are 
developed similarly to RFC's; the community mulls them over for a 
while, makes suggestions, etc until mostly everyone is happy.  The 
W3C also has complete references for the HTML standards, including 
tips on using newer features in HTML which many people may not be 
aware of...and lastly, they have an HTML validator to make sure your 
HTML is correct.

If you have a Windows system, you can install the Google toolbar, and 
each visit to a page with audifans content increases our "Google 
Pagerank".  Alexis, a major popularity-ranking site, has the Alexis 
toolbar plugin which does similar things.  However- whereas I'm 
positive the Google toolbar does not install anything else, I have no 
idea what the Alexis toolbar does (it may be fine as well, I really 
don't know, sorry!)

Brett
-- 
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary
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