WebSpawner.com Blog

One of the most frequent questions received by WebSpawner Customer Service is:

How do I get my website listed in search engines like Google and Yahoo?

Getting your website listed in search engines is probably the single most important step you can take to promote your website and increase the chances of receiving substantial visitor traffic. Building a website without getting it listed in search engines is kind of like having an unlisted phone number; it makes it extremely difficult for others to find you unless you directly provide them with the URL address for your website.

Getting listed in search engines is a process and does not occur immediately. For your website to appear in search engines the following things need to occur:

1. The search engines must first be alerted to the existence of your website. This typically occurs by submitting a request for inclusion of your website to each search engine. It may occur automatically over time if your site is found by a search engine spider after it crawled a link on another website to your site… but submitting it directly speeds up the entire process.
2. After each search engine receives the request for inclusion, it goes through a process of determining the relevancy of your website, which includes sending out a “spider” (an automated program that acts like a viewer) to visit your website and “crawl” its contents, which are analyzed using the search engine’s relevancy algorithms. Each search engine uses different algorithms to establish a relevancy score, and the algorithms do change over time, with relevancy scores varying as a result.
3. Once the search engine has determined the relevancy of your website it will then make a determination of whether or not to list your website in its search index. As each search engine is an independent business entity there is no way to force a search engine to include any particular listing; each engine retains the ultimate authority over the decision to list a website in its index (or to not list it).
4. On an ongoing basis, the search engine spider will review your site to make any necessary adjustments to how it rates the relevancy of your site against other similar sites already in its index. If the relevancy of your site drops too far your site may be removed from their index.

The process of getting into the search engines can take from a few days to several weeks (sometimes even a couple of months) depending on the search engine, how many submissions they have waiting before yours, and the rate at which they process those submissions.

You can visit each search engine and follow its instructions to submit your website yourself if you wish. Or, WebSpawner does offer a service in which we will handle the rapid submission of your requests for inclusion to more than 100 search engines and directories for a one-time fee. For more information and pricing along with a secure online order form, click the orange Promote Your Site tab in the Members Menu of your account, then click the Search Engine Registration link.

It is important before submitting your website to search engines to increase the overall content available on your website. Without a considerable amount of content there will be little for the search engine spiders to evaluate. The more prepared your website is for the spiders’ visits, the more likely it is that your website will be listed in the search engines’ indexes. Search engine spiders can read the text on your website, so the more unique and relevant information you can provide in text format, the better.

For more information on content and how it relates to search engine relevancy scores, see Improving your website’s positioning in search engine results.

In today’s post we cover the use of Image Gallery Groups. Image Gallery Groups are used to group together multiple Image Gallery pages. With Gallery Groups, you can set up each webpage in your website to display different Image Galleries than the other pages in your website, so that only those Image Galleries relevant to each webpage are available.

The instructions provided in this post will be more relevant if you have already created several Image Gallery pages and have already added additional webpages to your website account. With an Enhanced WebSpawner website account, you can create as many Image Gallery pages as you like and can also add as many webpages to your website as you like, all at no additional cost (click either of the two links to see previous Blog posts providing instructions).

To illustrate the use of Gallery Groups, we will use an example website containing reviews of automobiles. The website has several webpages, each focusing on a different car manufacturer. Several Image Gallery pages have been created, each containing pictures of cars produced by different auto companies. The goal in using Gallery Groups with our example website is to have only the Ford car image galleries display when the Gallery button on the Ford webpage is clicked, and only the Dodge car image galleries display from the Dodge webpage, and so on. The Member Menu of our example website account is shown below.

To begin creating Image Gallery Groups, click the Image Gallery tool (under the orange Add-Ons tab in the Member Menu) as shown above.

The Image Gallery tool window displays with a few buttons and a pull-down menu of all existing Gallery pages as shown below.

Click the Manage Gallery Groups button.

The Gallery Groups window appears with a list of existing Gallery Groups (our example account has no groups created yet) and some buttons… click the New button.

Give your Gallery Group a name which will help you remember which webpage it should go with.. we’ll start with a Group for our Jeep Galleries and name it “Jeep gallery group” and then click the Continue button as shown below.

The Gallery Groups window reappears. Next, we select the new Gallery Group by name from the pull-down list and click the Edit button as shown below.

A list of all existing Image Gallery pages appears. Click to put a checkmark in the box next to each Gallery page to be included in this Gallery Group and click Update when done, as shown in the example below.

Now the Gallery Groups window appears again, this time showing our new Jeep Gallery Group in the pull-down list. We can now click the New button and repeat the steps above to create more Gallery Groups as desired for the Ford, Dodge, Pontiac, Honda, and Toyota Galleries.

When you have finished creating your Gallery Groups and editing each one to assign the Image Gallery Pages to the proper Groups, close the Image Gallery tool window.

The next step is to Modify each webpage and indicate which Gallery Group should appear when the Gallery button on that webpage is clicked by a website viewer.
Click to select one of your webpages under Step 1 in the Member Menu and click the Modify button under Step 2, as shown below.

Scroll down in the Modification form to the Image Gallery step, and select the desired Gallery Group from the pull-down menu, shown below.

Be sure to complete the Modification process by clicking Continue at the bottom of the form and then click the “I Like It” button at the test page preview to save and publish your changes. Repeat these steps to assign your other Gallery Groups to the other webpages in your account.

Gallery Groups have many different uses depending upon the purpose of your website. For example, in a family website, you can create a different Gallery Group for each family member, or for each birthday, holiday, or event.

A few parting notes:

• You can assign an Image Gallery Page to more than one Gallery Group.
• You can assign a Gallery Group to as many different webpages as you like.
• Each webpage can display either ‘All Image Galleries’ or just one selected Gallery Group.
• By using descriptive names for the Image Gallery Pages you create as well as for the Gallery Groups you add, you can make it much easier to keep track of things and have the desired pictures display from each webpage in your account.

Today’s post is a follow-up of sorts to a previous entry titled Adding an Image Gallery to your website. While that article has proven helpful for many first-time users of WebSpawner’s Image Gallery tool, the need for a little additional instruction has become apparent through a recurring question received by Customer Service:

How do I replace an existing picture in my Image Gallery with a new one?

Replacing an existing image with a new image is quite easy and in today’s post we’ll show you how.

From the Member Menu, click the Image Gallery tool, which you can find under the orange Add-Ons tab as shown below:

The Image Gallery tool will open in a new browser window (titled “Image Gallery”). Select the Gallery Page which you would like to make changes to from the drop-down menu of existing Gallery Pages, and then click the Edit button.

In the Edit screen, the Gallery Title and Description will be displayed along with 12 image location boxes which will have any images you have previously placed there, like the example below. Click in the box for the image that you would like to replace.

The current image will be displayed in a larger size, along with the Caption and Description (which can be edited by changing the text within the boxes and clicking the Update button if you wish to keep the same image). Also shown are three options for removing the image, as shown below.

The three options for replacing the image are as follows:

• To simply remove the existing image and no longer display any image in that location, click the Remove Image button under Option 3 (no further steps are required for this option).
• To replace the image with another previously-uploaded image, choose the image under the drop-down menu under Option 1 and click the Done button (no further steps are needed for this option).
• To replace the current image by uploading a new image from your computer, click the Transfer New Image button under Option 2 and then proceed as outlined below. A window like the following one will appear.

Under Step 1 click the Browse button, navigate to the location of the new image file on your computer’s hard drive and click to select the image, then click the Open button. The path to the image will then appear in the box under Step 1 as shown in the sample above.

Under Step 2 enter the text for a Caption to appear with the image, if desired (this is optional).

Under Step 3 enter the Description text to be displayed with the image (also optional).

Finally, click the Add Image to Gallery button, which will start the image upload process.

After a few seconds when the upload has completed, the screen will refresh, displaying the Edit screen with the 12 image location boxes and your newly-uploaded image in its chosen location. You can click another image box to make changes to its image, or click the Done button as shown below when you are finished.

Next, close the Image Gallery window as your changes have been saved and your Image Gallery updated with your new image(s).

A few other things worth mentioning regarding the Image Gallery:

• Image files should be in .gif, .jpg, or .png file formats in order to be compatible with the Image Gallery tool. If your images are in another file format, re-save them first before trying to upload them.
• Each image file should have a unique file name. If you upload a new image having the same file name as a previously-uploaded one, the old image will be replaced in the Gallery wherever it appears with the new image of the same name… so rename your files before uploading if needed.

So you’ve finished your shopping, wrapped the gifts, baked some Christmas cookies and hung your stockings by the chimney with care. Your house is decorated and lit from rooftop to foundation. So what else is there to do on Christmas Eve? Why, grab some eggnog and gather the family around the warm glow of your computer screen to track Santa’s travels online, of course!

For more than 50 years, NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), a bi-national military organization ever on the watch for man-made threats in the skies over Canada and the United States, has utilized its high-tech equipment each Christmas Eve to track the travels of Santa Claus in his sleigh. Each year NORAD provides updates to radio and television stations on the progress of jolly St. Nick’s travels, and in more recent years has also been providing live tracking information on the internet.

The NORAD TRACKS SANTA 2007 website is online now with fun activities including an interactive North Pole Map with games and more, and on Christmas Eve it will provide up-to-the-minute information on the exact whereabouts of Santa and his sleigh (and the reindeer, too). Visit the website with your kids now as they are sure to find it fun, and don’t forget to bookmark it for Christmas Eve.

For the nice (and naughty) girls and boys in the United Kingdom, the Wroxall-Weather website will also provide live Santa tracking on Christmas Eve starting at 7:00pm local time. As of now, the website has a countdown timer ticking off the seconds until Santa leaves the North Pole to begin his journey.

All of us here at WebSpawner wish you and yours a safe and happy holiday season and a very happy new year!