E Ghaqda

e ghaqda

Improving Your WWW Presence 

by Ruth Soler and Tiziana Bartolo

As part of the European Youth Week, one of the events organised by Agenzija Zghazagh was E-Ghaqda, held at their headquarters in St Venera led by Dylan Seychell and Dr Alexiei Dingli.

The first part of the seminar dealt with how to improve use of the World Wide Web for a greater presence on the web. Whereas the internet was the domain of big corporations, it is now accessible to the general public, thus making it an essential tool in today's technologically advanced world due mainly to its low cost.

So what is the internet? The internet has three distinct definitions one should keep in mind: the internet being the infrastructure underlining global connectivity; the world wide web - WWW - is how the information is presented; web 2.0 is what widens and enhances audience contribution. This explains how a one-way flow of knowledge expanded to a two-way flow of information between producer and consumer promoting the consumer to a co-producer hence emphasizing a more interactive web experience.

So how do you employ this great tool? Many companies are using the internet as a low cost advertising stratagem to attract more interest in what they offer to their consumers. The internet, or better yet, computers need people to make use of their full potential. Computers need a human touch providing innovation and creativity as well as a passion towards the message they are conveying. But computers enhance our experience through its vast outreach.

It is vital that you keep track of your presence on the web so as to keep your webpage or blog alive. This can be done through various free tools available on the WWW.

The second part was about Search Engine Optimisation. SEO helps searchers find what they are looking for by a better setup of the website. If the information they are looking for is more than three clicks away then people will abandon your site. Your site needs to have access from the search engine to all the conversion pages.

When starting a website companies have to think about the primary goals and the audience they wish to reach. It is important to have an eye on what your competitors are doing and keeping the website interesting with a clear message to your visitors. However it is important to keep it simple, avoiding too many animations. The main challenges to overcome are gaining quality links from high ranking sites, unexpected search competitors having similar keywords and the budget and time available.

Robots, Spiders and Crawlers are used to index web pages and gather information about the website from links, texts and statistics to produce the keywords for the website on search engines. However crawlers do not understand misspellings, dialects, punctuations and pictures or videos. Therefore, this means that if the page is in a foreign language or if the title is a part of a picture, then crawlers do not understand these. However any schemes to trick the crawlers are not advisable since if caught this leads to many consequences. 

Today there are many tools that can help companies keep track of page views, the number of unique visitors, the keywords for the site and also how visitors accessed the pages.