>>> ernie pollard <[log in to unmask]> 11/17/2010 10:05 am >>>
I have recently embarked on putting my Benenden, Kent, parish history
studies on a website. There must be a large and rapidly increasing
number of such sites; I wonder if a central list is maintained to which
I can submit the details of my site and see how others have tackled
their's?
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My web site, "A Vision of Britain through Time", is designed as a
systematic source of information about "places", which in practice are
mostly parishes (and systematically include all Civil Parishes in 1911
and all Ancient Parishes listed by Youngs).
We do provide systematic links to GENUKI, VCH parish-level pages and
Wikipedia pages. We have had a lot of requests to add links to specific
parish local history sites, which we cannot do (nobody is funded
long-term simply to enhance the site), but we have started to look at
adding certain kinds of "crowd-sourcing". An application has just gone
in which would include allowing users to add such links (and other users
to flag them as inappropriate). If we get the funding, the facility
would be there within 6 months.
We do very well in Google searches because the underlying structure of
our system -- a polyhierarchic ontology derived partly from Youngs Local
Admininstrative Units! -- plays well with them, and we know that sites
we link to tend to get significant traffic, not least from googlebots.
The bots are something like 20% of total traffic even on a pretty busy
site, and one site we link to has complained, but we see it as very
desirable: if Google indexes you a lot, you tend to show up well in
their rankings.
I did a systematic check of what showed up as the top hit when you
searched Google for "History of ?? Herefordshire", where ?? was each of
the 188 Ancient Parishes listed by Youngs. These were the results:
BritHistory 1
GENUKI 8
Local commercial 9
Local noncommercial 22
Nat commercial 19
Nat noncommercial 16
VoB 96
Wikipedia 17
British History on-line does unusually badly because there is no
Herefordshire VCH (I picked Herefordshire simply because it is my home
county). We do well because we have really thought about this,
basically. The interesting point is that "local non-commercial", which
covers both specifically local history sites and also parish council
sites, does better than Wikipedia. If you want to do well in Google
rankings, the biggest positive is to provide useful titles to your
pages, and a fair amount of straightforward text on them. The worst
think you can do is rely on users clicking on graphical images for
navigation. If you have ever come across detailed guidelines on "web
accessibility", which focus on helping blind and partially-sighted
users, and decided you could not be bothered, thing again! Googlebots,
the programs Google uses to index the web, have almost exactly the same
limitations as blind users; neither use standard web browsers.
Accessibility guidelines tell you to include "alt" text on all your
images, and that helps with Google.
NB much of what is sold as advice on "search engine optimisation" is
junk, which at best will help you for a short time until Google revise
their system to defeat such tactics, and at worst will get you
black-listed by them. This book, on the other hand, is excellent and
puts you on the side of the angels in several senses:
http://buildingfindablewebsites.com/
Best wishes,
Humphrey Southall
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