Mavista Blog

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT FLASH IS COOL! You see it and you want it. But, coolness has a price and if a web design company sells you on cool looking Flash site, you will be paying a lot MORE than the cost they have quoted you for.

Here are 4 reasons why:-

1) DEVELOPMENT COST – Flash development is lot more costly than standard website development. Roughly areound 100-150% more than HTML based website with Ajax / Javascripted effects. Moreover, everytime you want to update your content (even a single word), you will require a Flash developer to help you (they are usually quite well-paid and always busy!! )

2) ACCESSIBILITY – Although Flash is very common, there are still many web users (especially corportate users) who has no access to the Flash plugin. (Oh, you can say bye bye to all those iPad / iPhone users)

3) SPEED – Although most of us are now enjoying the great speed of broadband internet services, Flash sites are still relatively SLOW. You have to wait for the initials to load before you view and access the Flash site.

4) and….. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION – Why build a beautiful website when nobody can find your website on search engines?? Although Google have said they can now crawl through Flash content, it is a fact that Flash-based sites perform extremely poor in general searches. Sites built in Flas prevent access to general web spiders, hence compromising their ability to be crawled and indexed.
This is why we don’t offer Flash-based website to our Mavista clients (there are exceptions of course, for example, online game websites). We understand the need to create cool and attractive websites, but we have created many eyes-catching but yet SEO friendly websites. Check them out: Our Project Portfolios

We all know there are many free amd convenient SEO sites or tools out there for particular functions and sites, but the SEO process can usually gets cumbersome and boring , expecially when you are trying to check the stats of your site on a couple of search engines.

I found an interesting SEO tool yesterday. It is a add-on for Mozilla Firefox which offers a collection of SEO tools for major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN (now Bing) and also the page ranking site Alexa.You can preform functions like check backlinks, indexed and domain links and on each site with just a single click.

Download Here

Here are the functions of the add-on: Read more…

What is robot.txt?

You might have heard of robot.txt  before when you are trying to build a website or looking over a webpage’s root directory, but what exactly is this robot.txt? Robot.txt protocol, also known as the robots exclusion standard, is a file to instruct the search engine robots which pages and files to be indexed or ignored. Robot.txt can prevent disclosure  of privacy from search engines and  reduce unnecessary bandwidth load to the server. A web administrator can decide what instructions to give to the robots by filling in the robot.txt. Just like the META tags, robot.txt is not a necessary component of the webpage, but it doesn’t hurt to create one, as robot.txt will give the search engines an idea how should they treat your webpage, which might help your page ranking a bit!

Create your own Robot.txt

You can create robot.txt with any text editors, such as notepad and wordpad. There are only two fields in the text file. They are user-agent and disallow. User-agent represents the name of the spider/bot, while disallow stands for the directory or file you want to exclude from crawling. The basic format of robot.txt is as follow: Read more…

Meta elements are special HTML codes that contains the metadata, which is the”data describing data itself”. Unlike regular codes, meta elements do not affect the appearance of the website. Its purpose is to specify and provide certain information of the page such as author and copyright, identify and assign proper values.

Once the meta tags play a major role in the algorithm of the search engines. Although they are no longer the primary factor, they are still important to a website and good to have regardless, since they can give your page a unique description to the search engines. Meta tags are relevant for a successful website SEO process.

There are four valid attributes of meta elements. They are : content, name, http-equiv and scheme.”Content” provides the property of the meta information, while”Name” provides property name for the corresponding value. The”scheme” formats and interprets the property value.” Http-equiv” is used to indicate the property as a HTTP header for HTTP servers to gather informantion and respond.

The <meta> tags should always stay inside the <head> element.

Here are some common usage of the meta tags:

Read more…