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A LESSON LEARNT - FREE NET REPORTS is the newsletter of the Online Business Center, produced in South Africa. The point of the Online Business Center is to help its visitors make sense of the Internet and learn to build and promote their businesses there. The site and newsletter are another of the free marketing resources for new Internet ventures.
Much of the content of the A Lesson Learnt newsletter comes from a section of the Online Business Center of the same name. It offers tips and ideas for helping Web entrepreneurs grow their businesses. The Web site also offers a Training Center, a Book shop and a Shopper where you can purchase products from South Africa. There's a "virtual visit" to South Africa, too.
In the newsletter archives, I found entries like this one:
" 2. Lesson - Hidden HTML Tags - Communicate with 'spiders'
"We talked about META tags the last time and how they tell many of the spiders visiting your site from search engine what YOU want the search engine to know. Visit our archives at http://netreports.listbot.com
"However, some 'spiders' are designed to ignore the META tags precisely for the reason we use them. The search engine administrator does not want you to manipulate the information which eventually gets listed.
"Very often these spiders are designed to run through a page, to ignore HTML code and to read 'text' only. They will then run through the page and pick up a repetitive theme or keywords. Other spiders may take the first part of 'text' in the
section of your page as the description. I'm sure you've seen search engine entries which are garbage or which give you the contents of the site navigation table.
"To assist the spiders to describe your page the way you would like you can try to use Hidden HTML Tags.
"Hidden HTML tags which you put in these brackets are generally used for information purposes and they do not show up on your page when opened in the browser. You may use them as a reminder to yourself or as an information guide or to give credit to someone Someone reading your source file will be able to read these tags but they will be hidden from your normal visitors..."
Generally, I found the newsletter to be informative, informal and each edition did offer a new tip which would be useful to someone new to the Internet. Well worth a look.
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