Dear Tripod Member,
On the 20th of October 2004, Lycos Tripod will be making important changes which could affect your website.
Lycos has been, and is always, the place where you can freely build your personal website with whatever tools you want: our exclusive Lycos WebBuilder, FrontPage or PHP technologies or simply by uploading the pages you created on your computer.
In order to keep the best quality of service possible for all its webmasters, Lycos Tripod is now changing its rules. To keep your Tripod account online, your website will have to achieve, each month, a minimum amount of 50 pages impressions (please see below the definition of page impressions).
Why are we doing this?
To improve the quality of our free hosting service
To make all the available space and resources available for serious webmasters
What happens if you reach 50 page impressions a month?
Nothing will change for you apart from the fact that your website will be running better and faster.
What happens if you don’t reach 50 page impressions a month?
You have two months to achieve this, if not, your site will be deleted. At the end of this mail are some tips on how you can optimise your site. Alternatively, you can transfer your site to Lycos WebCentre. We have a special package available for Tripod members:
http://www.tripod.lycos.co.uk/switch/.
More information about Lycos WebCentre and other packages we offer can be found on:
http://webcentre.lycos.co.uk
What to do next?
Check your monthly page impressions
Your page impressions statistics can be found under ‘Your statistics’ section on My Account page
http://www.tripod.lycos.co.uk/myaccount/
If necessary, use the tips to increase your page impressions OR
Transfer your site to Lycos WebCentre.
Lycos will contact you in again in month’s time with an update on your website.
Now more than ever, Lycos Tripod is now the place where popular sites can express themselves freely!
The Lycos Tripod Team.
Page Impressions definition:
Number of Page Impressions – “is the exact number of times a specific web site has been accessed or viewed by a user. A page impression acts as a counter for web pages, informing site owners how many times their sites were visited. Page impressions are also referred to as hits” (source: webopedia.com)
How to optimise your site:
You’ve done the hard part by constructing your website. By completing a few extra ‘behind the scenes’ checks, you can help your site get a higher listing in search engines and ensure that more people enjoy your hard work.
These checks mainly concern ‘meta-data’. ‘Meta-data’ tells search engines what the pages in your website contain. Keeping the Meta tags up to date will make it easier for search engine spiders to read your pages.
Follow these steps to help increase your listing:
Meta description – write some text (no more than 150 characters) which describes the web page. Try to use as many keywords as possible in the description. For example, if the page is about Manchester United, make sure you mention Manchester United by name rather than saying “my favourite football club”.
Meta keywords – Create a list of no more than 20 words or phrases that are relevant to your page. They must ‘sum up’ the content on your page, i.e. they are ‘keywords’. However, it is important that the words you choose are words that already appear in the content and links of your page. For example, “Manchester United, Man U, David Beckham, Old Trafford, Premiership, Ryan Giggs …” etc
Title tag – The title tag should be a catchy 6-8 word strap-line that tells the user (and the search engine) what the page is about, and entices them to click and find out more. For example, “Manchester United fan site with gallery and gossip”
Alt tags behind images – use the alt tag behind images to describe the image, which will add to the keyword relevancy of the page. For example, behind a picture of David Beckham scoring against Arsenal you would put the caption “Beckham scores against Arsenal”
Central content – a sentence at the top that introduces the page will help the user and the search-engine quickly see what the page is about.
Text links – the text you use when creating a link should contain keywords if possible. For example, if the link goes to a page with a gallery of Manchester United players, the link might say: “Manchester United players gallery” rather than just “gallery” or “pictures”.
