In our last installment of HTML Tips, I went over how to create really cool bullet points for your list items and also how to wrap text around your photos. In this installment, we’re going to finish up with a few more tips that I am sure you will find quite handy.
The first tip is for ad tracking. As much as you don’t want to hear this, ad tracking is critical if you’re going to know which ads of yours are working and which ones are not. The problem is, ad tracking requires one of two things.
The first option is to buy some expensive ad tracking software such as Analyzer. Sure, it works great, but it also costs a pretty penny.
The second option is to program some PHP code, which is what I do. The problem with that is that if you don’t know PHP you are plain out of luck.
However, there is a really simple HTML option that nobody thinks of when it comes to tracking where your clicks are coming from. It’s so simple, it’s almost silly. But it works fine. The only requirement is that you have to have access to your web logs and it must be your own domain. If not, this option is not open to you.
What you do, in the text of your ad, instead of just putting your domain name for the URL, you use something like this…
http://www.yourdomain.com?ad_one
What the “?” does is that it tells your web stats to show this as a separate page. So when you go into your web stats, you simply look for how many clicks you got to your page called “ad_one”. Of course, you can call it anything you want. This is just for illustration purposes.
The next tip is another big one, especially for people who are creating their own pages, have their own products, and don’t want the download pages indexed by the search engines. Trust me, this can be a real pain in the backside when you find out the search engines have all your download pages indexed.
The fix is a very simple one. The following code in your meta tags will do it.
This tells the search engines not to index your page and not to follow any links from the page. This way, there is no chance that you’ll find your download page showing up in Google’s results.
The final tip of this series has to do with page redirecting. There are many ways to do this. Personally, I use a PHP script to redirect to a page depending on what code is entered. But if you’re not into PHP programming, the easy way to do this is with a simple HTML meta tag REFRESH command. It will look something like this.
What this will do is redirect the person to whatever page you put after the URL tag. It’s that simple.
I realize that I have only scratched the surface with things you can do to make your life a little easier. Maybe I’ll have a future edition of HTML tips someday.
Until then, happy coding.
