He trudg'd along, unknowing what he sought (John Dryden, Cymon and Iphigenia)

Citation

Ellis, B. (1999), "He trudg'd along, unknowing what he sought (John Dryden, Cymon and Iphigenia)", Microelectronics International, Vol. 16 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/mi.1999.21816cag.001

He trudg'd along, unknowing what he sought (John Dryden, Cymon and Iphigenia)

He trudg'd along, unknowing what he sought (John Dryden, Cymon and Iphigenia)

Keywords Internet, IMPAS

Many of us trudge along the Internet, trying to find some means of drumming up business, but not knowing how to do so. In the last issue, I showed you how to improve your Web to give you a better chance of being close to the top of a search engine list when a prospective customer typed in appropriate keywords. Unfortunately, this is only half the story. There are many ifs and buts which can affect your rating. One of the most important is to consider your uniform resource locator (URL). Although your URL appears to be your address, it is no such thing: it is an alias for your Internet protocol (IP) number. This takes the form of four groups of figures from 0 to 255, such as 123.234.210.100. Every site on the Net has such a number, even your own computer, which is usually 128.0.0.1. When you ask your browser to find http://www.<name>.com, the http indicates that it has to work in hypertext transfer protocol (as opposed to file transfer protocol or ftp). Your server or that of your Internet service provider (ISP) will then look up the URL in a list and do all the necessary with the corresponding IP number, which you would not normally see or even know about. In fact with modern browsers, it is usually sufficient to assume it will find the http://, www., and .com by itself, provided that there is no ambiguity: just type in the <name>, unless you specifically wish something different. This may not work with non-US domains, such as are registered with other countries, ending in a two-letter country code.

To return from our digression, the best kind of URL to have is like the one shown in the previous paragraph. The .com type makes it intuitive if you have a unique name and this applies to companies in any country. Just think, http://www.<name>.com gives more international credibility to your company image than the relatively parochial http//www.<name>.co.uk, or the equivalent in whatever country you are (you can have both your country and a .com domain, if you want, with mirror sites: this would be even better). Even worse for your image is where you use an ISP non-domain service, in whatever country, like http://www.<name>.<isp>.com, http://www.<isp>.com/<name> or http://www.<isp>.com/homepages/<name>. Worst of all is when you use a free service (and you obtain exactly what you pay for here). Not only does your presence on a free service automatically class you with a poor image, the quality of the service is generally so poor, with overloaded servers, that few will visit you, not to mention the obligatory advertising (do you really want someone to click the banner at the top of your page, rather than to look at what you have to say?).

What, then, is the best way to register your URL on a search engine? There is no "best" way because there is no sure way. Let us assume, to start with, that you do not wish to spend much money. Each search engine or index has the possibility of allowing you to do so, free of charge and for nothing. All you have to do is to browse into the engine and seek the means to do so, very frequently under the title "Add URL". You will then be asked to fill in a more or less complex form. Wait a month or two and you may be listed, with any luck. The only problem is that there are dozens upon dozens upon dozens of such engines and lists and to do it this way takes an eternity of mostly online time. Wouldn't it be good if we could fill up one form and have the data submitted to all the engines in one fell swoop? There are dozens of companies that offer to do this for you, but are they effective? My experience is 'not very'. The problem is that many of these companies offer what appear to be excruciatingly wonderful deals: "Let us register your URL to 900 search engines and indexes for only $40"; "We will put you at the top of the list of 500 search engines for $99" and so on. Be warned, these are mostly scams. These are not the "Open, Sesame", of search engine success: rather the opposite for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the more popular engines, need more info than the URL alone, which is usually all that these merchants give them. In any case, there are only ten or a dozen major engines so who uses the other 890 or 490 engines? Your prospective customers? I think not; far better to use one or more of the free services which offer free submission to a dozen major engines. It is very difficult to choose amongst them but there is one which I think may have the best idea, at http://selfpromotion.com: this site seems to ask all the right questions, if a little laboriously. The service is free of charge but you are invited to send a $10 contribution if you are happy with what they do.

However, you will be lucky if you reach the coveted "top ten" in a search engine list with just that. So, what is the secret? The answer is simple: publicity. Search engines live on it. Buy a position on a banner sequence and you will be much more successful. How much does it cost? Avoid any fixed price system ­ once they have your money, they will not promote your site better than without payment except for a week or two. Negotiate a "per hit" referral system at a few cents a time. Each time someone clicks on your banner, your meter clicks up a hit. This is a targeted system: when anyone asks for a keyword associated with the electronics industry, for example, only banners relevant to that industry are displayed, so the visible ads are appropriate to the surfer's immediate interest. Subscribe to one or more of these services and your "rating" will improve dramatically.

However, there is an even better way of improving the number of hits to your site. It requires just a modicum of cheek, but it is effective. Exchange links. Put in a page on your site where you can put in links to any number of sites. Categorise them into government, chambers of commerce, commercial and so on. Then contact the Webmasters of all the companies or organisations you have ever had any dealings with, including all your suppliers and clients in the industry, and request them to put your name in their links page if you do the same for them. As a rule, this will result in about an 80 per cent acceptance. Now, you may wonder, who is likely to look at Joe Bloggs' links page to find your site. Possibly not a great number. But, if a search engine spider finds your name time and again when it examines others' sites, it will consider you more important and slowly push you up the scale. Of course, this is not necessarily a short-term investment in effort, but I believe it is effective.

Regular readers may remember I reviewed the first site in each of the letters A to E of the IMAPS membership list in the last issue. I propose to continue with the alphabet this time, as well.

F & K Delvotec Inc., Burbank CA http://www.fkdelvotecusa.com

The Home Page of this site loads at a medium speed, but is quite a "clean" design. The download time could be improved by eliminating the animated advertisement for Netscape, using text instead of some of the graphics and rehashing the illegible "10 Best" icon which, surprisingly, has a longer compressed JPG file length than the uncompressed version. I don't know what went wrong, here. The keyword list could be longer and more complete, but the meta description is rather too long. Navigation from the Home Page is easy from a very clear graphics list. Naturally, I clicked on the Products page, which gives a rapidly-loading sub-menu of different models of wire bonders. Each of these opened a page with a clear, but modest, photo of the equipment offered, a brief description and the specifications in a tabulated form. I liked the way this was done and must say that this is an ideal way of being able to shortlist equipment with a view to purchase. The only negative comment I can make here is that the list of products does not include the company's plasma cleaner, which you have to search for on a minute text menu at the foot of the page, or some other products accessible only through the What's New page. I was pleased to find the full address and contact numbers on the Home Page, but far less pleased to be told that they have offices in various parts of the world (including their corporate headquarters in Germany) without the slightest clue as to how they could be contacted. This sort of parochialism is perhaps too common with some US companies who seem to think that the world is contained within the shores of the 48 contiguous states, but I would have expected better of a European company. This is a pity, as the site would have otherwise earned more consistently good marks.

Gaiser Tool Company, Ventura, CA http://www.gaisertool.com

Oh! Horror! A funereal, totally graphics, Home Page, without any details of the company, other than the name in characters so big that someone who was visually impaired could read it, if a happier choice of colours had been made. Fortunately, the graphics is not too big, but big enough to compromise downloading time with a slow connection. The pages have been recently written with a Claris trial tool and some minor code errors are evident. There is a list of keywords, including all imaginable spellings of the company name, but no meta description. To enter the site, there are two mapped areas on the graphics, one for wire bonding tools and the other for wire EDM tools. Clicking on the first one produced a screen with two frames. The left hand one continued the funereal theme with a graphics menu (it would have lost nothing if this had been text-only and gained a lot in legibility and speed). The right hand frame shows a large pink and yellow graphics rectangle with photographs of seven types of tools encrusted in it, acting as a menu to reach pages devoted to each type. Each of these (some did not work) produced a single or multiple line-drawing graphics with a choice of models. These black-and-white line drawings were not sharp and details were difficult to see; moreover, their file sizes were too big for the information they were supposed to convey. Clicking on them produced a larger and legible version of the same sketch, along with details, sometimes tabulated, of the choice of tools. Other menu options allowed the downloading of brochures in PDF format. Ever curious, I wanted to find out whether they had a sales organisation covering Europe, which could be contacted. I clicked on Representatives and up came a map of the USA with, I presume, their offices marked. Just below there were the words "International Dealers" and a microscopic world map. I clicked on Europe and up came the same map but larger, this time. I clicked on Europe again and this time I was offered a table giving the names of the German and UK dealers and one for Europe (I take it Germany and the UK are not in Europe?) with an address, telephone number and so on in ... Massachusetts, of all places (I take it New England is in Europe?). The EDM tools followed a similar set-up to the bonding tools, equally laborious and with long download times. Oh! By the way, most of the pages except the Home Page did have a meta description ... appropriate for Web creation and hosting, rather than for hi-tech tools!

H-Technologies Group, Inc., Cleveland, OH http://www.smtnet.com/h-tech

This is not so much a Web site as a single information text page on Jennie Hwang's organisation. As such, some of the boxes in the table at the foot of this article are not relevant. One would think that a single 9kb page would be fast-loading but this did not appear to be the case, probably because it was hosted on the SMTnet server, which is probably inadequate for the traffic and the jobs demanded of it. If this page was mirrored on an "ordinary" ISP server, it would, indeed, have zipped in like greased lightning. What can one say of the contents? Not much! It is all there and easy-to-read in default text. Anyone wishing to hire this company as a consultant can find all he or she needs to know before contacting it. Parenthetically, Jennie Hwang is on the Editorial Advisory Board of our sister-journal, Surface & Surface Mount Technology.

Figure 1The home page of IBIS Associates

IBIS Associates, Inc., Wellesley, MA http://ibisassociates.com

This company seems to be a little bit of an oddball here. It describes itself as Technology Strategy and Business Development Consulting. The problem may well be mine, but I felt I could not relate to this company from their Web site, which gave me the impression of being aloof and distant. This may be because they work in many industries and I know it is difficult to be all things to all men. The amount of details regarding their work in the electronics industry is almost negligible. The Home Page (Figure 1) itself is pleasant enough to the eye and is correctly written with Adobe PageMill for Windows. It has a good meta description but its keyword list is a little meagre: for example, if you searched under "electronics .AND. consultant", it would never be in the top 100, simply because neither word is listed! The total of the Home Page files is under 25kb despite a graphics whose relevance is hard to find, so it downloads well and rapidly. All the other pages follow a similar theme. It should perhaps be mentioned that all the pages use a rather unusual font, Georgia: if you do not happen to have the same font on your machine, the display will default to, probably, Times Roman (depending on the platform) and this will cause a loss of the site's visual appeal.

JEM America Corp., Fremont, CA http://www.jemam.com

The first time I tried to look at this site, it was "down" for some reason. However, if "up" is the opposite of "down", it was "up" again the following day. The Home Page is neat but, oh!, so heavy with graphics, totalling over 150kb. This alone dropped the downloading time score. Webmasters should remember that some potential customers may be in the wilds of some African country with just copper for the whole Internet connectivity and a 386 server connected up with 2.4kbits modems. This page would take over eight minutes to download, assuming an absolutely perfect connection, which would be unlikely under these conditions. In this case, it is exaggerated, because even the address, in ordinary Arial-style text, is a graphics file taking up 16kb: it could have been done in 100 bytes or so. The page was generated with NetObjects Fusion for Windows, which seems to be able to do a good job, although I have no experience of it. The meta description is adequate, stating "JEM manufactures wafer probe cards for the semiconductor test industry", and the keywords list is reasonable, so that search engines should have little difficulty in finding it, after spidering. Happily, the Home Page does not compound its sins by unnecessary advertising, animated graphics, script effects or any other byte-grabbing gimmicks. It is easy to navigate from this page to the useful part of the Web by a graphics menu. Clicking on Products did not produce any better impression. The page downloaded horrendously slowly because of JEM's local server (I had a very good connection up to the server gateway) plus it had an 82,473 byte graphics of black-and-white photos of some products in another massive page. This image was effectively a menu to split the different product lines, but it was superfluous because there was a similar text-graphics menu at the top of the page and it did not really convey any useful information in its own right. Happily, three of the four product information pages were much better, being essentially text-only, except for the logos and menus. They would have been better without a fixed-width (tabulated) text, as it means horizontal scrolling in small windows or at low resolution. Unfortunately, the published data did not give enough information to enable one to say "Ah! This is a must for the shortlist!". The fourth one responded with the dreaded Under Construction. By hunting diligently, but not intuitively, one can find the Web site of JEM America's parent company in Japan and three European addresses (incidentally, all three with spelling errors) but no e-mail addresses for them. In summary, this is not the best site on the Internet, either for information or for design and I doubt whether its presence will significantly increase sales or satisfy support needs for existing customers.

Table I gives a subjective appreciation of different aspects of the reviewed sites.

Finally, I should like to make a plug. I have just started an Internet forum on all aspects of cleaning and contamination control. It is freely open to all who have any kind of cleaning problem, including removing the tomato soup stains out of your tie, as well as defluxing that dense hybrid before hermetically sealing it. Even if you have no questions to ask, you may be able to help somebody else find an answer to their problem. Please visit this forum and bookmark it at http://www.protonique.com/solvents_forum

Brian EllisMosfiloti, Cyprusb_ellis@protonique.com