Web promotion is the general subject of this chapter. For a chapter with a JavaJam assignment, this has to be the shortest one, relative to the length of the chapter. I will get into why below.
The only major thematic subject you need to know is about search engines.
This chapter gets you acquainted with the bare HTML way to help your website get indexed by popular search engines.
The origin story of the rise of search engines is this: in order to visit any interesting websites, you would have to know the full URL of the website you wanted to navigate to in advance. Yes, it sounds a bit like an infinite ingress problem or the chicken and the egg problem. If you misspelled the URL, then there was no easy third-party way to know what you should have typed in. (We will ignore reputation attacks and cyber squatting, for the sake of simplicity.) That is the heuristic need that search engines fulfilled. Out of the early 2000-nots, Google has risen to be the most dominant. Now you know the absolute bare minimum on the beginning of Google, from a conceptual point of view. (We also have to ignore the later and more relevant part of Google's history, which is namely the backdooring of Google by TLAs, to keep this shorter than 1,000 pages.)
It is mentioned that Yahoo gets its primary search results from Google... I find this hard to believe, because Yahoo was always, is, and probably will continue to be inferior to Google - no matter how you feel about Google.
Ironically, besides adding a meta tag to the header of
a bare HTML webpage is the bare minimum. (Conversely, you can tell
web crawlers from search engines to not index your site with the
same robots.txt technique - if you wish for your
website to not be indexed by search engine crawlers or spiders for
various and valid reasons.)
In Section 13.4, a rule of thumb of not giving every webpage on your site the same page title is sometimes even ignored. Usually, this happens only on very small sites, but I suppose not everyone gets the same standard media literacy training since not everyone has taken an HTML class. Also, when the textbook mentioned that search tags should not be spammed, I just remember how YouTube was like in 2010 - some videos tried to get clicks by adding so many tags that it would require at least 2-3 pages to print all of the tags out on paper.
Unfortunately, "content of value" has been forgotten in 2020. The top 10%-25% of trending videos on YouTube have little to no value anymore...
In Section 13.5, I cannot believe you need a Google account to submit a free request for Google to list your site - if this does not already happen automatically in 2020. I suppose this is to prevent spam or other social engineering attacks, but it makes me uncomfortable that a lot of the internet is turning into a literal kindergarten class, where you need to ask permission to basically do anything.
Also, please stop using paid ads on conventional search engines, such as on Google. I suppose the ads on DuckDuckGo are ok, since the ads are not really interactive, not animated, and not generated by privacy-invasive AI neural networks.
I kind of wished websites had site maps, but that would be impossibly large for sites like Twitter and Instagram (even for the public accounts, ignoring that accounts can change between public and private at any given time).
As I have prematurely stated, one does not need to default to Google Analytics for web analytics. There are other open-source analytics tools out there, ready for further adoption!
Alexa web rankings (not to be confused with Amazon Alexa) are a common sight for me, since any major company with a website (which is actually almost all of them) have accompanying Alexa rankings in their respective Wikipedia articles.
In Section 13,8, social media optimization is... a dirty matter. I suppose it may be necessary, since having an official yet inactive, quiet, and noncontroversial social media presence is better than having none which inherently carries the risk of false reputation attacks. (This risk can never vanish, even with an official social media presence, but at least official presence is better than none.)
I feel that many sites are guilty of forgetting what RSS feeds are, which is quite unfortunate. I think even Firefox still has a built-in graphical RSS feed. This allows for your (potentially technically more inclined) audience to keep tabs on your latest company news blog without constantly having to check for any new changes by hand in the browser. One rule of thumb: please do not truncate the RSS entries (to the first 100 characters, or something like that). Even though not all RSS readers in general can convey all of the visual formatting, at least the text-only RSS entries can be read entirely in an RSS reader. Not everyone wants to open up a browser just to look at a text-only webpage... well, I am not convinced to do so - unless your site has a good dark theme.
In Section 13.9, QR codes are mentioned. Apparently, the QR means "Quick Response". QR is apparently a term with copyrights or trademarks, but I think it may be headed in a direction much like rolodex or velcro - words that were copyrighted on paper but are used so ubiquitously that legal enforcement is practically impossible.
Anyways, I recommend using QR codes for printing out, especially when you intend your audience to quickly navigate to a target website via a mobile device (with a built-in camera, of course). (More traditional laptops and desktops though do not get to really utilize QR codes - at least not as easily and/or in a straightforward manner with respect to maximal usability.)
Affiliate programs probably make you think about YouTube videos filled with affiliate links and sponsored segments. Yes, it could be considered "annoying", but at least it is less invasive than YouTube's built-in ads that the site injects into YouTube videos (when using YouTube proper).
Banner ads are mentioned - probably not the best idea, unless they are small (in size) image ads that only use HTML and CSS. Yes, that would mean non-dynamic content, but those sort of small sites that actually post relevant static content ads are miles better than whatever infinite stream of JavaScript ads are providing these days.
A lot of newsletters do not add content of value anymore. In fact, a lot of them are basically an additional avenue of online tracking, if you subscribe to the newsletter of an unscrupulous site.
Forums are still part of the internet, but has been largely superseded by mainstream social media.
Traditional media ads - reminds me that Apple only runs traditional
ads on TV, newspapers, and billboards. Any YouTube video the
company uploads has the comments turned off, and I would not be
surprised at all if Apple limited replies to its legion of Twitter
accounts to mentioned accounts only. Yeah, so much for the classic
anti-1984 Orwellian TV commercial that Apple created - either you
die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain when it
comes to
Section 13.10 offers the only Hand-on Practice exercise in all of the chapter, which is displaying a YouTube video in an inline frame. The technique may be extended to any other video provider (such as Vimeo, DailyMotion, or PeerTube), so the exercise is pretty good.
All you need from Section 13.4 is the following HTML code from this
section:
<meta name="description" content="(Your web page description goes here.)">
The JavaJam weekly assignment is the shortest JavaJam assignment. Simply add description meta tags for search engines to pick up for all pages on the JavaJam site. The "Description Meta Tag" section in Section 13.4 will give you the HTML code template you need. You are copying and pasting 1 additional line that does not change the output, but remember to change the description to be unique for every JavaJam webpage.
By the way, the textbook treats Chapter 9 as the last required JavaJam assignment - however, you should simply copy the latest JavaJam assignment. For example, if you did Chapter 11's JavaJam assignment, then copy Chapter 11's work for Chapter 13's JavaJam assignment.