Team Resources

It's very important to be able to find a team's website on a search engine easily. This can be tough if your teams name is a popular phrase. In this post, I'll give a few tips to help promote your website rank. The basic idea of search engine optimization is to make the source of your site is as easy for a search bot to comprehend as it is for a human to after the source has been rendered. A few other techniques will have you working at a deeper level, dealing with file names, modified times, and descriptive URLs.

• Keeping your content together
  When a page is rendered by a browser, it can make different elements look like one block of content. Search engines see these different blocks as separate blocks, and they won't see the whole picture. You want to put all of your main content in one centralized element - something like <div> or similar. If your content needs special text formatting, use CSS class and a <span> or <p> to divide the content up.
• Image Descriptions
  The alt attribute in the <img> tag is not only mandatory in the XHTML doctype, it's a heavy factor for your images to be included in a search. Just a couple of words in there should help out a lot. Additionally, naming your images relatively will help reinforce the description.
• Titles
  The <title> tag in the head section is meant for more than just a team name. Specifying a sub-page will help search engines distinguish one page from another. It's also a good idea to title the page in the content are as well. Using <h1> tags for main titles, and <h2> tags for sub-titles will help group your results.
• Sitemaps
  Sitemaps have declined in popularity for human navigation of sites in the past few years, but search robots can still benefit. Having one page with links to every other page on the site makes sure that the whole site is visible, and more will get indexed. You might also consider an XML Sitemap. This is especially important to sites with hidden links - IE: javascript dropdowns, image maps
• Links
  Be descriptive with the text in your links. A common technique is to say "click here," but that misleads a search engine to think that page is about clicking there. If you use an image as a link, set the alt attribute to what you'd set the link text to. Also make sure to make absolute links as opposed to relative links.
• A clean IP
  I've seen a lot of robotics sites hosted on shared servers that may also host inappropriate content in other accounts. This basically backlists every site on that server, and some school or work firewalls even block sites in these situations. If possible, see if you can get a dedicated IP address for your domain.

    Throughout the build season students in the FIRST robotics program work with a lot of machines, unfamiliar parts, and prototypes. To assure the safety of our team members, Team 61 makes sure all who are involved in the design and building processes are aware of the safety guidelines. By adhering to these rules we hope to avoid injury and potentially disfiguring events, both emotional and physical. The safety rules are as follows.
    The most widely used safety rule is to wear safety glasses. Safety glasses should be worn while using any tool or when working with prototypes with moving parts. Also while working with moving parts, and machinery, tight fitting clothing should be worn, hanging jewelry removed, and hair tied back. The rule about safety glasses is followed religiously because of the imminent danger to eyes. The proper foot wear is required because there are immediate dangers of slipping or having something fall on your toes in the machining area. Proper foot wear is defined as closed toed shoes and slip resistant ones. Another rule that is fully enforced is that a person needs to wear gloves when ever working with the robot. This is followed strictly because of the amount of danger posed to the outer extremities. Student and mentor safety is a prime concern to the members of all FRC teams.
    The rules listed here are strictly enforced because we prize the safety of the students and mentors above else. The rules we follow are set in place to protect and ensure safety for all students, even those from others schools. Team 61 takes safety very seriously and we never take it for granted.