| Submitting
your page to a Search engine - placement / promotion |
|
| If you want traffic, you've really got to show up in the first two or three pages of the search engine results. Otherwise, people will never find you (unless they're conducting some deep research). There is an industry devoted to working (or exploiting) search engines, as some of the following resources indicate. | |
| Search engines work in two ways. 1 - They "spider" or continuously search the Internet for pages. These pages are then registered in the search engine's database for retrieval. 2 - Site owners and developers submit their URL's to the search engines to speed the process. A search engine will then either automatically include the URL in its database, or will make a point of visiting and verifying the site content before inclusion. | |
| Costs to register with a search engine or
directory http://www.promotionbase.com/article.php/361 |
|
| Virtual Promote
lists a variety of strategies for those who just can't get
enough of this: http://www.virtualpromote.com/ |
|
| There's even a page devoted to getting
listed in Yahoo: http://www.webmaster-resources.com/articles/guest71.shtml |
|
| Some services allow you to submit
your site for free: http://www.free-spot.com/submit.htm http://accusubmit.com/submit.html and others do a more comprehensive job but will charge: http://www.submit-it.com/ You can also visit each of the search engines and submit your site directly for free. Some pages offer helpful tips as well. |
|
| And finally, here's a great resource
covering most aspects of site promotion should you want to delve
deeper: http://www.webmaster-resources.com/articles/promotion.shtml |
|
 |
|
| Monitoring web site traffic | |
| How can you tell if your efforts are paying off? Well, you enlist the support of web site statistics to gain a pretty clear picture of how many people are visiting your site, and where they're coming from. You can also find out a great deal more about your visitor, such as where they spend the most time, where they enter your site from, and where they leave. This information will let you work on the weak spots while learning from the success of the stronger pages. | |
| Most Internet Presence Providers (IPP's) will provide this service for no additional charge when they host your web site. You can then get detailed site statistics from such software packages as WebTrends and MediaHouse. | |
| You can find plenty of web sites
that will provide this service for free as well: http://servercheck.com/ http://books.pagecount.com/sign_up.html http://www.gumball-tracker.com/?uk |
|
|
|
| Send your web site to email listservs or Usenet Newsgroups | |
| And finally, once you've been able to establish a track record of web site traffic, you can then think about putting advertisements on your web site. Advertisers are interested in "eyeballs", as we explored previously. If it's consistent with your web site, you may want to try and grab some of the advertising revenue from companies in alignment with your site content. | |
| Once you've reached this point it will be time for some self-congratulations before returning to step one above (since someone else will have seen how you've done all this and copied your success...). | |
|
|