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How to Promote Your Site

While a web site may go up quickly, getting traffic takes a while. This isn't surprising given the vast number of web pages sprawled across the Internet. There are many ways to make sure you keep traffic once you get it. But before you can worry about keeping surfers, you have to get them surfing in your direction. This isn't a speedy process, but with planning, some low-bandwidth banners, and determination, you can have a thriving web site.

You probably don't have money to spend on costly banner ads, print ads, or other traditional marketing tactics, like the big corporations do. So how can you make sure your site gets noticed?

It's a good question, and while you may feel like your chances of having your "counter" ever cross the 1000 marker are grim, don't despair. There are many low-budget or free options available that will help spread the word about your site.

Some of these tips involve web-specific advertising, using web-sense in your everyday communications, and tweaking your HTML.

Everyday Web-Sense
If your website matters to you and your business, then you'll want to make sure it's a part of "you" every time you go out the door. In other words, make sure your URL is on everything you send out that bears your name.

1) LEARN YOUR URL. It's okay not to have your own domain name, but its not okay not to remember your URL, or to stumble when asked.

Homework: Say your URL five times before going to sleep each night and with your morning coffee.

2) Use a signature (sig-line) in your email. You see them everywhere. Keep it simple and to the point. No matter who you write or what it's about, your info is there, hopefully not big and obtrusive.

Using a sig-line has become a commonly accepted practice and so you shouldn't get any flames from email recipients.

If you would like to know more on how to create a sig-line see our training section in the members area.

Tweaking your HTML
You've probably heard that you should be stringing key words over and over again across your page and then formatting them in a transparent color (white if your background is white) so that search engines notice you. I wouldn't recommend doing it. That's not the answer to beating the search engines. For someone using a browser that won't format the text color, or for someone who has changed the browser default colors and set them to override the web colors, your text will show up and then you would be caught cheating, and that could be a bit embarrassing.

MegaURL will submit your site to Search Engines and other promotional sites as well as giving you tips on how to get ranked higher. So for starters lets see how you should change up your HTML to help search engines find your pages.

1) Make sure that the <TITLE> tag offers a descriptive title that accurately summarizes the page. This is important for several reasons. If you leave the <TITLE> tag blank those visiting your site will probably suspect: that you don't really know what you're doing, and/or have a blank bookmark (or one that says Untitled) when they try and bookmark your page since the bookmark uses the <TITLE> information as its keywords.

Search engines pay a lot of attention to what's in a <TITLE> tag. The linked text you see in results generated by a search engine is the <TITLE> information from the page the search engine has pulled up as fitting the search criteria. When faced with potentially hundreds of search results, people often pick and choose what sites to hit based on the title they see in the search list, so make sure your <TITLE> is meaningful.

2) Use <META> tags. There are two <META> tags you should definitely use:

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="">
Select the most important keywords (20), and write a descriptive sentence or two. You don't need to repeat any words that you used in the page title. Keep this short and to the point, but still understandable. Eliminate as many "filler" words as you can so that you have room for the keywords you have chosen, which do the actual work for you.

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="">
Prepare a list of 50 to 100 keywords -- the kind of words that if someone entered one of these words, you'd like him to find your site. Make sure that you don't repeat any word more than three times. When you arrange your key words, it's a good idea to list the words in terms of importance. Engines hopefully will read them all, but just in case, stack the deck, so to speak.

There is another <META> tag that you can use but it is kind of tricky to understand. The "robots" tag:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
According to the Advanced HTML site, there are four options for the "CONTENTquot; section of the "robots" tag. The four options involve two pairs of two, and from each pair you can only have one of the terms in the tag.

The pairs:

index / noindex
follow/ nofollow

Using "index" tells robots to index your page. If a robot sees "follow" in your <META> tag, it will follow the links on that page and thus index subsequent pages (if they, too, have the "index" tag). Using the "noindex" and "nofollow" options tell robots to ignore your page and not to follow the links. You might want these options on pages that aren't for general access, pages you have on the web but are still testing, or pages you have set up for client review.

Cheating META tips: Be forewarned, however, that not everyone will consider this an honorable approach. A recent CNET tip suggested creating two versions of the same page and changing the title/meta info in each version so that you can highlight two different aspects. For example, if your site is about both software and training, you might want to do separate html versions, one in which you play up the software aspect and the other in which you play up the training aspect. A similar approach which many guides describe as illustrating poor netiquette is changing your <TITLE> tag frequently so as to be reindexed and thus, potentially, show up more than once in a search list.

4) Add descriptive ALT-tag information, particularly if your site depends upon many graphics for content. While not all search engines recognize or record ALT tags, some do.

Announcing Your Arrival
Registering with search engines is one of the first things you should do once your site is complete. Not only is this the best way to assure that you will, eventually, come up in someone's search, but search engines often take time to register a site's existence. So the earlier you file your submissions, the better.

Small, colorful, moving, rectangular White Noise
Sorry, those are banners, and (some) surfers pay a lot of attention to them. How you feel about banner ads is beside the point. You either look and click or ignore them. Regardless, they are the cornerstones of today's web scene, and you don't have to be left out in the cold just because your funding bucket is dry.

There are many free banner services that may increase your traffic. The only catch: you have to be willing to have ads on your own site. So surf around or visit one of those sites listing links of "FREE stuff" sites.

Odds -n- Ends
As you flip through your paper-copy magazines and trade publications, notice the email addresses often included in the review sections. If submissions are accepted, write a short summary of your site, tack on the URL, and send it off. Having your page show up, online or offline can't hurt in the quest for attention.

You can also scope out the numerous "Cool Sites" web sites. Many of them allow you to submit your site for consideration.

An insiders tip: You can check to see how many sites have you linked. While you can do this on many search engines, it's easily done on AltaVista. To check, just enter link: http:// (your URL) and hit submit. The results show the number of sites indexed by the search engine that have you linked.

Consider writing and submitting press releases. The Internet News Bureau Press Release Service isn't free, but this, or another similar site, may be worth considering for those special site/product launches.

Tweaking your code, and filling in numerous submittal forms take time, but in the end you'll realize it was time (not money) well spent.