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INFOBOX This guide tells you virtually every way you of promoting your page. Search Engines receive a particularly thorough treatment. |
All right. Your web site is finally completed. It is great and all you need now is to let others know about your site. How do you do that? Well, there are several ways and I will go through all of them in considerable detail. I hope you do not really think that you can avoid promotion, somehow? Internet is ruthless to lazy people, so find some time to read this introduction. |
First, lets look at search engines. You must've used at least one before. The most popular are Yahoo, Infoseek and HotBot. However, Yahoo is a bit different from (say) HotBot. There are basically two kind of search engines: a directory listing and a robot. A directory listing is very similar to a paper-based directory listing. People fill in information about themselves and later the directory listing is updated with the new entry. Yahoo is a good example of a directory listing. The second class of a search engine uses a special automated program (known as robot, crawler, spider or worm) that accesses your page and travels through all your links (or most of your links) and creates an index of all the information it accesses. I know, it might sound like a sci-fi episode, but that's what a robot does. Usually, you have to fill an application, giving your site URL address, so that robot can go there and create an index of your page. The whole process is automated and no more information is needed on your part.
As you can see, to be listed on a search engine you have to fill a request. I've read that some robots do not need a request to index your page, that they search through the whole Net to find any URL location not yet indexed and then rush there as hungry werewolves (uhh... getting out of synch here). But usually, you have to let search engines know about your site. So how do you do that?
It's simple. You go to a search engine site you want to be listed on and submit your page. There are too many search engines around, so complete instructions could not be written, but I will give you couple of example. But before you submit your page, there is a very important piece of information you need to know.
First of all, most search engines rank pages. E.g. if your site deals with Health Services in Lithuania, a user might search for "Lithuania Health Services" and will be presented with a link to your page. But what if there are hundreds of sites, dealing with the topic? It might strike you unlikely that so many people are interested in a topic like the one above, but if your site tells all about IRC (Internet Relay Chat), you might find yourself in quite a competition, with thousands of pages dealing with the topic. So how do you make sure that as soon as user types in IRC, a link to your page will pop up, leaving all other pages behind?
You must understand, that it is better to be the first in less-used topic than to be 100th in a most popular topic, because users do not usually bother to look at all pages the search engine has on current topic. Sometimes it is even impossible: for example, I once searched for "hacking unix" and search engine prepared an index consisting of 200,000 pages. Now, if I was browsing through all of them, I would still be doing that now. So, not being in the top 20 pages is worthless. You must think of what your page has to offer that is particularly novel or original. Note, that I said "it has to be original", not "it seems to be original". Think of a keyword or a key phrase that you think describes your page or site most. Say, if you deal with CGI PERL literature, then your key phrase will be "PERL for CGI BOOKS" or something like that.
Now, use your search engine to test the phrase. Enter your key phrase and see what entries you will get. No matter, what your key phrase is, chances are, you will get at least a 10,000 index. But don't worry, it just shows that your topic is indeed popular. Now, look carefully at the index and see how the search engine ranks the pages. Usually it says something like "90% relevance" for each link it provides. If the index returned many high-relevance pages, it's unlikely your page could get to the top of the index. If, however, the best relevance is 50%, you can be quite sure, you will be the first on the list. But don't get too happy yet. If the relevance scores in returned index are too low, your key phrase might be too specific or too vague. You must try and strike the balance between originality of the phrase and a "good guess possibility", e.g. you have to think what a prospective user will enter as a search string to search for a material you provide.
This is the most difficult part and you should spend quite some time thinking about it. Don't rush, because as soon as you submit your page, it might (sometimes) be impossible to change the data stored in search engine. Think of as many key phrases or key words as you can. Use a thesaurus, talk to your friends. Dirty trick: you can also look at your competitors' pages (or similar pages) source to see which keywords they use. Now that you have the keywords and you actually tested them (try testing most of them, I know it's boring, but it will pay off) you are almost ready to submit.
Search engines use pretty complex algorithms to rank your page, but they are still stupid. Not only they are all stupid, they are all different and stupid. But couple of rules are still applicable to most of them.
1. Use main key phrase in a <TITLE> tag. Most search engines give preference to keywords in <TITLE>.
2. Use key phrases and keywords at the beginning of your page (first ten lines). Yeah, I know this is stupid and I do not really think you should do that, but if you can, you do. The idea behind it is that a search engines assume that you give a summary or a review of your page at the very beginning. Now... it can be true, but usually you have 10k of JavaScript code in front of any text.
3. If you cannot write a summary in your first ten lines, you should use <META> tags. Not all of the search engines use them, but majority of them does. Here is what you do: open the page you want to index and put the following HTML tags in your <HEAD> section:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keyword1, keyword2, ...">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Description of your page">
These two tags are used by crawlers to get data from your page. Keywords META should contain the list of all keywords or key phrases separated by comma (e.g. <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Lithuanian Health Authority, Lithuania, Eastern Europe Health, Health in Lithuania">).
Description META should contain a description of your page that will be displayed as a summary to your page. You might have noticed that whenever a search engine displays a link it also displays a short summary to the link. Sometimes you see loads of strange symbols instead of a description and this is because a search engine creates a summary itself if it cannot find a description META.
How long can these METAs be? Well, again, there is no standard answer. It varies from engine to engine. But Excite allows 1000 symbols for keyword and 500 symbols for description. I don't know if you are penalised for having a META longer than that required, but I believe that long METAs are simply cut, so you can write a long keyword META of (say) 1000 symbols with most important keywords towards the beginning of the META.
Two points to note before we go any further. First, never, never forget to give your pages a title. Use the <TITLE> tag in every page you have, because this will boost your ranking. Second, as soon as you call a web crawler to your site, it usually indexes not only a page you given it, but all the pages you link to from that page! So make sure, that all the pages on your site your main page links to have METAs and TITLEs.
Having said that, do not trust the search engine, however. If you want to submit several pages, submit them explicitly, do not presume that the web crawler will find it. Also, if you submit to a directory listing, you should understand, that it will not access your page to read META tags. When you submit to directory listing, you have to enter a description and keywords manually, so have them ready. And remember, that directory listings ask you to find yourself a section where you want your page or site to be. E.g. in Yahoo you might want to add your URL to a section "International:Health&Services:Lithuania" (hypothetical example). This placement should also be thought out before submission. Think how many chances you stand to be found in section "Computers" if you sell Plato's works (Answer: unless you rent the whole page and display a 60k banner, not many).
Finally, when you submit an URL, do not forget to include the full name. You might think that your page is www.geocities.com/~heart, but this is not true. Usually the main page is called index.html, so you should write http:\\www.geocities.com/~heart/index.html. Sometimes search engines do not require you to write http:\\ (or even crash if you do), check with a particular search engine before submitting.
Now, you know how search engines work and can start submitting your page. Where to? Well, the best idea is to submit to www.yahoo.com, www.hotbot.com, www.excite.com, www.lycos.com and www.infoseek.com. If you want extra information, go to webIGN resource page and look under heading Promotion: Search Engines.
Search engines are very efficient and so on. But if you want to submit your page to every single search engine (and there are thousands!) you won't stand a chance. First of all, I don't think you know that many. Second, it will take you ages. However, we live in a capitalist world, so you will easily find people who will do it for you. Web promoters became very popular a year or so ago, and now there are at least a hundred of them. But it is not free, you might say. Yeah, they usually charge you a hefty sum (around $200), but they submit to 100s of engines.
However, if you do not want to spend money on web promotion, you can use a free service provided by some web promoters. You won't be able to promote to as many engines as you would if you paid, but who needs to be listed on "Camden Town Local Pastries Listing", anyway? If you are interested, go take a look at our resource page (section Promotion: Web promoters), but remember that everything I said before about search engines still holds.
I personally do not like banner programmes. You might have seen them. They work like that: you create a page and put a call to a banner programme (see Introduction to CGI to understand how these calls work). When someone accesses your page, a banner is displayed and you earn yourself a point. For each three or two points you earn one exposure, i.e. your banner is displayed on other participating pages. The banner programme initiator owns other 50% of exposures and uses them to display ads and earn money.
The most popular banner programme is Link Exchange and it is quite friendly and actually gives you detailed information on how many hits per day you had, how many exposures you had and so on. If you are interested, go take a look for yourself. Banner programmes are listed in the Promotion section of our resource page.
There are some sites that review pages on the Net and give the best (in their opinion) an award. An award in itself might be a boost of confidence to you, but it is also a good way to attract people. Some search engines review web pages and some magazines also have award systems. There are some vote-based programmes, which work like this: you put a banner to an award site and ask your users to press the button. Each button press is counted and the results are published on the award site. I do not have good experience of Award sites, but I'll keep you posted.
This is very hip right now. It's actually a way to get money. It is called sponsorship, because people are aware that there are no mega-bucks behind these schemes and a scheme will only pay for your domain name plus extra pocket money. There are several ways of sponsorship, the most popular being a mutated version of a banner programme. You put a banner on your page and you receive some amount of money for every time the banner is displayed. This is called an impression, and one impression usually earns you something around 0.5 cents. Usually, you won't get your money until your page earns 100$. Also, if your page doesn't attract more than 100 surfers a day, do not bother.
Another sponsorship scheme is based on click-throughs. For each time a person clicks on a banner you earn money. This time it's much more, something around 10 to 25 cents. There are two ways of click-through as also impression schemes. You can sign to an independent advertising network and it will display banners on your page or you can sign a contract with an individual company to display their banners only. This is not a lot of a difference, but you have more control over what is displayed if you sign with an individual company.
There are many advertising agencies, because the business is booming. However, most are just schoolboy projects, so be aware, you might never see any money at all. There are also many scam schemes at work, which display banners on your page, get money from advertisers and then shut down, without paying you. If you decide to use a sponsorship programme, make sure you sign with a reputable company.
Now, if you want exposure, you might want to use a different part of a sponsorship scheme. You might want to advertise for money! Yeah, even Microsoft uses one of these schemes, so it might work for you. It very much depends on an advertising agency and you should shop around before signing up. The most basic thing an agency should provide is advertising targetting - i.e. if you advertise videos for kids, you must make sure that your banner is targetted, e.g. not displayed on X-rated sites.
This scheme demands you to work hard. A buddy link is a link on another (similar to content) page. A buddy link is a scheme, when you link to a particular site, then e-mail the site owner and ask him/her to do the same. This way you can get a greater exposure, but a buddy scheme does not work effectively if you link to a page that is not similar to content, so do not link to any page at all.
Not all pages would link to your page even if you write in big red letters YOUR PAGE IS THE BEST! (well, Microsoft would definitely not fall for this, they'd know you are lying). So, another way to promote your page is to promote between experts. How do you do that? Well, say you have a page on Industrial Relations in Britain. You write an article on Industrial Relations to an established site and incorporate your www address (they usually let you do that) and an e-mail (virtually always let you do that). So, you become known by using someone else. As you get more and more known, you get an expert status yourself and one day someone would write an article on Industrial Relations in France on your page to get a little bit of exposure. As soon as you become an expert, other people link to you, write comments about you, etc. You get exposure which is actually targetted.
This is very difficult, I know. But it pays. And if you don't want to become an expert, why did you create your site in the first place?
A note of warning. Do not use wanna-be methods. Do not send people unsolicited mail, telling them to visit your page, which is apparently the best on the Net. Similarly, do not send auto ads on IRC and do not cross-post announcements in USENET. But if someone asks you if you know anything about Industrial Relations, give them a taste of things to come from your page.
I bet, you thought I won't mention search engines again. Well, here they are again. Because they are so popular (search engines are the most popular sites), you might want to advertise on them. Yeah, it is very expensive, but you will get the largest exposure (the standard way to market software nowadays is by using search engines) possible. And there is a way to target the audience. For example, Yahoo displays a banner of a particular brewery when you search its directory for beer.
OK. I might've missed something out, but these are the main ways to promote your web page. Of course, you don not need to do them all. Finally, if you can afford it, get yourself an easy-to-remember URL. So, if you sell philosophy books, you might go for www.philosophy.com, etc. This pays off, because people remember the name and then type it in directly.
Now, I think you will find it worthwhile to visit our resources page and visit some sites that will help you with promotion. Just click here.
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