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Dec 14, 2002 You own a web site. You put in a lot of hard work to get your thing(s) shown to the world. Some of you even want to make some money with your web site(s). But then the big question comes up: "How many people are actually looking at my web site?". No way to tell, so you add a counter to your site. The first week,... you find 14 vistors. But when you investigate the hits a bit better, your conclusion is that it was you, twice a day checking out your own web site (is it still there? Does it look ok? Oh, I did a good job on it!). This happens to most web masters,... beautiful site, no visitors. Why not??? The answer is simple. Every internet surfer has the choise of billions of web sites to surf to. There actually are more web sites than people in this world. So the chance anybody will find your web site is extremely small. Just look at the way you surf the internet. Do you ever look at personal web sites that belong to people you do not know? Hardly ever, if at all. And you are no different from the rest of the internet surfers. So, the best way to think about web site promotion is to ask your self: "How would I find my site, without looking for it?" Of course, a little help never hurts! The following points are important: 1) Web site title 2) Meta Tags 3) Search engines 4) Web site promotion sites 5) Creativity 1) Web site title Your web site should have a title. When ever did you read a book without a titel? Web sites are like little books, so they need a title. The title can be followed by a - and a small explanation. Go surf a bit and pay attention to the blue bar in the top of your browser. The title of a web site shows up there. Since you are a web master you know a little bit about HTML code. In the top of your HTML source you can add the title like this: Title of your site - Short sentence explanation 2) Meta Tags Meta tags are used by search engines to determine what the site is about. There are different types of meta tags, but the main one is the "key words" meta tag. In here you put words that people would use in a search engine. To investigate, check out some sites and open the source code so you can see how other "popular" sites do it. Meta tags look like this: meta name="keywords" content="word1, word2, word3, word4, word5, word6" 3) Search engines Search engine use different ways to find web sites. They have software that just "surf" the internet for pages and keep records on how often people look for sites and how many hits a site gets. Then you can pay to a search engine for getting good rankings. This means they put your site higher in the rankings because you pay for it. If you do not wish to do this, you can still get high rankings, but it is going to take a lot more work. The choise is yours. One of the other ways they rank a site, is link popularity. The more sites that link to your site, the higher ranking your site gets because the software assumes that your site is popular. So, exchanging links with other sites can help. The basic thing is to try to make your site popular for search engines. The title and the meta tags are an absolute minimum in order to make your site visible to search engines. 4) Web site promotion sites These are sites that help you get hits for free. A good way to start, but the above still is important and should not be forgotten. Sign up with web site promotion sites and you will see the hits comming in. Question is if these hits are really valuable. Not as much as hits that you get directly from a search engine, but still you can get some people interested. You can sign up with many of them. For a whole list of them go to this site: http://lotsoflinks.web1000.com and click on "Money makers" in the top of the screen. There you can find a whole list of web site exchange sites which are ideal for your starting your web site promotion and the hits you will receive will keep up your motivation to continue to becomming a successful web master/promotor. 5) Creativity Probably the most important one is creativity. Basically you need to be creative in 2 things: 1) Web site design Make your site interesting enough so that people will remember your site. The best promotion is getting people to remember your site so they come back! But be carefull with graphics though. If your site needs to download 1 MB of pictures nobody will look at it. It just takes to long, especially for the dial-up modem connections. Best is to keep the ammount of to download files below 40 KB. Some smart HTML programming can still make your site beautiful with small files to download. Also, if you have a high resolution screen, design your site for a 800x600 or 640x400 resolution. Still half the world uses 800x600 screens and some even the 640x400. 800x600 is the maximum design resolution. 2) Web site promotion Creativity can give you many hits. Start with the web site exchanges you can find in http://lotsoflinks.web1000.com and continue from there. Create some campaigns that will release a flood of hits. Any legal way ( do not spam!!!) that is creative can increase your hits and success. This is just the beginning of web site promotion, but it is a good begin and may lead you to be a very succesfull web master/promoter. Good luck and if you want to already start improving your link popularity, send me an email (I do not spam!) with your link via the request form in the above mentioned web site. Next article will be about making money with your web site. Also written for beginners. ------------ Peter Faber is Dutch and has recently moved to Brazil. Visit Peter's website. Email Peter: getting_there@uol.com.br Comment on this column in the forum. ------------ |
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