The saying "if you build it, they will come" does not apply to Web sites. The Web is more like a wilderness than a mall. You have to put serious effort into making your site stand out. Don't invest money in a great Web site without also budgeting for promotion.
Search engines are probably the first things you think of when I mention Web site promotion. But are they the best way to promote your site? Maybe. The Web is cluttered with millions of Web sites and trillions of pages. I recently read that about 97% of people do not look beyond the first page of search results, and the competition for those first ten spots is fierce. So, while search engine registration is certainly a good idea, don't expect that to necessarily be the way people will find you, unless they are looking specifically for your business name or something relatively unique to your site.
To register your site with a search engine, you navigate to the search engine Web site with your browser and click on the appropriate link for adding a site. You eventually end up at a form that you fill out with information about the site or the page you want to register. Each search engine has different rules regarding the submission of pages, and those rules change frequently. And unless you regularly re-submit, your pages fall in the ranking. Some search engines charge a fee for page submissions, sometimes without even an acceptance guarantee.
Submitting your Web pages to the search engines is boring and frustrating. To ease the pain, software products like Web Position Gold can help you submit your pages and evaluate your current position in the various search engines. If you are serious about search engine placement, getting specialized software is money well spent. Alternatively, if you don't have the time to manage it yourself, consider hiring the services of a company that specializes in search engine submissions.
Some search engines allow you to submit only your home page, while others allow you to submit any page. Many employ spiders, which are automated programs that can scan your entire site by following the links between pages. Spiders look for specific elements in your Web page when they index them. Indexing refers to the process of cross-referencing your pages with specific search keywords, then storing that information in the search engine's database. For those of you who know something about HTML, here is an example of the tags search engines generally try to find:
<title>Rocking Chair Ranch Product List</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="rocking chair,rocker,Rocking Chair Ranch,wood furniture">
<meta name="description" content="Hand-crafted wooden rocking chairs.">
The title tag controls what displays on the browser's title bar when you navigate to the page. The keywords meta tag provides the keywords that are used to index the page. The description meta tag provides a description the search engine can use in the search results listing. Some search engines also look for keywords in the ALT attribute of your images, and may get the page title from the first H1 tag on the page.
If you use a visual design tool, check the product's help facility for information about how to set search engine indexing attributes.
Getting your site into the search engines is just one way to promote your site. In the next article, I'll cover additional things you can do to increase traffic. |
