Some web sites are designed as customer
support sites and so don't need to attract site visitors but of course
most do want to get as many new visitors to their site as possible so we
need to address the best way of going about that.
You need to understand that the major site
search engines only actually index some 16% of web pages. In
addition, there is a whole industry growing up devoted to getting your web
site to the top 30 links of major site search engines. In many ways
this is actually detrimental to the web user as so often the links
presented do not give them the information they are looking for. As
an illustration, last year I put in a search term "Scotland"
onto the lycos.co.uk search engine and it took me over 300 links to find
any of Scotland's top 5 web sites. If that result was mirrored over other
search terms then that search engine is doing nothing for me as a web
user.
For this reason many experienced web users
are now deserting these major portals and finding themselves more focused
vertical market portal sites. So what we are really seeing is the inexperienced
web user still using the big portal sites while experienced web users are
only rarely using them. In business terms it's likely the
experienced web users that are your most valuable resource and so while
getting good listings on the top search engines might have been achieved
and site hits are going up you might well not be seeing much in the way of
increased business. That's because the wrong people are visiting your
site.
All this means is you have various
options open to you...
- You can pay a small fee to places like
Submit-It, Recommend-It, etc and for less than $50.00 they will get
you listed on the top 400 or so search engines. These services usually
offer an extra cost item for special services and on the whole are
excellent value and well worth using.
- You should then look for synergy links
where you get your site listed on major sites that focus on your
industry. For example if you were in the chemical industry you
might find it valuable to be featured on the Chemical Week magazine
site. Similarly, if you were in the tourist industry you might find it
valuable to be listed on your local community site.
- Electric Scotland is of course a major
portal site so if you were trying to get business especially from
North America and you are playing the Scottish angle as part of your
marketing mix then it would be valuable to have a link or feature on
Electric Scotland.
- When launching a new site you should also
look at getting listed on "What's New" sites as many look to
them for interesting new sites to visit.
- Another method is getting your mailing
list onto sites like Topica rather than running your own as sites like
that automatically give you greater exposure and will feature new
mailing lists.
- You should also strive to get your site
listed on sites that have good synergy with your own and a way of
finding such is to use the search engines to search for key words that
apply to your own industry sector. So when presented with a list of
sites take time to visit them and where appropriate email the site to
see if they will give you a link.
- Another method is getting your site
featured on some of the large mailing lists and some of them have
100,000 or more members so by being featured on one of those targeted
at your industry sector you could do very well indeed. You might
also consider writing an article offering special advice which they
may publish as part of the newsletter.
Getting listed on sites can be the most
powerful way of increasing site visitors but it is also a somewhat time
consuming task and one that you may even wish to outsource.
Finally do note that a reliance on search
engines is not a good idea. One company told me they got around
10,000 visitors a day to their site. Due to a change they made to
their index page they were delisted by Alta Vista and as a result their
visitor count halved! Also many search engines now take into account
how many other sites link to your site when ranking your site. This
means it is now harder to get good listings and means you need to get more
web sites linking to yours.
Setting up your web pages for the Search
Engines Many search engines use
meta tags to index your page on their search engines. Meta Tags don't
display on your page so you need to add them manually to the .html code of
your page between the </title> and </head> part of your
page. Here is an example of how they should look... <meta NAME="description"
CONTENT="enter your description here">
You can use up to 200 characters and you would be wise to include as many
of your key words as possible. <meta
NAME="keywords" CONTENT="enter your keywords here">
You can use up to 1000 characters. <title>enter
your title here</title>
You can use up to a maximum of 100 characters. <body>enter
keywords here</body>
It is important that you use at least 5 of the keywords in your meta tag
within the body of your page and the higher up you do this the better.
Often search engines will rate you on the relevance of the words on your
page to the keywords you have listed in your meta tag key words. Graphics
Search engines don't use graphics so it's important that you use the ALT=
within your graphic code to enter a description for the graphic and then
the search engines will pick it up. Following
these simple rules will improve your ranking on search engines.
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