Finally, after months of blood, sweat and tears, you’ve introduced the wide world to your new Web site. Trouble is, you’re getting few visitors. For many people, site promotion is an afterthought — not surprising, considering that building a worthwhile site can be a Herculean and all-consuming task in itself.
Online and on bookshelves, you’ll find reams of information on how to drive people to your site — a cacophony of sometimes contradictory advice on keywording techniques, search engines and more. It’s hard to sort wheat from chaff, for a couple of reasons. First — as with everything Web — what’s relevant today may be obsolete next month. Second, search engines are like people: logic and preferences vary from one to the next; what might get you noticed by one search engine will strike you from the list of another.
But there are ways — many of them effective, none of them infallible — to increase your chances of getting Web traffic. You’ve already done the hard part: developed a site with strong content. Now what?
Put your code to work
An important step is getting search engines and directories to notice you; you can’t get clicked when you’re not on the list. Naturally, the higher you show up on a results page, the better.
Some search engines look beyond what’s visible on your Web pages into the “head” of the source code, to see if you’ve left content clues hidden there. Page titles, keywords and descriptions can fortify the trail of breadcrumbs that leads search engine robots, spiders and crawlers across the Web to your site.
Your Web developer can modify your code for you, and of course you can do it yourself if you know a little HTML.
Page title.This is what appears at the top of your browser window. It’s also what most search engines use as the link from their search results page to your site. Make sure every page has a title and that it accurately and succinctly describes content on that page.
Keywords.Some search engines — but not all — check keywords to glean more information. Like your page title, keywords (in the form of a comma-separated list) should reflect actual content. Generally, a short, concise list of keywords is more effective than a long, all-encompassing one.
- Include words you imagine your intended audience might use for searching. There are online services that track the most popular search words.
- Word order is important. Start with the most important for each page, then fine-tune as appropriate.
- If some of your keywords are commonly misspelled, include these misspellings
- It may not be necessary to list both singular and plural forms of nouns, unless spelling varies between the two; e.g. “company” and “companies.”
- Don’t use any single word more than three times in your keyword list — “bat, cow, bat, bat, sheep, bat” — or you may be disqualified for “spamming.”
- You may want to list any words that are implied — but not specified — in your body content. For example, a “Contact Us” page shows your address but probably not the word “address.” Add it to your keyword list — and to your page title and description.
Let’s say you’ve managed to get listed by a search engine, and also to rank high on its results page: a major coup, but you’re not there yet.
Sometimes search engines will display your page description, along with your title, in the results listing. This may be your first — and only — opportunity to entice a potential visitor to your site, so keep the blurb informative and appealing. Get your core message in there. And limit the whole thing to about a sentence. If you were looking for a gardening shop in your area, which link would attract you more:
“Welcome to our home page.”
“Sacramento’s most complete selection of garden supplies.”
Attending to these copywriting details isn’t the most riveting task in the world, but it can have a direct impact on your traffic.
Get linked
It takes money to make money and it takes traffic to make traffic. In determining relevance and ranking, search engines pay attention to how popular your site is, noting how many other sites link to you: the more, the better.
Ask your friends to add a link from their site to yours. Contact businesses that are compatible with yours — for a garden supply site, try landscaping firms — and see if you can work out a reciprocal linking arrangement.
Submit to search engines
You’ve crafted and entered the perfect keywords, descriptions and page titles. You could stop now. Many search engines send out their crawlers to explore the Web, whether or not you’ve officially invited them.
But you can increase your chances of getting listed if you go one step further, by submitting your site’s URL.
Start by visiting the sites of the major search engines and directories — including Yahoo, AltaVista, HotBot, Google, Dogpile, Excite and others — to learn their specific process for submissions. Set aside a morning and submit away. Then forget about it for a while. It can take weeks or even months for your site to get indexed. In fact, there’s no guarantee you’ll get listed everywhere you submit; the volume of material the engines plow through is enormous. If you’re not listed the first time, some search engines encourage you to try again, while others ask you not to, so read their submission guidelines carefully.
There are Web-based services that submit your site on your behalf, for a fee. Some promise to get you listed on a seemingly impressive number of search engines. However, the number may be less critical than which lists they are; naturally, you’ll get more traffic from Yahoo than Joe’s Search Page. Listing agencies are often submissions-savvy and may have some useful analysis tools to optimize your chances of getting found by search engines and directories, but none can honestly claim that they’ll get you onto all the Big Ones.
Use the tools at hand
Finally, in the likely event that you don’t have a dedicated budget solely for marketing your Web site, take advantage of built-in promotion you already have at your fingertips:
- Add your URL to your business card, stationery and other elements of your business system.
- Include your URL in any advertising materials, e.g. yellow pages, newspaper ads.
- Add your URL to your email signature block.
- Get involved in online discussions — forums, newsgroups and the like — again, adding your URL to your signature block.
Remember: if you build it, they will come… but probably not in the numbers you’d dream, unless you build in some promotion strategy as well.