Promoting Your Site...

The first and most important thing you do is promote your web site name by puttingwww.Your WebSite.com on everything from business cards to TV advertisement. You don't need to run out and get everything reprinted or redone. As you run out of business cards, letterheads and envelopes be sure to get the www.YourSite.com on them. As you make changes to advertisements add your web site address.

Now for the search sites. We need to let them know about you web site.

When the internet was born people needed a way to know what sites were out there and how to get to them when they didn't know the www address (url). This was accopmplished by search sites such as Yahoo, HotBot, InfoSeek, AltaVista, Google, Go.com, NorthernLight, AOLSearch, AskJeeves, MSN the list goes on. Around 15 search sites serve 95% of all internet searches. The other 5% are served by hundreds of other search sites. You can see the why you will need to concentrate on getting you web site to come up on the major search sites.

There are two different types of search sites...

• A Directory Site - Your web site is put into revelant categories depending on the revelancy of your site. Human eyes actually see your site in most cases before categorizing. The majority of the major search sites now use a common directory database via LookSmart.com. To be guarenteed of inclusion into their database they charge a one-time fee of around $200. Paying customers come up ahead of non-paying sites when searches are returned to search sites that use LookSmart. They do accept free sumissions but make no guarentees. You sign-up as a paying customer once and you are included into 60-70% of the major sites in 2-3 weeks.
• A Search Engine Site - Your site would be visited by a SearchBot (a computer that visits sites 24/7) and looks for keywords within the text and metatags of your pages, counts them and then tries to make some kind of judgement on relevancy of the page and your site, then store this data in a database. Well you can see what problems this caused. An example of this would be were someone would put a peticular word into a page umpteen times thinking they would come up in searches ahead of some other site. That little trick didn't last long needless to say. People were putting words that were not revelant to there site into a page therefor creating a less reliable search result from the search engine. They combated this by completely disreguarding a site that tried these tricks. That was just the beginning of the nightmares search engines would have. Search engine sites have learned that the best way to return the best search results is to be directory based and forget about the searchbots. They are changing over. Most of the major search sites are now directory based. Being included into search engines is free but you need let each one of them know you have a web site by registering your url at their site.