How Web Pages Work

After you have spent hours creating your site, and have posted it on a server, you really want people to come look at it. But in order to get people to visit your site, you have to promote it. Very few people will find your site by accident -- something has to lead them there.

There are many different techniques you can use to draw people to your site. This chapter will teach you many of the angles you can use to increase site traffic.

Registering With Search Engines

Search engines read a Web page and index all of the words from the page. Users of the search engines can find your page by searching for keywords. The good thing about search engines is that they let you find everything that contains a certain word, or set of words. The bad thing about search engines is that they generally return a lot of chaff with the wheat.

From a Web promotion standpoint, the nice thing about search engines is that it is easy to get your site listed on them. Each search engine includes somewhere on its page a "submit a site" link, or something along those lines. Using this link, you will be able to complete a form (some lengthier than others) which requests to have your site listed with them. Your site will not be added immediately, and sometimes it will take several submissions over a period of time before your site is listed. Each search engine is different. Also, be sure to submit each one of your pages individually to make sure that the keywords from each separate page are incorporated.

Here is a list of the URLs to some of the major search engines' "submit-a-site" pages:

Registering With Link Sites A link site lists various sites in some sort of hierarchical structure. Each site is placed in a category and given a short description. Yahoo is the best example of this sort of site, but there are now many others trying to do the same sort of thing in different ways.

Most of these sites are very slow to pick up new sites, because people must review each submitted site before it can be added to the collection of links. The following links point to the home pages of each of these link sites, because you have to review the site to figure out the category for your submission before you can add your URL. Once you find the proper category, look for an "Add URL" button to add your site.

We'll look at the different kinds of listing services in the next section.