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Explanation of Getting People to Visit Your Web Site - Succeed in Web Design. Also refer to surfers, submissions, advertising, counters, motivation, Ron Kurtus, School for Champions. Copyright © Restrictions
Getting People to Visit Your Web Site
by Ron Kurtus (revised 11 July 2005)
People typically will visit a website because they are looking for information or entertainment. The ways they reach the website is by know the URL or web address, through a link from another site, or through one of the search engine sites. Thus to get people to visit your website, you need to advertise your web address, get other sites to link to yours, and get a high listing on the various search engines.
Questions you may ask include:
- How do I advertise my URL?
- How do I get links to the site?
- How do I get listed with the search engines?
This lesson will answer those questions. There is a mini-quiz near the end of the lesson.
Advertising your web address
If you are in business, you should have your web address or URL on all your stationery, on business cards, and in any advertising you do. If you show your mailing address and telephone number, you should also include your URL.
Even an individual who wants others to visit his or her site should have the URL on personal business cards. when looking for a job, you should include your web address on your resume, provided you want to show samples of your work or such.
Getting links to your site
If you have special information, entertainment or opinions on your website, others may provide a link to it as a resource.
You can also exchange links with others who have similar interests. For example, people with websites providing information on certain music can exchange links with others having similar or related sites. Likewise, businesses and their suppliers and customers may exchange links.
Search engine listing
Top search sites such as Google, Yahoo and MSN use crawlers, webbots or web spiders to scan the Internet for web pages, picking out key words to use for classifying those pages. Thus, when someone is looking up some specific words, the search engines will list many of the web pages containing those words.
Often the webbots follow links from other sites. Thus it is advantageous to have numerous links to your site.
Key words and description essential
The search engines look for key words to select sites to list. They also provide a short description for viewers to decide whether or not to actually visit the site.
To facilitate their search, it is a good idea to have a title for your Web page. Many webbots use the first 200 characters of the body of your page as a description. You can also list your key words to help in finding your site with a <META> tag in your HTML source code:
<META name="keywords" content="Kurtus, CBT, Web site design, good times, ... etc.>.
Don't get too clever
Some people try to get clever by repeating a key word many times in their heading, in hope of a higher ranking from the search engine. Most have rule that repetition of a keyword more so many times will eliminate that page from the ranking.
Submitting
You can submit your URL to a commercial search engine submission company for a fee. They then will send your web address information to numerous search engines. Although this was the best way to get listed a few years ago, improvements in the webbots have diminished the effectiveness of this method to get seen.
Summary
In order to get people to visit your Web site, you should advertise your Web address, get others to link to your site, and make sure you have a good description and list of key words to attract search engines and those are searching for the information you have available.
Put yourself in the other person's shoes
Resources
The following resources provide information on this subject:
Websites
Major Search Engines - Tells how to submit to major search engines
Books
Top-rated
books on Website Design
Mini-quiz to check your understanding
If you got all three correct, you are on your way to becoming a Champion in Web Design. If you had problems, you had better look over the material again.
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Getting People to Visit Your Web Site