Promoting Your Sites

Promoting Your Sites After you have designed a successful and appealing web site (or at least tried), you will find that you must get visitors. Now despite what a SPAM email (an unsolicited email of commercial or non commercial content, sent without permission ) may say, this does not mean you need to pay someone $1000 for one hit. What is does mean is that you need to learn about your target audience, meta tags, banner exchanges and stuff like that. Remember, while SPAM is the easy way to get hits, it's almost never worth the potential lawsuits; Or the name you will earn for yourself and for your company. Remember to read our meta tag tutorial when you are done with this page. The simplest way to get visitors is search engines; to get into the search engines you must first add special code called meta tags to your site. Before you use meta tags, know just what audience your site is trying to target, whether it be children or business people. This becomes very important, when using meta tags. Let's say that you have a page filled with games for children, it is unlikely that a child will type in "exploring dreams in an interactive game", however a business person may type something like "IPO in the derivatives market". For this reason, it is important to not only advertise your site where your audience will look, but to code your site the right way. Once you have placed your meta tags, try a free site submission tool (check out our links page). If you decide to advertise, think about where you do it and what you spend a long time. While there might be a great offer on some site with 100 pop up windows or some personal page in the middle of no where, is that really where you think your target audience is going to look? If you do web hosting, a big computer magazine might be a good place to start -- if you can afford it. Otherwise, stick to newspapers, small sites and places where your clients come by often. Also don't shell out $5000 for 10,000 impressions of your banner, if your banner is bad. What you should do at first is make deals to trade links with sites that might get a good amount of people passing through. Pick a few sites to advertise on, invest a little in each and see the results. Then invest more if you like it. Don't fill up countless pages with banner exchange programs because the load time is really bad and receiving 1 banner view for every 2 banners you show isn't worth it. Another important thing to do is log your visitors. Most every host provides free logs and some type of analyzing program (if not try www.cgi-resources.com). Check your logs out often, see how many people use each browser, what operating system they use, where they come from and so forth. This information is called demographics and by knowing who comes and who you want to have come, you can plan how to advertise and where. Also, with this information, you know how to make your site look, what to make it work best with and who to target. Remember to empty your log files every 30 or so days since they can take up a ton of space. After you know just where you want to advertise and who you are trying to reach, implement your meta tags and start your ads. When using meta tags, remember that the more specific and general the better (you can have around 200 keywords, so use 200 keywords). Also remember that creating fake referring page and using tons of repeating or hidden keywords can get you banned from search engines. In fact the sites highest ranked are the ones with the most content along with a fair amount of keywords, because they don't get banned and they list the key words a lot. Also remember what we said before about the level of your keywords vs. the level of your visitor, Now you are ready for the meta tag section....