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January 22, 2001

The Fundamentals of Professional Web Sites for Business Professionals

This Week’s:

Step-by-Step: Keep Essential Information on Every Page

On Focus: Writers — Part 3 (Building an Online Community)

The 13 Lucky Steps to Promoting a Web Site - Part 3

Reviews

An Essential Reference for Web Masters

Thinking Differently About the Mac

Techniques

Instant Graphics - Royalty Free Image Sources

Feature

The 13 Lucky Steps to Promoting a Web Site — Part 3

by B. E. Warne

After Going Live

8. Submit the site by hand to: 8 search engines, 3 directories and GoTo.: The 6 search engines include: Google, AltaVista, Excite, Hotbot, Lycos, Direct Hit, Fast, Go (InfoSeek).

The 4 directories are Yahoo, NBCi, About, & Open Directory.Yahoo requires $199 for many business sites but is worth it.

Commit a minimum of $25 to GoTo. If you can afford it, spend $199 at Look Smart.
9. If you want, a week or so later, you can do a mass submission using Jim Tools or a similar site submission tool.: Use site submitter tools used after hand submitting to the major search engines appear to increase site traffic and positioning, however, used alone site submitter tools are less effective.
10. No sooner than two weeks after your initial submissions, you can start submitting one to two, but not more than two, internal pages by hand to Alta Vista, Go, and others appropriate resources.
11. If you have the time, consider finding and joining related Newsgroups, Message Boards and Chat groups that discuss your field.: You aren't allowed to "promote your site" but if you answer questions knowledgeably, the signature lines in your email will promote your site.
12. Find other web sites that are not direct competitors but are in the same general field as your site, and put them on your link page.: Now notify them via email that you have linked to them and ask if they will please link back to your site.
13. Pay attention to your web site statistics & reports after about six weeks. Then every few months do a Web Position report on your site using the three most important keywords you have chosen.: Your hosting company should provide periodic reports on how many unique visitors come to your site, how many pages an average visitor goes to, how many visitors go to each of your pages and where these visitors come from.; The Windows program Web Position Gold can report back to you where your site is listed in the major search engines — but don't bother checking for at least two months.; These monitoring methods allow you to judge the effectiveness of your current promotion and indicates where you are not appearing. From there an experienced promoter can decide what changes need to be made before new submissions.

Be patient. Promoting your site takes not only time but the experience to follow these steps most effectively.

Find out how to arrange an independent consultation or a workshop for your conference or organization on this or any other Internet-related topic.