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Publicizing Your Web Site

Presumably, you want your Web pages to attract someone's attention or you wouldn't bother to create them. If you are placing your pages only on a local network or corporate intranet or are distributing your pages exclusively on disk or by email, helping people find your pages may not be much of a problem. If you are adding your pages to the millions upon millions of others on the Internet, however, bringing your intended audience to your site is a very big challenge indeed.

To tackle this problem, you need a basic understanding of how most people decide which pages they will look at. There are basically three ways that people can become aware of your Web site:

Somebody tells them about it and gives them the address; they enter that address directly into their Web browser.
They follow a link to your site from someone else's site.
They find your site listed in a search site such as Yahoo! or HotBot.

You can make all three of them happen more often if you invest some time and effort. To increase the number of people who hear about you through word-of-mouth, well, use your mouth—and every other channel of communication available to you. If you have an existing contact database or mailing list, announce your Web site to those people. Add the site address to your business cards or company literature. Heck, go buy TV ads broadcasting your Internet address if you have the money. In short, do the marketing thing.

Getting links to your site from other sites is also pretty straightforward—though that doesn't mean it isn't a lot of work. Find every other Web site related to your topic and offer to add a link to those sites if they add one to yours. If there are specialized directories on your topic, either online or in print, be sure you are listed. There's not much I can say in this book to help you with that, except to go out and do it.

What I can help you with is the third item: being visible at the major Internet search sites. I'm sure you've used at least one or two of the "big six" search sites: Yahoo!, Alta Vista, HotBot, Excite, InfoSeek, and Lycos. (The addresses of these sites are just what you'd think: http://www.yahoo.com, http://www.altavista.com, http://www.hotbot.com, and so on.)

These sites are basically huge databases that attempt to catalog as many pages on the Internet as possible. They all use automated processing to build the databases, though some (such as Yahoo!) emphasize quality by having each listing checked by a human. Others (such as HotBot) prefer to go for quantity and rely almost entirely on programs called robots or spiders to crawl around the Internet hunting for new pages to index.

A robot (also called a spider) is an automated computer program that spends all day looking at Web pages all over the Internet and building a database of the contents of all the pages it visits.

As the spiders and humans constantly add to the database, another program, called a search engine, processes requests from people who are looking for Web pages on specific topics. The search engine looks in the database for pages that contain the key words or phrases that someone is looking for and sends that person a list of all the pages that contain those terms.

A search engine is an automated computer program that looks in a database index for pages containing specific words or phrases. Some people use the term Internet directory to indicate a search engine whose database was built mostly by people instead of robots. (Lately, it's become vogue in some circles to call search engines portals.)

Listing Your Pages with the Major Search Sites | Next Section

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