Getting your website noticed

So you've designed your brilliant website, it looks great, it works well and there are no glitches.

Thats great, but not much use if people can't find it. So how can we attract people to our websites? We can improve our number of visitors in several different ways these include:

Site design - It is a key aim of most web designers to be 'googled'. This means to be included on the first page of results when searched for. There are a number of elements you can include in your site design to improve your listing with search engines. These elements are: text content; title; meta description tags; meta keywords and internal links. To add description and keywords select Insert/Head Tags and select the relevant tag. Add your description/keywords in the box that appears.

External links -The more links there are to your website from other similar sites etc, the more traffic your site will receive. Find which sites get top listings when you run a search - these sites may well be friends and colleagues who have similar interests, or similar businesses to yours. Contact them by email and suggest they add a link to your site, in return you will add a link to theirs. You will be suprised how many websites will be happy to do this.

These links will have two benefits. Firstly if people run a search and find a site linked to yours, they will often visit your site from this link. Secondly your listing will improve on the search sites.

Register your site - Most search engines and directories have a facility for you to register your site with them. Make sure you register your site with as many as you can. There are programmes that will do this for you, but you should always register manually with the top few search engines - google, yahoo, ... just to be sure. You can pay for a top listing, but I would never do this. Be prepared to wait 6 to 8 weeks for your hard work to take effect, then watch your visiting numbers rocket!

This link will submit your site to 40 search engines.

Keep it fresh - if you design a site and leave it, doing all the above stuff to make sure it is listed with the main search engines etc. it will probably get a good listing for a while. But to keep your listing in the top 20 you will need to keep the site 'fresh' and updated regularly ie. once a month or so. If the site lists news, or current events this will be necessary anyway. There is nothing worse than a website which has news, listings etc that are seriously out of date - and it happens too often!

You will find your website is like a monster - it will grow and grow and demands constant feeding!

The Old Fashioned Route - sometimes nothing works better than old fashioned marketing. Wear a billboard with your website address (URL) on it and walk around town! Put a sticker on the back window of your car. Advertise in the papers, magazines, relevant journals, or even better try a press release and get some free advertising. Make sure your URL is on your business cards, letter headings, at the bottom of your emails, in company reports, newsletters etc etc.

For more information try these links:

Search Engine Watch provides lots of useful information about search engines, here is an article about meta tags .

Index Introduction Setting up Text Preparing images Adding images Tables Design/research More stuff Getting noticed Publishing your site Links