Finally,
after completion of the web site, the Most Important and
confusing, frustrating part -
-
How
do your get visitors to your web site ?
-
If,
this is not enough, how do you actually convert the visitors in
customers, in case of business web site?
-
If
the prospective customer does not needs my services right now, how
do I make sure that he remembers me when he actually needs it?
Now,
these are question, which needs a complete book. Every project needs
personal attention and wide experience (Read: You need to pay me
consultation charges). Anyway, I will give you some direction to move
you forward to.
There
are two ways to promote and bring traffic and possible business to
your web site - offline and online.
Offline,
as it signifies, means promoting your business through traditional
offline methods like advertisements, press releases, interviews,
seminars, newspapers, radio, television, letters etc. You know about
all of them, do I need to elaborate? So, we move to the other method:
Online
web site promotion and Marketing
Online
promotion is very much like offline methods, except they are new and
happen online. You promote your web site online usually by:
i.Directory
Submission
Yahoo.com
, AOL Directory are some example of Search Directories. Directories
are independent indexes of web sites in a tabulated, categorisd manner
prepared by humans. When you submit web sites to directories, a human
being actually visits your web site and adds to their categories. The
staff at directory, called guides looks for good quality web sites.
Here the demand is higher than the supply, in ratio of some 10,000:1.
Everyday, lakhs of people submit their web site to yahoo and other
directories and some hundreds get listed. Quality happens to be a
subjective term, a good quality for me may be very bad for you. But,
generally, the traits highlighted previously in Web designing section
are true for most of the people. Just read the submission instructions
carefully at every directory, take your own time and then submit. A
simple mistake like an inappropriate description in the view of the
guide or winds not blowing from the north may be the reason for
rejection of your web site. Do Not use automated submission, they are
one of the surest way to make mistake in submission.
Search
Engine experts help a lot in this regard and you should consider
hiring one (Read: Pay me the consultancy fees)
ii.
Search Engine Submission
Google.com
, AltaVista.com , Lycos.com
, Hotbot.com , euroseek.com
are examples of Search Engines. Search Engines are independent web
sites which employ a software (called robot) to automatically visit
(called crawling), collect information from the web sites submitted by
you or by the search engine specialist or webmasters and prepare index
of the web sites. The whole process is automated and no human
intervenes. Amazing, isn't it, Simple, let's see ?
Search
engines use data provided by you in your web pages to know the Title,
description and relevancy of your web site. You need to add following
tags in the <Head> section of your web site. After you have made
your web site, open your web pages in the Browser, there you can see
the source code. In Microsoft Internet Explorer use View-> Source
to view the codes. There insert tags Title, description and keywords,
like following is the example of our web site:
<head>
<title>4eIT.com - Domain name registration, Linux web hosting</title>
<meta name="title" content="4eIT.com - Domain name registration, Linux web
hosting">
<meta name="description" content="We offer complete web site
solutions - Domain name registration, Linux web hosting, web site
consultancy, design and development, search engine submission and
online marketing">
<meta name="keywords" content="domain name registration, Linux web hosting, web designing, web site development, web site, web pages, home page, search engine submission, domain hosting,
indian, asian, rajasthan, kota">
</head>
There
are other tags also, but to the best of my knowledge, now a days,
search engines generally, don't read them. Google is known to even not
consider the description and keyword tags.
The
problem here is that for every subject there are thousands of web site
on the internet, in your country and other countries, across the
oceans and continents. When there are so many web sites listed, your
web site may appear at the 20,974th place out of 98,247 web sites in
the database of search engine. Search engines are highly secretive of
their criteria for ranking, and this makes the matters worse for a
layman or amateur web site developer. It requires deep study of each
and every search engine behavior in the past to assume and predict.
Avoid
automated submission, search engines don't like them and make every
effort to deny listing to web sites using automated submission.
Again,
Search Engine experts help a lot in this regard and you should
consider hiring one (Read: Pay me the consultancy fees, you see!)
Continued
on next page..
