The Slacker's Guide to Web Site Promotion, Search Engine Placement, Meta, and More

The Slacker's Guide to Web Page Promotion

Reciprical Links
META Tags
Effective Titles
Search Engine Submission Links
Banner Advertising

So, you have an excellent, high-quality website chock-full of valuable information and you are positive that someone will love it. The only problem is that no one knows that you have this web page.

Ok, now I'm going to jump into this assuming that you understand that you should submit your URL to some search engines and indexes. A search engine is simply a searchable collection of links. A search directory is a categorized and searchable set of links. The difference is that with a search directiry, relevant information is much easier to obtain. Yahoo! is an example of a directory, and Excite is an example of a search engine. Try them both out if you don't get it.

Reciprical Links

Click Here to Link to Me and Have Me Link to You

The reason so many websites have pages devoted to reciprical links is because it benefits both parties involved. The reason that both people gain from it is because of the way search engines operate. A good deal of the search engines/spiders that people use most operate with many things in mind. When you search for, let's say, the phrase "HTML guide frames help" the search engine will quickly scan it's index and pick out the URL's that match the criteria. Let's assume that 10,000 pages are chosen from the millions and millions. How does it narrow it down further?

One way it cuts off the fat is by seeing which URL's use words such as "HTML", "guide", frames", and "help" the most often. The engine will scan the beginning of the document, usually not all of it, and then see which document appears to be most relevant (that is, which one uses the terms most often). That method is often not very helpful, though, because many webmasters choose to have titles such as "John's HTML site of HTML tags for HTML editors and HTML lovers and HTML HTML" and then John throws the word "HTML" into the meta tags about 100 times, and then he make comment tags with the word "HTML" in it repeatedly, and so on. While one might assume that the shadey entrepeneur like John will get placed highly in the search engine rankings, that usually doesn't happen. If the search engine finds too many occurences of the terms, it will often disqualify a page and remove it from it's index. So don't do that, be reasonable.

The reason reciprical links are good for both you and who you link to is because search engines are moving away from that method and are moving towards another, more reliable method. Instead of listing sites according to the amount of times a search term comes up, they are listing sites in order of popularity. How do they measure popularity? They measure popularity by checking to see how many sites link to each site that matches the criteria. If your site matches the "HTML guide frames help" term, and it has 100 people linking to it, then your site will rank highly. So, the more people who link to you, the better, and one way to quickly raise your popularity is thorugh reciprical links. Get it?

So, please link to the Slacker's Guide to HTML:-) It will help both you and me. It will be another link to your site (and my site gets a good deal of traffic, which will boost your site's ranking even more) and it will be another link to my site!

Use this URL when linking, please, although you are free (obviously) to link to any page you like. http://slackerhtml.tripod.com/

Meta Tags

Do you have META tags inside the head tags of the pages you want listed? If a search engine spiders (electronically scans) your pages for inclusion in the engine and they have no Meta tags (or title tags, for that matter) then you will not get listed. If you do get listed it will be very difficult for someone to locate your page. The meta tag is the way that search engines get a description and keywords, as well as other information, to list your site accurately.

The meta tag has a variety of uses. The meta tag is used primarily to instruct search engine "spiders" on what to do with your page when they spider over them. It also is the tag used to cause a page to "refresh", or automatically reload and open up a new URL.

Here are the elements used in a meta tag:

The keyword element states that the page concerns hockey and baseball, and if someone does a search for those 2 words, that your page should come up as a search result.

Tells search engines when your page should be deleted from it's directory.

Tells search engines the description of your page.

Tells them who made the page.

Tells the search engine to visit your site again in 30 days.

Tells the search engin that your site is meant for everyone, and that it can be distributed globally. You can also specify "local" and "IU". IU means Internal Use, which means that it's basically not meant for the public.

There are some other META tags, also. Check out these "robot" tags that tell search engines whether or no to index the page, and whether or not to index pages that are linked to. There are many combinations of the robot tag. *Not all search engines can handle the robot tags as of now, but I'm sure they all will soon. It can't hurt to use them.

And you can put all these together by just lining them up like so:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="baseball, hockey">
<META NAME="expires" CONTENT="6 December 2001">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="A page about sports">
<META NAME="author" CONTENT="Your name here">
etc., etc.

Title Tag

Like I said, did you have a title tag in your pages? If you don't, then what will some search engine's list your site as? A URL? That would suck.
You're pages title (the thing that appears in the title bar of your browser, such as The Slacker's Guide...in my case) should be descriptive and should use a keyword or two, but don't overdo it because search engines do penalize people who attempt to SPAM or whatnot.

Search Engine Submission Links

Search Engine Watch - Discover the best way to submit a site to popular Web directories, read the latest on Internet search engine technology and learn about industry innovators. This is a robust resource for both professional Web developers and casual Web surfers.
Submit Corner - If your website is not in the top search engines, how will your customers find you? Introducing Submit Corner, the complete guide on indexing techniques, tips and online tools to optimize your visibilility to the top search engines.

If you do not submit your site with one or these above links, or with another mass-submit link, then you will have to go around to each engine/index and individually submit your site to each one. That will take some time, and it will probably be a little while before the fruits of your labor are realized. Search engines and indexes take a very long break between updates, and your site might not be in the index until weeks after your submission. To submit your site to individual search engines, all you have to do is go to that search engine's home page and find a link that says something similiar to "ADD URL". Then follow the instructions from there on.

Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is another good way of attracting visitors to your web site. If you join a banner advertising program, then you will have the opportunity to add your banner to a collectionof other banners being rotated and displayed on the web. The nicer your banner is, the better it's results will be. Following are a list of links to banner programs:

You might also want to consult with your server about ads that you can post. There are many add posting services that offer things in exchange for you displaying banners. Search the web with something like: "banner services" or "banner swaps", "banner free service".