Publicize Your Web Site!
Tips for publicizing your web site.
Get awards for your web site.
Using Meta Tags in your HTML documents to help index your site.
Search Engines and Directories to Publicize Your Web Site.

Need exposure for your web site? Join LinkExchange, a subsidiary of Microsoft. With over 1,600 web site categories, LinkExchange is a way to target your ads, increase exposure, and drive traffic to your site for free.

Some Tips About Publicizing Your Site

  • What's the biggest myth on the web? That search engine "robots" will index your web site for you. Don't count on it, or you may end up with a very lonely web site. Get out there and start submitting your URL to those search engines!

  • Write up your site description, and keep it in a text file. That way you can simply cut and paste your description into various search engines. Open your text file, highlight the description, and use Ctrl+C (Command+C on the Mac) to copy the text to your computer's clipboard. Then, once you reach the site that you want to add your URL to, use Ctrl+V (Command+V) to paste the information into the form.

  • Remember it can take between 2 - 8 weeks to add your web site to a search engine or other site.

  • Having trouble adding your web site to a particular search engine? It could be because you're trying to do so during peak usage hours. Try again during non-peak hours. Peak hours are 5PM Eastern to Midnight Eastern.

  • What's the best way to publicize your web site? It's still print. So let your alumni newsletter, hometown paper, and industry newsletters know about your web site. Slap your URL on your business cards, letterhead, or how about a tattoo? The point is, you'll need to be creative, persistent, and patient to do a really good job of publicizing your URL.

    Of course, the more interesting and attractive the content on your web site, the more likely that your web site will be featured in a publication. Contests, give aways, tutorials, hints and tips, a weekly column, are all great ways to attract traffic to your web site.

  • Exchange links. This doesn't mean hanging out in a chat room, looking to exchange links...it means putting some time in, and really looking for web sites whose subject matter dovetails with your web site's subject matter, then asking the site owner if they would be interested in exchanging reciprocal links.

Meta Tags for Search Engines

Both the AltaVista and Infoseek search engines will index all words in your document (except for comments), and will use the first few words of the document as a brief index. Not all search engines are open about what means they use to categorize and index web sites.

However, you can use the META tag to specify additional keywords to index, and a short description of your web site. Let's suppose your page contains:

<META name="description" content="We specialize in catering corporate events.">
<META name="keywords" content="catering, vegetarian, food, company, events">

AltaVista will then do two things:

It will index both fields as words, so a search on either vegetarian or corporate will match. It will return the description with the URL. In other words, instead of showing the first couple of lines of the page, a match will look like this:

Vegetarian Catering Inc.
We specialize in catering corporate events.
http://www.veggie.com/index.htm size 3k - 29 Jun 97

AltaVista will index the description and keywords up to a limit of 1,024 characters.

Using Meta Tags

Meta tags are very powerful. The first thing that a server or browser looks for on an HTML file is the <HTML> tag. The second thing that a server or browser examines when an HTML file is opened is the <HEAD> of the HTML page. The <META> tag is the only HTML tag, other than the <TITLE> or Javascript or Stylesheet tags, that will go inside the <HEAD> tag. All other HTML tags will appear in an HTML page between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags. As HTML continues to develop, we expect that there will be more and more uses for the META tag. Here's an example of how and where a META tag would be added to a web page:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META name="description" content="Ten cool things you can do with email.">
<META name="keywords" content="email, tutorial, web, help">
<TITLE>
You Have Mail! Ten Email Tips
</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
The body of your HTML page would appear here. Images, links, text, etc. would appear in the page here.
</BODY>
</HTML>

Get Awards for Your Web Site

Award-It allows you to quickly submit your site for dozens of web site awards. Give it a whirl: if you've created a cool web site, you might win a pocketful of awards!

Free Funny Site Awards - While you're waiting for the awards to come pouring in from Magellan and Cool Site of the Day and suchlike, you might want to flesh out a scrawny awards page with an award from The Corporation. The Corporation, a satirical web site, lets you review your own site, choose a fun icon from its Iconnect Gallery, and post it on your page. In return, they request that you link back to their icon gallery. You, too, can qualify for the "99 Cent Award" or "The Carpal Tunnel Site of the Week"!

Yahoo's Listing of Web Site Awards - Everything from the Dandelion Web Award to the Underground Web Awards.

Point Communications - If you've created one of the top 5% of sites on the World Wide Web, submit it to Point. Point Top 5% of the Web rates and reviews web sites for content, presentation and overall experience.

Places to Submit Your URL

Broadcaster allows you to add your web site URL to over 200 places at once.

Submit-It allows you to add your web site to over a dozen well-known search engines and directories at once.

VirtualPROMOTE offers links to 500 places to promote your site. These links are reviewed and indexed. A great place to go as a second step in your journey to publicize your web site!

WebStep Top 100 lists the top 100 places to submit your URL to for free.

Yahoo's links to web page announcement services.

Wondering how well you've done in publicizing your site? Drop by RankThis, and you can find out if you've placed your site in the top 200 sites in a particular category with eight popular search engines.

The Internet Promotion Megalist - this is another directory of submission sites for you to publicize your own site. Includes over 50 free sites and number of sites that request a reciprocal link to your page.

AxS/Group Maintains a list of places to submit your web site to for free.

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