Promoting your website. Review on Geocities

Promoting your website

These days having a personal webpage is as common as an email address. It serves as a wonderful tool for creating your web-identity and can help others find you and contact

you. You can make an online photo album and all your relatives, friends can view it. You can upload your resume and might get a job!!!! It also serves you as a free, effective medium to advertise your products and services, and, with plethora of web services like geocities.com, lycos.com, freewebs.com it has never been so easy!! You can use microsoft frontpage to create wonderful webpages in no time.

Alright! you got your website. But what next?? You need traffic. You need people to visit your website so that the all your efforts make sense. You need to PROMOTE your website. Now that’s something not so easy. The most effective way by which others can land up on your website is the Search engines And how do you get listed there? I can give you some tips...

1) You must submit your site to the search engines. Most engines have a ’’Add URL’’ or ’’Submit your site’’ link on their homepages. Just search for such services on Google and you will get thousands of them- some free, others paid. I cannot comment on the paid services since I haven’t used any such service.

https://google.com/search?q=add+site+url&sourceid=opera&n

um=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

2) Give suitable Title to your webpage. If your website is about your company, XYZ Travel agency, ’’XYZ, Pune. Lowest airfare on over 500 flights’’ would make a good Title. Think of what your prospective customer would serach for, and include those keywords in your Title.

The title is the text between tags.

3) Include keywords and description tags to all your webpages. These are called meta-tags. They aren’t visible to a human visitor but the search engine crawlers or spiders can understand them. This way, the spider can index your site in appropriate category and thus, your webpage is more likely to figure out when a customer searches for the product or service you provide. For example,

4) Have others link to your site, so that the spider is more likely to visit your website. Google, in particular, uses a page-rank technology wherein every webpage that links to you is considered as a ’’vote’’ for your website, so, if more people link to you, your webapge gets a Top rank. Request your friends, relatives who have their own sites, to add a link to your page. You can also participate in some ’’Link exchange programme’’ where other sites provide a link to your page on their webpages and you link to them on yours. A Win/Win situation.

It all sounds so easy. Doesn’t it? But unfortunately, these tricks don’t yield immediate results as the World Wide Wed is really WORLD-WIDE and about 200 new websites spring up everyday according to the reader’s digest statistics. So you need patience... And lots of it.

Keywords: promote, website, rank, improve, search, engines, listed.

(c) Amey Purandare.