In Just the Basics is a short checklist to illustrate the steps to making a website visible to the larger web and drive traffic to it. Let's take a closer look at the steps, one by one.
Attract new visitors
Get your site listed in search engines and directories:
- Submit site to Google and other search engines
- Submit site to Yahoo! and other directories
- Revise site as needed to improve search rank
People use Google every day. Customers expect a business to have a website. Every website owner wishes wants their website to bee seen. Yet many never realize that unless they tell the search engines and directories the site exists, there's a good chance it will never be found.
In fact, more than half the webpages on the Net are not listed anywhere.
Did you notice the change? Websites were the topic, then in the last sentence, webpages.
That's an important distinction for a business since most businesses offer more than one service or product. And each product or service commonly goes on a different page.
Search engines and directories need to know not just that your website exists, but the webpages where your services and products are described. Every webpage on a site potentially defines a different marketing goal because the product(s) or service(s) on the page have different competitors, customers, and goals for the business.
Search engines and Directories
What's the difference?
This is where borrowing prose from fantasy novels becomes appropriate somehow. Quote:
In the beginning, in the time before time, there were no search engines. There were a few secretive lists of places to find information. These were the first directories.
When the Internet began, there were so few that the best place to look for something was to look where others with similar interests were sharing what they'd found. These were called bulletin boards or newsgroups. Finding them was a never-ending quest.
It does sorta sound like a fantasy game, doesn't it?
In time, some websites made lists of resources on a topic. These were the first directories.
Other websites made lists of lists, listing the topics. And then some made lists of the lists again, categorizing the information by regions, topics, and categories.
But unless you knew where to start, you could think the Net was empty.
Then came archie. archie was the first well-known search programs on the Net. In fact, it was a web protocol, not just a program. Searching the web has been intrinsic to the web from the very beginning.
What archie would return was a list of sites and lists as links. archie would read what the sites and lists said about themselves, and if what you were looking for matched, archie would let you know.
archie was a vast improvement over having to keep long lists for yourself, but archie was not very efficient since archie was not very loquacious. archie only looked for what you told him.
If you wanted to look for 'program', archie would return a list of every type of program - any programming language, any program for dieting, exercise, school programs, and on and on.
Before archie disappeared from common usage, programmers made him more discriminating, but then came search engines.
Search engines did not just look for things on the Net when you told them to, like archie, but kept looking all the time. Search engines sent programs out to follow links from one site to another, and send back information about all the sites it found. The programs were called robots or spiders.
The really good thing about search engines though was not just all the sites they found, but that the information that was returned was indexed and analyzed. Search engines let you distinguish between programming a computer and programming a concert.
How?
Remember the directories? Search engines would follow the lists of lists on directories, and use the categories to organize what was found.
Even more, search engines looked at how things were categorized and realized that different words could be used to mean the same thing - and could use those other terms to give more results for a search term. They indexed the results based on the terms and other similar terms.
Then search engines started doing a very smart thing: they kept track of the stuff, which meant you didn't have to search the whole web. You just had to search the search engine's database.
There's a snag here, of course. If the site isn't listed on the search engine, either because it was on a directory or found from some link, the site simply didn't exist for anyone who used the search engine.
Remember, more than half the webpages out there have never been found.
The categories became keywords. Websites found a way to put keywords and descriptions on their webpages invisible to those who viewed the webpage - called metatags.
Combine the keywords with links from other sites, and search engine marketing was born.
Links can be compared to votes. The more people link to a site, the more popular it is. The more ways the spieders can find it. This went into the search engines' databases, too. The more visitors a site has depends a lot on the links. Combine traffic on a site with the number of links to the site, and that is the beginning of how to index the popularity of a site.
Not only does a site want links, but the owner wants people to see it.
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