************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** So you built a fancy web page, did you? Now what? Obviously you want people to visit it. How are you going to do that? The first step, of course, is to register with a search engine. There are over a dozen major search engines out there. Visiting each one and finding the submission link on an increasingly busy intro page can be a time consuming process. There are sites that will charge you for promotion services but I'm skeptical as to the cost/benefit. Luckily a number of pages that will do the work for you for free. The @FREE Website Promotion site at websitepromotion- 12600.hypermart.net is a quick and handy site that will fire off your URL to ten major engines, including a couple of "second generation" sites like Northern Light (www.northernlight.com) and Google (www.google.com). Once you submit your site, the search engine's "crawler" will eventually explore your site and index it. Be warned, it could take weeks or months for a crawler to visit. Even worse, it could take months for the crawler to revisit your site and update it. So, before you submit your URL, make sure things are about as complete as possible. You may only get one shot at it. One of the closest guarded secrets on the net is the formula a search engine uses for ranking sites. Your site may come up in the top ten on Hotbot but Lycos lists it after 30 porn sites that have nothing to do with your page about Korean cuisine. Search engines can only differentiate themselves through the completeness and accuracy of searches. You can improve your chances of a satisfactory ranking in a number of ways. Make sure your page's title (e.g., the text between the tag) is as descriptive as possible. If your page is about Korean cuisine, don't title your page "My Page". Using meta tags is a complicated but primary way of helping a search engine index your page. Too many people, however, think meta tags are the only solution and try to load up their <keyword> tag. Putting "playboy" 900 times on your page might backfire. Search engines have a policy against these overt attempts at "spamming" the index and will remove your URL altogether. Most modern HTML generating tools like FrontPage provide an option for generating meta tags like <keyword> and <description>. The page at vancouver-webpages.com/META/mk- metas.html generates the proper HTML for those tags plus a wide range of more obscure tags like <expires> (which tells a search engine when to remove a page) and <robots> (which tells a search engine if a page should or should not be indexed). I find one of the best ways to promote a page is find related pages that come up in a search engine's top 10 and email the web masters asking them if they can put a link to your page. I find when I'm looking for sites on a particular topic I'll visit the highest ranked sites and then explore their collection of links. Naturally place a link in exchange. Another trick is join related newsgroups or mailing lists, take part in the discussions, and include your web site address in your sig line. It's a good way of generating impulse visits. Once you've got people to visit your site, you probably want them to come back. A page that's frustrating to use or crashes browsers won't see much in the way of repeat traffic. There's a cool utility called SiteInspector at siteinspector.linkexchange.com. You can punch in your URL and it will report back interesting facts about your page like if your meta tags are readable. A more complete (and picky) HTML validator can be found at validator.w3.org. The site will visit your URL and report back errors or non-standard HTML coding.