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Explanation of Getting People to Visit Your Web Site - Succeed in Web Design. Also refer to surfers, submissions, advertising, counters, motivation, Ron Kurtus, School for Champions. Copyright © Restrictions

Getting People to Visit Your Web Site

by Ron Kurtus (revised 11 July 2005)

People typically will visit a website because they are looking for information or entertainment. The ways they reach the website is by know the URL or web address, through a link from another site, or through one of the search engine sites. Thus to get people to visit your website, you need to advertise your web address, get other sites to link to yours, and get a high listing on the various search engines.

Questions you may ask include:

  • How do I advertise my URL?
  • How do I get links to the site?
  • How do I get listed with the search engines?

This lesson will answer those questions. There is a mini-quiz near the end of the lesson.

Advertising your web address

If you are in business, you should have your web address or URL on all your stationery, on business cards, and in any advertising you do. If you show your mailing address and telephone number, you should also include your URL.

Even an individual who wants others to visit his or her site should have the URL on personal business cards. when looking for a job, you should include your web address on your resume, provided you want to show samples of your work or such.

Getting links to your site

If you have special information, entertainment or opinions on your website, others may provide a link to it as a resource.

You can also exchange links with others who have similar interests. For example, people with websites providing information on certain music can exchange links with others having similar or related sites. Likewise, businesses and their suppliers and customers may exchange links.

Search engine listing

Top search sites such as Google, Yahoo and MSN use crawlers, webbots or web spiders to scan the Internet for web pages, picking out key words to use for classifying those pages. Thus, when someone is looking up some specific words, the search engines will list many of the web pages containing those words.

Often the webbots follow links from other sites. Thus it is advantageous to have numerous links to your site.

Key words and description essential

The search engines look for key words to select sites to list. They also provide a short description for viewers to decide whether or not to actually visit the site.

To facilitate their search, it is a good idea to have a title for your Web page. Many webbots use the first 200 characters of the body of your page as a description. You can also list your key words to help in finding your site with a <META> tag in your HTML source code:

<META name="keywords" content="Kurtus, CBT, Web site design, good times, ... etc.>.

Don't get too clever

Some people try to get clever by repeating a key word many times in their heading, in hope of a higher ranking from the search engine. Most have rule that repetition of a keyword more so many times will eliminate that page from the ranking.

Submitting

You can submit your URL to a commercial search engine submission company for a fee. They then will send your web address information to numerous search engines. Although this was the best way to get listed a few years ago, improvements in the webbots have diminished the effectiveness of this method to get seen.

Summary

In order to get people to visit your Web site, you should advertise your Web address, get others to link to your site, and make sure you have a good description and list of key words to attract search engines and those are searching for the information you have available.

Answers to Readers' Questions

Put yourself in the other person's shoes

Resources

The following resources provide information on this subject:

Websites

Major Search Engines - Tells how to submit to major search engines

Web Page Design Resources

Books

Top-rated books on Website Design

Miscellaneous

Mini-quiz to check your understanding

1. Why put your web address on your letterhead?

Never put your web address if you have your mailing address included

To give the impression you know HTML

So people can go to your site to see what else you have to offer

2. What is needed for someone to get to your site from an associate's site?

The associate's site has a resource link to your site

You can't get there from someone else's site

Often special software is needed

3. How do most people find information they want?

They use an encyclopedia CD-ROM

They enter key words in a search engine such as Google

They randomly surf the web

If you got all three correct, you are on your way to becoming a Champion in Web Design. If you had problems, you had better look over the material again.

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Getting People to Visit Your Web Site

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