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Promoting your web site in 2003

© Bert Markgraf

The first thing small business owners ask when considering setting up a web site is, "How are my customers going to find it?"

Finding web sites has actually become much more straightforward over the last few years as search engines have managed to figure out how to disregard the tricks and false listing practices used by unscrupulous site promoters. Now it's pretty much just being honest and straightforward which will result in the best chance of being found by visitors interested in the site.

The basics of non-internet promotion still apply of course: the web site address should be on all company paperwork including business cards, letterheads, invoices etc. and on all promotional material. It should be a domain - the name of your company or a few relevant words followed by ".com". The ".com" ending is still the preferred choice - other endings will make the site harder to find.

Once the domain name appears on all paperwork, the web site has to be optimized for search engines. Here three key factors play the major role:

1. Page structure
Search engines can't deal with splash pages showing advanced movies, graphics or animations and they can't read scripts. They are looking for plain html text. They also have problems with frames. Home pages with frames tend to have links but little text. A web page optimized for search engines is static - not generated by scripts - and has a simple, old-style html structure which can be read in a text editor.

2. Site structure
Search engines look for and analyze links - they like simple, root-shaped site structures which can easily be followed. If your menu is generated by a script, the search engines won't find the links and are likely to conclude that your site consists of one page. If you must have a complicated, script-based structure, at least underlay it with a system of normally linked pages.

3. Text consistency
Once the search engine can navigate the site and read the pages, it will concentrate on the text. To determine the subject of the web site, it will compare words in the title (title tag) and the key words (meta tag) with the text in the body of the page. Some search engines will also include the description (meta tag) and image titles (alt tag). Words which appear with normal frequency in all these places are used for the listing. Sites which have abnormal frequencies of particular words, caused by trying to skew the listing, are usually disregarded. The best strategy is to choose a few words which your target visitors would type into a search engine and make sure that these words are in the title, keywords and image titles and are represented with normal frequency for a descriptive text in the description and web page body.