What Now?
Now that you have a web site designed and built, what do you
do next? We have discussed many but not nearly all the
aspects of good web site design and how to do it so that it
is a benefit to you. Is that all there is to it? Can you now
sit back and watch the money flow in? If you are any kind of
business owner, you know the answer to that question.
Getting your business open is only the beginning. Let’s
begin looking into the first steps of the long road toward
marketing on the Internet.
The Internet is no different than trying to run a business
on Main Street, USA. There are salespeople that have just
exactly what you need for your business – I say
sarcastically. There are scam artists and in the case of
Internet business I believe there are more scammers. Like
your traditional businesses, there are some good reliable
people to work with. It takes time to find them and develop
a working relationship with them. This is all part of the
core of your business. Along with all this you are working
to establish a customer base as well.
An interesting aspect of doing business in the Cyber World
is your business is somewhat portable. If I open a hardware
store on Main Street, that’s pretty much where I am
relegated to doing business. If I later discover that I wish
I had located my business on Railroad Street because there
was more traffic, a move would not be a simple thing to do.
An Internet business floats. You have no fixed location and
you can always work harder at putting your business in a
better location. Isn’t this great? How can you do that?
You now have a good web site that is ready to do business –
yours and a few million more. The first step that needs to
happen before anyone can find you is you have to be found by
the search engines – at least the major ones.
There was a day when it was imperative that you submit your
new site to the search engines. After that, you sat back and
waited sometimes for weeks, before Google or Yahoo sent a
robot out to look at your site. When they got around to it,
they would look at your home page and it might be some weeks
before they returned.
Today it is different. With the competition in place for
your search engine business, robots are active everyday and
through the campaign of linking, new sites are found
relatively soon. With that said, I would say you do not need
to submit your site for inclusion to Google, Yahoo and MSN.
They will probably find you before you get around to
submitting the site.
So how will they find my site? The fastest way to get your
site crawled by the search engines is to find someone who
owns a site that is established and gets crawled on a
regular basis. Ask them if they will put your link on their
site. You can request an exchange – whatever it takes. If
you can get that link up, the next time the robots crawl
this person’s site, they will find the link and see where it
goes. Once your site has been located, the robots will then
come and begin gathering the information on your site.
Pretty cool huh? This is the first and foremost thing you
should do to get your site going.
If you are wondering how to know if your site has been
included in any search engine database, one simple test will
give you the answer. Simply open up any of the search
engines software or search box and type in your URL. If it
has been crawled, you will get a result for your website. If
you don’t, that means they have yet to crawl it. You can do
this with Google, Yahoo, MSN, Netscape, Altavista – any of
them.
There are virtually thousands of search engines in
Cyberspace. The more of those search engines you can get
your site listed in, the better the chances of people
finding you. Think of each of these search engines as a road
sign or as one would find around Bethel, a sign kiosk –
hopefully a lot more visible than the tiny ones coming in
and out of Bethel. Most of these search engines will place
your business on their signpost for free. First begin with
free site submission. If you don’t know anything about it,
do a search for “free site submission”. You’ll find many.
Let me give you some advice about submitting your web site
to free search engines. When you opt to make a submission to
a search engine, most of them want you to sign up for their
newsletter. This puts you on their mailing list. You should
do this because lots of times these newsletters contain
valuable information. Later you can always “unsubscribe” to
the newsletter without any penalties. Before you go doing
this, you should find a free webmail service, like yahoo,
and open an account. A webmail service is one that actually
stores the mail on their server and you don’t have to store
it on yours. It will also lessen your chances of contracting
a virus. When you submit to these search engines, give them
this email address. The reason is you will begin receiving a
seemingly endless barrage of spam and you don’t want it in
your business or personal email account – trust me on this.
Get yourself a notebook and log everything you do. Each time
you submit your site to a search engine, write down with
whom you submitted and any other information you may need to
know. Some search engines provide you a link so you can go
there and edit your own content. These will have user names
and passwords. After a while it is difficult to remember who
you did and didn’t submit to and what user name you used.
Many times, web designers will offer “Free search engine
submission” as part of their freebie campaign. They usually
will tell you which search engines they will submit your
site to. Let them do it. They can submit to as many as a
dozen or more with one easy entry. This way you don’t need
to do it 12 times or more.
When you find someone who will submit your site for free,
you are going to get an opportunity to buy into their search
engine submission program. For a certain amount of money,
often a monthly fee, they will submit your web site to
several hundred or thousand search engines. My advice to you
is to not jump into this unless you know what you are doing.
Many of them are not worth the money you have to lay out for
the service.
I am not high on paying for search engine submission. I have
issues with it and I would like to share my thoughts on these
programs. First of all, I don’t believe that anyone should
have to pay to have their web site listed in someone’s
search engine. Paying for submission is a racket in my
opinion and the benefits are not worth the money you pay.
Secondly, and I don’t have concrete evidence of this as it
is only my opinion, I believe that when you opt to pay for
search engine submission, you may in fact be taken out of
the normal search engine page ranking system. With this
tactic, you become a slave to needing to keep paying. Let me
explain it this way. You opt to pay for search engine
submission. Many times, depending upon the service you get
hooked up with, part of the submission program will involve
becoming a “sponsored site”. I’m sure you have seen these
while you have been surfing the Internet. This all looks
wonderful on the surface and may bring you some good traffic
initially but as I am discovering, you are removed from the
page ranking system that non sponsored sites are part of.
When you decide you don’t want to pay for this service
anymore, you fall out of site and have to begin page ranking
all over.
By using this tactic, which I believe is a big scam, they
are betting that should you opt to drop out of their program
and you discover your site has disappeared from the results
pages, you’ll be clamoring to get back up on the top row and
begin paying again. To me it is nothing more than glorified
blackmail.
The main objective you should have is making sure you get
listed in Google, Yahoo and MSN. Any others would be gravy.
There is only one case that I might suggest to someone to
pay for site submission. When you first get your site up and
you really need to generate some traffic as quickly as
possible, this tactic could help you out.
DMOZ.com is a “community” database. This means it is operated
by volunteers. These are people who believe that the
Internet should be truly free. They donate their time to
manually submit web sites to the database. Should you decide
to list your site with DMOZ, it takes a long time to get
listed because it is done manually and is done on a first
come, first served basis. There are other free community
search engines that are worth submitting to. Doing a search
for “free community search engines” should get you started.
Don’t focus completely on the big search engines. Consider
smaller more focused or geographic community search engines.
Maine Hunting Today is now the proud owner of our own search
engine called “SkinnyMooseSearch.com”. We focus strictly on
web sites whose main focus is on hunting, fishing, and the
outdoors (recreation). We add sites to our search engine
manually, one at a time as we review every site first for
quality content. In our marketing approach for this site, we
tell people how we choose site submission and pride ourselves
on ensuring that search results will be relevant to hunting,
fishing and the outdoors as we say.
There are many of these kinds of search engines out there
that can be very beneficial to web site businesses. Take the
time to find them and get your site listed. Most of them are
free. If you find those that are not, consider other options
first. The trend for the future may lie with specialized
search. As more and more users discover that there are
quality search engines that search only specific content in
web sites, the more they will want to use them.
This is the start of search engine submission. Hopefully
either you or your webmaster has or will do this simple
task. If you are using a webmaster, ask them if they have
submitted your site and if so where. Make a list and keep
adding to it. If your web site is an addition to your
existing business, I would suggest you trying to set aside
about one hour each day to work on your web site. Work at
building it and making it better. Keep it up to date with
good content.
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