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| Title: | 5 Ways to get your website noticed |
| Author: | Maui Reyes |
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Your website is just one of the billion sites parked on the
World Wide Web. Chances are, you don’t think yours will ever get
noticed. We hear your cries for cyber attention. Here are five
ways to get people clicking on to your site.
1.)Make sure it’s professional looking. No one likes looking at
website that reminds them of a book report they wrote back in
school. Invest in learning a good web design program
(Dreamweaver MX and Microsoft Frontpage are good picks), and let
your creative juices flow. Make sure it’s compelling,
well-designed, and organized. People don’t exactly find it fun
to weed through haystacks of cyberfiles to get the information
that they want. On that note, don’t make it a heavy site.
Putting up some flash intros may be great eye candy, but the
average internet surfer only waits 10 seconds for a page to
load, and then they’re off to the next.
2.)Put your URL on every search engine possible. Putting your
URL on business cards and bugging your family and friends to
check out your site won’t exactly increase traffic. Submitting
it to search engines will make it easier for people to find you,
provided that your webpage carries the topics they’re looking
for. To understand how a search engine works, think of it as a
“spider”: it crawls through your website, picking up words and
information which would later be indexed in the search engine’s
database. So make sure you pepper your site with keywords you
think are relevant to what people are looking for. Web
directories, like Yahoo!, are operated by humans who actually
categorize the websites themselves. If you don’t feel like
submitting your website to numerous directories, consider
subscribing to sites like www.submit-it.com, who, for a fee,
will automatically submit your site to search engines and
directories for you.
3.)Link everywhere. Find other sites that carry similar content
as yours and ask to exchange links. Create banners to be placed
on other peoples’ websites, and offer to the same for them on
your site. Add your URL on your e-mail signature. Join webrings
if you must—there’s nothing like strength in numbers.
4.)Advertise offline. The world of cyberspace isn’t enough to
get you noticed. Write up press releases and send them to local
newspapers and magazines. Print out fliers to be distributed.
Just make sure that your site is already up and running to avoid
giving people a bad impression (no one likes getting pumped up
for something only to get disappointed).
5.)Interact with your readers. Put up forums or message boards
for your visitors to interact with each other. Chat rooms are
often time-consuming for some, while message boards allows them
to check back every so often for replies. Create an e-mail list
so you can update your visitors about new developments, and
always be open to feedback—that’s what will make your site even
better.
About the author:
For comments and inquiries about the article visit
http://www.ucreative.com
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