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 Outbox Web Marketing Newsletter, Volume 1, #5, April 9, 2001 Copyright 2001, Paul Stokstad. All rights reserved.     |
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This week's topic is: Site Promotion, Abstract and ConcreteBy abstract and concrete, I mean that we're going to throw some glitter on the generalities, but we're also going to stitch that glittery fabric together into a disco tube top that you can actually wear in public. Or at least in the privacy of a locked bathroom. That was the analogy for the Venusians. The guy's analogy starts with something about football strategy and ends up with how to tackle the big guy, keeping your eyes on the belt, since as the belt goes, so goes the fullback. Why not settle on an analogy we all can relate to, i.e.- a restaurant? In the restaurant business, you have several major factors to consider:
As anyone in the restaurant business knows, or learns immediately with a painful and embarrassing lesson, you never do the grand opening on the day you open for business. You would have to be crazy to do that. You want to get your people trained and the bugs worked out (and preferably exterminated) before you start inviting in the hungry hordes. Similarly, you don't hit up the search engines to check out your site before you get the site working properly. That means NO (read my lips) NO (again I say) NO "under construction" signs anywhere on the site. Make sure the site works on your machine and on a few other machines. Make sure it works on the Mac and the Windows machine. Check out a few browsers. Word of mouth in the restaurant business is some how deeply connected to the truth. You can eat and talk about it with the same organ. The web analogy is less direct, but still appropriate. The point is, don't rely on promotion to bring people to your site. The place to start promoting good word of mouth is by serving up something worth chewing on. Your site must have some useful content, or it's crazy to bring people in the door. They'll not be back. A restaurant rarely has more than one chance to make a good impression. Your site might have only a few seconds. They're scanning your site for relevance. They're looking to see if there is any reason to stay, and, almost as crucial, they are deciding whether they should come back. I say focus on creating compelling, interactive site content. If you don't have anything new on your site fairly often, why should anyone come back? Plus, if you only spoon-feed information to people, and don't let them participate in any way, you may not get the attraction to your site that something interactive can develop. I'm working on these elements for my own site. It's a work in progress. The suggestion box in the restaurant gives good feedback on the feed. You can gain a lot from surfer feedback on your site, if you can get it. You have a live research group standing there right in front of you. You might ask what they like. Like this: "Hi, this is Paul. What kind of topics would you like to hear discussed in this newsletter. Please let me know!" By the way, you had better get your menu in the window (i.e. - meta tags) going before you even open the door. The reason for that is that in the web business, there are automatic "spider" agents browsing the web 24X7 looking at whatever they can find, and they may come your way even though you haven't announced your presence to the search engines. You don't want to be caught without your menu on the window, or they will peer in through the curtains and make a guess at what you do. That's right, the web bot/spiders will actually pop into your site and harvest the first twenty-five words they find on the home page and use that as your site description. On my site, if I had no meta tags, that would mean that my spider-harvested search engine entry would look like this:
With my meta tags (which are encoded into the <head> tag area of my site -- see last weeks' article for a quick intro to tags), the search engines will say this about me:
Maybe not the most aggressive statement possible, but at least it's MY statement. But this is just playing with the analogy. To get down to business, when you want to promote your site, you have to promote on the web and in the real world. Many people forget to advertise and promote their site in the real world. Let's not forget traditional business tools and models. Forgetting traditional models is part of what is behind the recently burst dot-com bubble. Here's a couple of traditional ways that you can promote your site: Put out a press release to local media. Your new website is a new business venture, or a new aspect of your existing business. Let the traditional media know in your own home town, and in any town where your business has a measurable impact or clear relevance. Also let publications in your industry know. They may not print anything, but they will "duly note" the information, and you never know when some editorial guy will be calling you. Put your URL on everything. Let people know that you have a site and that it is open for business. Read the article on my site for more site promotion ideas. Promoting your site on the search engines (just ONE of several forms of site promotion - we won't be getting to banners, reciprocal links, web rings, text links, viral marketing, affiliate programs, etc. today) takes several forms:
I've already discussed meta-tags. Meta-tags are easy. All you have to do is go to a site that could be expected to have a basic level of competence, like, say Amazon.com, and check their source code. You can find the source code of any document by clicking on the correct menu item on your browser. On my Netscape Communicator 4.76 browser it's available as a menu item called "View Source" on the View menu. You'll have to search about on your own if you have Internet Explorer, since I'm doing this article on my Mac and my windows machine is across town a bit. As you will see below, Amazon has no "description" tag. I guess they figure people know what they do. But they do have lots of keywords:
All you have to do is ditch all of the stuff that I've bolded and stick in your own stuff. So, what you see above turns into:
Notice that there are no spaces after the commas. If you do that correctly, you are actually preparing text for properly filling a database, perhaps for the first time in your life, with food that it can digest: what are called "comma-delimited" files. You are putting "dee" limits on "dee" file items using "dee" comma. Another form of delimiting is pipe delimiting. Pipes look like this: ||||||||||||. If you pipe delimit, it looks like: Suzy|Jones|201 South Second Street|blonde|46|WASP. You don't need to know that for meta tags, but you can startle your programmer friends by asking if they work mainly with pipe delimited or comma delimited files. It's stunning for a few seconds, and then like saying even a few words of French in France, they will assume you know what you are talking about and launch into a discussion of Mod-Perl scripts and then you will be <<un drôle d'oiseau>> for sure. The point is, you can copy the meta tags, add in your stuff, stick in the html of your home page, and you are off to the search engine races. That's a good start on site optimization of your own site. There's more, but you have to start somewhere. Once you have the sign on the door, or the menu in the window, at least, in the form of meta-tags, you may feel comfortable promoting your site on the search engines. When I first did this, five or six years ago (I was online early), I spent 17 hours posting my site on search engines. Now it takes one and half to two hours. The efficiency is due to a tool called Submit-It. Submit-It is a website that got started early in the site posting business, They were good. So good that Microsoft bought them out and now they are part of the Microsoft suite of site enhancement tools that are called Traffic Builder. It's a cool suite of tools, including the capability of doing newsletters like this one. For the purpose of this article, though, I want to focus on the search engine tool. This tool has simplified search engine promotion tremendously. There are many other tools out there, but I can't research them all, but I'm happy to recommend Submit-it (or whatever Microsoft is calling it nowadays). I use this tool and charge my clients for the service. And what do I do? I help them with a twenty-five and forty word statement about their business. I help them develop key words about their business. I get all of their contact information. I take all that and enter it into the Submit-it forms, and then I set forth on announcing their presence to the searchies. It's not like there's no work involved, though. Anything that keeps me away from food, romance, partner dancing, reading, movies, writing poetry, playing tennis , channel surfing, or the Samhita level of pure consciousness is work in my book. But I only have to enter all that information once, and Submit-it pops it into every database that we meet. There are three levels of the interface. First you can automatically pop your info over to about thirty general web search engines. There is some slight customization involved, choosing where you'd like to be listed, etc., but it takes five minutes for the whole lot. Then you get into the specialized search engines. This is where I earn my keep, but you would do better than I can with your own business. In this area you choose which types of search engines you think may be relevant to you, and drill down into sub-pages that list the actual names. Once you arrive there you can choose the ones that look likely and then Submit-it will take you on a guided tours through the sign-up page of every one of those puppies, pre-populating the forms for each search engine with 95% of what they need to function. You have to make a little decisions here and there. Add a comment now and then or click on a checkbox. But mostly it's automatic. I avoid the "pay for a listing" sites. There's so much that's free, why bother? Some clients may choose to pay for some search engines, but when I'm doing this kind of work, it's generally the weekend and my client is watching a football game while I'm coding into the night. I can't find him to ask him to pay 5 bucks for some lost search engine that has no other money model. So I don't. Maybe you would rather do this yourself and make your own decisions. I'm in all likelihood protecting the client from throwing their money away, anyway. Once you finish one sub-section, Submit-it gives you a little report on your submissions and it's off to the next sub-area, where you repeat the postings until you have exhausted everything to which your site can reasonably have some relevance. Then, you go to step three, where you can arrange to have the tool resubmit your site to the major search engines every moth or two, just to keep your site fresh in there database. And you are done (for now). I should mention that Submit-it also gives you site analysis tools, like a spelling checker, code checker, and even a meta-tag generator that spits out perfect meta-tags for you to pop into your home page HTML. It's a fun tool. Having done all that , you could say that you have made (basic) contact with the search engines. Of course, they take their (blessed) time doing anything about it. Some may send out a spider right away. Others may take weeks or even months to post you, or even to consider posting you. We don't own these guys, We just do the best we can and hope that they notice. "Doing the best we can" takes an extreme form in Site Optimization, where individual "flycatcher" pages are created and then submitted that are optimized to ensure the highest possible placement relevant to a single word on a single search engine. Every search engine has certain ways that they like you to submit information to them, specific word counts in the meta-tags, and other elements, which, in their little bailiwick, tend to move you closer to the top of the search pile. Real cool search engine dudes now create flycatcher pages to capitalize on this tendency. They encourage you to have long titles on your home pages, since the titles on the pages (the stuff between the <title> tags that shows up as your page name in a web browser) sometimes makes a difference in placement. They'll tell you to see if you can set up reciprocal links with a lot of other sites, because sites with lots of links TO their site are sometimes ranked higher that others. There's a whole bag of tricks, and special software to make generating and modifying satellite sites and flycatcher pages a bit easier. When it comes to this stuff, I defer to my good friend Rick Archer, who not only knows this stuff backwards and forwards, but also knows every song from the sixties that I know, and therefore I only have to start the song and he finishes it. Saves effort for me. I hope that you've enjoyed this lengthy discussion of the search engine gig. It's just the beginning of an entire genre of web activity. The challenge online is, if you build it, they won't come. You have to put up some signs on the information highway, or they'll never know to take the new road to your restaurant/lemonade stand/fashion outlet/donuts on demand shop/whatever. Next week: The first OUTBOX "Kewl" award, for a company that provides database integration tools for the non-programmers of the world (most of us). Your comments, questions, suggestions, donations? Thanks for being there.... -Paul
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