| Web Traffic Digest |
Off-The-Wall Tips and Tricks
Sidetrack Spam Resulting from Your
Promotion Efforts
Get ready for one of the downsides of aggressively promoting your Web site: a flood
of junk email ("spam"). The more you places your register, announce,
participate in discussions groups, etc, the more junk email you can expect. Be ready
with a separate email box to receive the flood and keep important inboxes free for
important correspondence. Sign up for a free email address at Hotmail, Yahoo!, or
one of the other free email services. Then use that email address when you promote.
Forestall Disruptions from Spam Police
Easy Way to Come up with an HTML
Title that Gets Results
List the important keywords that you want associated with your site. Massage them
add filler words until you have a reasonable resemblance of descriptive paragraph.
Then substitute lively words to make it more interesting. When you're satisfied with
the results, register your site all over again. You should get a higher ranking in
searches and more searchers intrigued enough to your title to click on it.
Not Sure How Your New Page Will Rank
in Search? Find out.
Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com) indexes your new page when you register almost
immediately. That enables you to keep massaging the title, meta tags, text, etc.
until you are satisfied with your search ranking.
Pick an Interesting Dual-Purpose
Title for Your Site
A good HTML title that appears when your site comes up in a search, may also work
well in your signature. If the title is effective in attracting searchers to your
site it should attract discussion group participants too.
Save Times Counting Words for
Registration
For those search engines and Yahoo! that require you to limit the description of your site
for registration, consider drafting it in a word processor like Microsoft Word that has
word count and character count capabilities. In MS Word, look in the Tools menu for
these features.
An Excellent Jumping off Point for
Manual Registration
The best way to register your site manually at the major search engines is to start at a
Web site like WebStep 100 (http://www.mmgco.com/4-star.html). It lists 100 of the
best search engines. Start with the best-known, four-star sites and register at as
many as time permits.
Register Every Page that Has
Significant Content
Nearly all major search engines allow you to register multiple pages so do so. Your
competitors are. Prepare these pages with the same determination to get a high
ranking as you do your home page.
Leverage Your Content for Maximum
Effect
Content not only adds value to a site but it can also be used for registrations and
announcements, newsletters, ezines, and email site update notifications. It can also
be shopped around to see if other sites want to publish it with a link to your site or
link to it at your site.
Create a Signature for Every Occasion
You should have a "business card" signature appended to your emails when you
want somebody to know who you are and how to contact you. You should also create a
"mini-billboard" signature to promote your Web site and product to prospects.
Mini-billboard signatures should be further refined to fine-tune your message for
each target audience.
Monitor Announcements Posted
Want to quickly check to see which newsgroups posted your announcement? Go to
DejaNews at http://www.dejanews.com/. Type in your name or the name of your product.
You'll see all the discussion groups that published your announcement, a quick
monitoring technique that saves having to go to each group to see if your announcement had
been posted.
Monitor Changes at Competitors' Site
Instead of visiting your competitors' site periodically to see what they are up to,
register them at URL Minder, at http://www.netmind.com/URL-minder/URL-minder.html.
This free service emails you whenever a site you registered with them changes.
Looking for Candidates to Link to
Your Site? Here's a Good Source
Find out who's linking to your competitors. Go to AltaVista at http://www.digital.altavista.com. Type in
"link:[competitor's URL] AND NOT [competitor's URL]. This will give you a list
of all links to your competitor's site. Excluded will be the competitor's links to
its own home page. Some of these the sites linking to your competitors are excellent
prospects for linking to you.
Looking for Advertisers? Look
Again to Your Competitors
Interested in revenues hosting banner ads but wonder who will pay you? Who's paying
for ads at your competitors' sites. Start with them. If no luck, then go to
the advertiser's competitors. You should be able to find them the same way you found
your competitors (our Competitors article).
Looking for Ideas for New Content?
Assuming we don't have to remind you how important content is for improving the value of
your site, here's the best sources for content ideas: knowledge stored in your own
noggin (call it "background", "expertise", "experience"),
variations on competitors' contents (translation: "enhanced treatment"),
hot topics in discussion groups, current events in your field.
Suck up to a Big Player
Write a glowing report, article, how-to piece about a product or service you use and know
something about. Encourage others to enjoy the benefits you have. Ask the Big
Player to link to your write-up. Even if they ignore you, you can always register
your piece. When anybody searches for the Big Player, they should see your write-up
too. (I wonder if that's the motivation behind the DejaNews write-up in
Count-the-Ways?)