May 20

Promote it and They Will Come
Sun Review May 20, 2000

On the web, the traditional marketing credo of "Build it, and they will come" has been replaced by "Promote it, and they will come".

It doesn't matter how nice your site looks, or how easy it is to navigate, or how informative the content is, if no one can actually find your website. The good news is that if you have a small business website or even a personal website, you can still compete by using the same marketing strategies that are used in major online marketing campaigns.

Website promotion involves three stages:
1. Page preparation
2. Search engine submission, and
3. Monitoring and analysis.

Before we go any further, let me mention the important role your website statistics will play in this game. Talk to your Internet Service Provider or Webhosting service and make sure you have access to regularly updated web stats. Now you can find out exactly how many people have visited your website, what pages they are viewing, how long they spent at your site, and even where they are from. Use your stats to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing strategies, and fine-tune both your marketing campaign and the performance of your website.

Let's get started!

The first and most critical step in online marketing is building the best website you can afford to build. After all, this website is your face to the world. Once your site has been built, you must prepare it for search engines. Every page of your website should have an informative page title, a list of keywords and a page description. The keywords and description reside in the META tags of your document - you can find a good overview of META tags, and a META tag generator online at www.submitcorner.com.

Now you're ready to submit your website to search engines.

Choose the search engines your target audience is most likely to use. In North America, the top ten search engines include Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, Go, GoTo, Lycos, Infoseek, Webcrawler, Google, and Northern Light. If you're aiming for audiences outside of North America, visit Search Engine Colossus (www.searchenginecolossus.com).

So is it worthwhile paying a submission service to submit your website to 400+ search engines, or can you do it yourself?

You decide: In North America, the top 10 search engines direct approximately 97% of website traffic. The number one search engine, by far, is Yahoo with approximately 46%, and Alta Vista trails behind at 11%. Focus your efforts on the top 10 search engines, don't forget to include your listing on any industry-specific search engines or index pages, and you will be rewarded.

Submitting your website to search engines can sometimes be an arduous task: Yahoo forces you to go through a multi-page registration process, but for most others, simply visit the search engine's website and look for the "Add URL", "Add My Page" or "Suggest A Site" link. You can also use a free submission service such as All4one Submission Machine (www.all4one.com/all4submit) or Add Me (www.add-me.com).

You should know that there can be a significant lag time between the time you submit your website and the time it is actually included in the search engine's index. Alta Vista usually has a turn-around time of 2 weeks, whereas Yahoo can take 4-5 months.

Don't forget to incorporate your website into your traditional marketing campaign on business cards, letterhead, brochures, signs, and Yellow Pages ads. Use your webstats to monitor your progress, and update your website often.

Download a free trial version of WebPosition (www.webposition.com) to help you monitor your standings in the search engines.

You'll find an amazing amount of information about search engines at www.searchenginewatch.com, a 40-page tutorial on Web promotion for beginners at Promotion World (www.promotionworld.com/tutorial), and even more information at Cory Rudl's Internet Marketing Center (www.marketingtips.com).