Now that you've built a terrific, good-looking, functional Web site for
your business, how are you going to make sure it gets noticed? There are a
number of different ways (in addition to conventional advertising media
such as trade magazines) to accomplish that.
Network! First and foremost, tell everyone you know. Friends,
relatives, neighbors and, of course, your customers! One effective way to
do this is to send out e-mail announcements. Be sure to talk up your site,
and give people a reason to go there (besides curiosity). Promotions and
special "Web customer discounts" are always a hit. Also, provide plenty of
links to your Web site.
Search Engines
Register your site with popular search engines such as Yahoo, Infoseek,
Altavista and Webcrawler. It's quick, free, and probably the most
important thing you can do in terms of making your Web site easy to find.
There are sites like SiteAnnounce.com that will register your site
with all of the search engines for you. Before you do that, you should
create META tags.
META Tags
A META tag controls how your Web page is indexed by search engines. In
the absence of any other information, the search engine will index all
words in your document (except for comments), and use the first 250
characters as a short abstract. You can also control how your page is
indexed by using the META tag to specify additional keywords, and add an
abstract. A keyword should be something Web users will actually think of
and type into a search. See any reference source on basic HTML for more on
META tags.
Seek Out Publicity on Industry Sites
The idea here is to be where people are looking for you. Contact
organizations in your industry with well-trafficked Web sites (ie: Small Business
Administration). Arrange to have them link to your site, or at
least mention it.
Update your stationery, business cards, and any other collateral
material to include your Uniform Resource Locator (URL) -- your Web
address.
