Making the Web Work for You

Making the Web work for you means conducting your own Web pro- motion campaign. As with any campaign, your promotion efforts start with careful planning—such as Web site promotion through search engines. Few people truly understand how search engines do what they do. Now it is time to make these search engines work for you. Rather than visit.

Google’s Web site (www.google.com), to find other Web sites, you will use Google to bring visitors to your Web site.

You start by learning to take advantage of the way search engines find and retrieve information. Although the inner workings of search engines aren’t exactly state secrets, each search engine does things differently, which is why you should use many different techniques to make your Web pages friendlier to search engines. Web pages that are optimized for search engines using the techniques covered in the Saturday Morning session, “Capitalizing on Search Engine Fundamentals,” will help put your Web site on the map. These techniques ease the burden of obtaining references to your Web pages.
After you gain a firm understanding of how search engines work, you should register your Web site with the search engines used by the majority of Web users. Although your promotion efforts begin with search engine, 

you don’t stop there. Afterward, you move on to Web guides, lists, and directories, such as the Open Directory (dmoz.org), you don’t stop there.

Afterward, you move on to Web guides, lists, and directories, such as the Open Directory (dmoz.org), 

Just as few people understand how search engines work, few people take the time to plot out how to get the most out of Web guides, lists, and directories. You will create your own personal plan of attack in the Satur- day Morning session, in the section called “Submitting Your Web Site to the Top Guides, Lists, and Directories.”
The reason for targeting the best directories is to encourage you to use your time and resources wisely. Why waste your time registering with every single search engine and directory on the planet when 90 percent of Web users find what they are looking for by using the top 10 percent of the Web search and directory sites? 

You will find many other search sites and directories that focus on specific types of information. These include Yellow Pages directories, category- specific directories, and specialty directories. Although these search and directory sites generally have narrow focuses, they are popular and fre- quently used to find information. For example, anyone looking for a business listing can use a Yellow Pages directory, such as yellowbook (www.yellowbook.com) 

Including social media sites as part of your Web campaign is just as impor- tant as including search engines and directories. In recent years, social media sites have garnered the attention of hundreds of millions of people around the world, making them among the most frequented locations on the Web. Social media sites are different from traditional Web sites in that site members and visitors can directly interact with one another and are largely responsible for the content made available at those sites.

Social media sites form the basis of virtual communities that you are free to join and interact. By becoming a valued member of these sites, you can build up a loyal following and there is no end of the amount of traffic you can ultimately drive to your Web site. An example of one extremely popular social media Web site is Facebook, shown in Figure 1.4. You will learn all about Web marketing through social media based Web sites in Saturday Morning’s session “Attracting Visitors Using Social Media.”