How To Bring More People To Your Web Site
With some 50 million Web pages now on the Internet, and more being added every day, getting noticed in the free-for-all of the World Wide Web is a bit like getting large numbers of people to listen to you speak on a busy street or in a crowded railway station--during rush hour.Despite these difficulties, there are some Web pages that attract far more notice--and thus more business and activity--than others. Some of these attract attention because they are integrated with expensive marketing programs from their parent organizations like IBM, or affiliated with extremely aggressive growth companies like Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp., or heavily promoted like the sites of ABC-TV or MSNBC. Others attract large numbers of readers/viewers because they contain information on "hot" topics, like the crash of TWA Flight 800 or the Oscars.
But while it's easier to bring people to your Web site if you have a large promotional budget and some natural glitz and glitter, none of this is an absolute prerequisite for success on the Web. In fact, there have been wildly popular Web sites put up by novelists, cartoonists, stock traders, antique dealers, and many others who began with relatively low budgets and little or no word-of-mouth appeal.
Within the last couple of years, for example, Sandra Woodruff found immense success as the creator of the popular and award-winning "Happy Puppy" games site. This fast, friendly link to the Web's best free game download pages started out as a $28-per-month ISP account on a computer in the basement of Woodruff's Seattle suburban home. Working with friends and family, and paying close attention to what her audience wanted, she created a Web site operation that she recently sold for seven figures to Attitude Network.
Similarly, the Southwest Inn in Sedona, AZ, has found that putting up a Web page can be very good for business. Begun in January, 1996, the Southwest Inn's Internet marketing efforts have grown to include a link to the weather bureau to provide Sedona's current conditions, plus a link to TravelQuest so visitors can easily get directions to the hotel.
The site has accumulated more than 50,000 hits per month so far this year, and the Inn's manager attributes more than 10% of its business--as many as twenty -seven room-night bookings in nine separate reservations received on a single day--to inquiries developed from these Web site encounters.
The Southwest Inn now has mini-home pages on at least fifty other sites, and is heavily involved with several online reservation services. It is also in the process of setting up reciprocal links to related but non-competing sites such as hotels and B & B's in other cities, local jeep tour companies and restaurants, and others who want to form a partnership on the World Wide Web.
You can lift your own Web pages into such elite company if you'll take the time and trouble to make them more attractive, effective, and visible to the Web users you're trying to reach.
Some of the ways to bring more people to your Web site are quite straightforward. Let's take a brief look at each of them.
At least for the present, the most important feature of a successful Web page is information that's of interest and value to the target audience. Certainly, the "sizzle" (as opposed to the "steak") is rapidly becoming more and more important on the Web, as it is within much of today's over-promoted economy. But on the Web we have not yet seen a success like that of "Screaming Yellow Zonkers" or the "Pet Rock", where promotion and appeal constitute 99% (or more) of the "product" being sold.
So for the moment the foundation of success on the Web remains the provision of something useful--whether it's a good product, useful information, or a desirable service.
Exactly how you present your product, service, or information is also important, of course. But even a plain text page on a blank white background will attract a good deal of attention if it provides something that Web surfers are looking for.
To Web users seeking particular information, the offerings have long since become far too extensive and diverse for simple surfing to provide conveniently rapid results. That's why "surfing" the Web is rapidly giving way to in-depth "mining" practices--directed, intensive efforts to find and retrieve highly specific information.
While Web surfers may be content to click on links they encounter and follow their noses to anything interesting, Web "miners" have no time or patience to trust only in serendipity. Instead, they turn first to one or more of the Web's many power search engines, enter some search criteria, and hope they are guided immediately into areas of the Web that are relatively rich in the exact resources they're seeking.
As a result, attracting Web users to your site today requires that you be listed prominently in some--if not all--of the Web's most-used search engines.
Today, this list includes Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, Inktomi, MetaCrawler, MetaSearch, WebCrawler, and Yahoo, as well as many others. For one company's listing of today's best search engines, check out http://www.mmgco.com/top100.html .
Search engines maintain their own indexes of Web pages they have checked and found worthy of their users' attention. Getting your Web site prominently listed in is like getting your gas station or motel listed on the official map of the Interstate highway. Instead of people whizzing by, suddenly they begin to stop, come in, look around--and buy!
You can manually offer your Web site to each of these search engines, of course. Somewhere on each engine's Web site is an electronic form you can fill in and submit. Within days, the search engine's robot, or its human staff, will visit your page and decide whether or not it's worthy of inclusion.
But since there are so many search engines, you might prefer to go with an "automatic" listing system. These--such as The Postmaster, CentralRegistry, and Submit-It--will send descriptive information about your Web site and its URL to a selected list of Web search engines for free, or for a fee to a much a larger list.
In addition, you can post a notice announcing the opening of your Web site, or announcing some important change to its structure, content, or format, to listservs and user groups concerned specifically with "what's new" on the Web. These announcements remain highly visible for a few days or a week, and can remain the archives of these services for years afterwards.
Some of the best of these services include:
The Scout Report: http://rs.internic.
net/scout_report-index.html
NCSA Webnews: http://www.ncsa.
uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/ Docs/whats-new.html
Mcom-What's New!: http://home.mcom.com/
home/whats-new.html
The Off the Net Archives: http://www.
coco.net/otn/index.html
WebWeek: http://www.webweek.com/
The shorter, sweeter, and more honest you can make your submission to a "what's new" service, the more likely it will be to carry your notice to the Web community.
But even after your Web site is listed in the "what's new" services and accepted by the best Web search engines, it may be presented to Web users as the 190th item in a listing of 200 or more relevant Web sites. Since few people have the patience to scan much past the first twenty or thirty links, it's important to do whatever you can to bring your Web site closer to the top of the listing.
Some techniques to accomplish this include:
Use the <META> tag. You give the Web search engines a lot more
information to chew on by inserting
<META NAME = "KEYWORDS" CONTENT = "Whatever">
and/or
<META NAME = "DESCRIPTION" CONTENT = "Whatever">
within the <HEAD> </HEAD> section of your HTML-coded Web page
files.
Of course, you'll replace the word "Whatever" with detailed keyword listings or a descriptive paragraph, or both-depending on your preferences. Most search engines utilize this <META> information in ranking your Web site within the search results they display. They may also include this information within the actual listing they present to their users, giving people a better sense of exactly what your Web page offers.
It's also valuable to use a descriptive phrase or headline, plus the full URL of the Web page itself, within a pair of <TITLE> </TITLE> tags on each of your Web pages. This information won't show when the page is displayed, but will nearly always turn up in the listings that the search engines display, providing one more attraction by which you can pull people on the verge of information overload to your Web site.
The greatest way to lose visitors is to make your Web site slow to download, difficult to read or view, and boring. Like a comic book or a magazine layout, your Web page site must be interesting to look at, easy to understand, and fun to experience. If it is, then people who experience it will generally enjoy it, and will be more inclined to talk about it with their friends and colleagues.
To maximize interest, ease, and fun, keep the sentences and paragraphs short, the files--particularly the graphics files--relatively compact, and the visuals bright but simple. While it's more challenging and exciting to create Web pages for the most cutting-edge systems now being sold, remember that the vast majority of people visiting your Web pages will be using older computers with limited capabilities. Leave them behind and you'll never build a large audience.
In addition, make it a rule not to overload users' computers with high-definition graphic elements that take a long time to transmit but don't show up any better on their display screens than less-detailed files.
And similarly, don't let your Web pages be dominated by long text files that take a long time to transfer to the casual user's computer. It's better to divide a long text file into several separate Web pages and let people click on "hot links" from one Web page to the next, or from a table of contents.
One of the best--but slowest and therefore longest-term--methods of attracting people to your Web site is to monitor as many listservs and user groups on relevant topics as you can. Look for natural opportunities to "name drop" the URL of your Web site whenever the conversation veers close enough to your topic.
It's also very useful to mention your Web site in messages that you post to these listservs and user groups from time to time. Don't be shy about this. If you don't blow your own horn, who will?
Establish A Web Of "Hot Links": Remember that "hot links" to relevant--and sometimes irrelevant--Web sites that people visit can be very important to your success. As you go Web surfing or Web mining, make a note of other sites that people interested in your own Web site might also visit. Then use the email links on these pages, or telephone numbers if they're listed, to negotiate with other Web meisters for free or low-cost exchanges of "hot links" between your site and theirs.
Unlike "word of mouth" advertising, "hot links" to and from other useful information resources on the Internet put people who brush close to your Web site only a simple mouse-click away from actually visiting the Web pages you offer. This is the essence of online connectivity that makes the Web different--and potentially far more powerful--than a passive page in a newspaper or magazine.
Do Off-Web Publicity and Promotion: In addition to everything you can and should do online to bring more people to your Web site, it's equally or perhaps even more important that you leave the Web and execute the same kinds of traditional print, radio, and/or TV publicity and promotional efforts you'd roll out for any offer, venture, or opportunity you want to make public. This is because the vast majority of people who visit a Web site usually don't discover it by searching the Web from a cold start. Instead, they generally enter the Web specifically to find a particular site or a particular kind of information. This desire is most often triggered by the very same kind "external" publicity and advertising that drives us to buy ice cream or a brand new car.
Thus, the more attention you can call through traditional media to what you're offering, the more people you'll attract to your Web site.
Copyright © 1997 by Robert Moskowitz. All rights reserved.