4.1 Registering with Search Engines
- One of the most important services of the World Wide Web as we know it is the Search Service providers. The Internet was previously not as friendly a place as it is since the search providers have appeared. It is important that a web site be registered with the search providers in order for people to find you. Before the search people came along, the web browser relied on links from their starting web site to locate other sites of interest. Now it is possible to find areas of interest just by visiting one of the numerous search sites. Some of the major search provider players on the Web are Yahoo37, WebCrawler38, Excite39, Infoseek40, Lycos41, Alta Vista43, and HotBot44. These search engines, as they are often called, provide the user with information about where to go to get the information that the user requires.
- Registering with search providers requires varying amounts of effort. Some of the search providers will search your whole web site just by registering the home page with the provider. They have software that will follow all of the links that are built into the web site and find all of the documents.
- Because of the difficulty in registering and promoting a web site on the Internet there are service providers that have emerged that fulfill the need for publicity on the Internet. http://www.WebPromote.com46 is one of the service providers that is providing a service to promote your web site for a fee. They will register your site with all of the major search engines and also provide you with links from other high traffic areas on the web. They will promote visits to your site by placing enticing advertising on different networks on the Internet.
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4.2 Advertising Your Site on other Popular Sites - One method of advertising your site is through the use of a banner exchange. In this method you add a banner to your site and others will add a banner to their site. The banner code link obtains the banners from a banner-sharing site that keeps track of how many times your site is hit. An example of a banner exchange service provider is http://www.linkexchange.com/47
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4.3 Promoting Your Site Using a Service That is and of Interest to the Internet User. - A very good method of promoting a site is to provide the users a service that is free and provides a service to the Internet browser. if a person enjoys visiting a site and enjoys the free service the site provides they will be more likely to return to the site again and again. here are some examples of sites that provide interesting services that are useful to users.
- http://www.mapquest.com48
- http://www.weather.com/49
- http://www.timecast.com/50
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4.4 Developing a marketing plan for the site. - You should have a plan for a web site that you want to be viable. The plan should include ideas of how you plan to promote your site and who will be the visitors of your site. This plan should be flexible enough that if the market for your service changes you can adjust your plan to allow for theses changes. The Internet is a fairly new environment and strategies on the Internet change quite often.
- In the area of marketing plans there are also service providers that provide market analysis of what sites are of interest to the home user and what sites they are visiting. A company called The NPD Group Inc.51 provides feedback to the Internet market by distributing a program called PC-Meter55 to a group of people representative of the average home PC user. This software tracks where on the web the person goes and reports the information back to NPD for data analysis.
Edited Last: December 12,1997
