Promoting a web site

Some individuals and companies build a Web site (or have it built for them) and sit back thinking, "we've done the Web thing". However, launching the site is just the beginning. The trick is to be noticed.

To paraphrase the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Internet is big, really big. Imagine counting every page of every district's Yellow Pages in New Zealand and multiplying the sum by a million. You'd arrive at a meaningless figure, which is just about what the sum of all web pages would be if there was a way to count them. There are a million times more Web sites in the world than the figure you'd arrive at. Some have twenty thousand pages and more on a single Web site.

Setting adrift into this electronic ocean means you have to light a beacon so fellow sailors can find you. Never mind the mixed metaphors, this is a huge sea. Imagine building a shop 20 kilometres down a dirt road off State Highway 1 and neither signposting nor advertising it. Your only customers would be your Mum and a couple of people a year who managed to lose themselves down the road and find you by mistake. Web sites are distressingly difficult to have noticed.

Even in its infancy in the early nineties, the Web became so big so fast that clever programmers developed search engines to hunt down sites. Others hand-built directories to list sites of interest, the best known being Yahoo (www.yahoo.com).

Much of the hand-built stuff has given way to automated programs that send electronic feelers out into the Web and catalogue stuff they find, listing it back on the search engine's home Web site (www.google.com). You really need to have your Web site listed on these sites because people trying to find information often head there first.

Internet marketing and promotion company, WebSideStory (www.websidestory.com) reported last year that 13% of Web users find what they want by going through search engines. However, they say their research showed more than 60% of Web users went directly to sites they wanted to view, without surfing. In others words, the decade's aimless surfing up til 2003 means most users now know where they want to go. If you are not in their bookmarks or if they're unaware of your site then you'll have trouble building a loyal audience.

The quest to be listed is so serious that companies have sprung up which do nothing else but try to get you a higher listing on search engines. The theory is that unless you are listed in the top couple of sites in your category on a search site then few people will bother to scroll down the 200 or so sites listed above you. You'll be ignored.

Your prominence on the search engines' lists is called a ranking. Number 1 is obviously best, anywhere on the top 10 is pretty good. You get to number one in several ways. If you're selling a translation of Enid Blyton's books into Klingon you're probably way out there on your own so you'll be number one and there probably won't be a number two for some years. If you run a motel, knit jerseys or run some other home-based business then you're a drop in the binary bucket. You have competition from all similar enterprises in the developed world.

Search engine specialists configure your site so the automated search engines will see it as a model of its category and rank it higher than its competitors. It's painstaking and fiddly and requires someone who's happy to spend 10-hour days tweaking your site to make it visible.

Yahoo, once totally free, now charges $US299 just to look at the address of your Web site within a week. That's no guarantee that you'll get a high listing, just a promises to consider your request. For US$25 monthly, you can have a highlighted listing to try to attract the surfers' attention. It can get expensive. Even a custom make over to get you noticed might set you back $4,500 with ongoing monthly charges.

There are things you can do to help yourself. Your stationery should have your e-mail and Web site address. Your business cards should display that information too. Every advertisement you take should include your web site address prominently. You can go to the local search engines and directories and enter your site details. For example, try www.searchnz.co.nz, www.nzsearch.co.nz and www.accessnz.co.nz. Google and Yahoo also accept manual entries as do the other big international search sites.

Head for the international sites and look for links such as 'add my site', 'site submissions'. Click the link, fill out the required information and hope they like you enough to list your site.