Promote Web Page

Many web page developers seem to think that if you build a website, people will visit.  Unfortunately, life isn't quite so simple.

With several billion pages on the Internet, the odds of someone bumping into yours is rather remote, unless it has good content, is well designed and adequately promoted.

Web page promotion entails registering your URL with one or more search engines or web portals.

There are literally hundreds of search engines in existence today. Although it is free to add your URL to most search engines, the registration effort can take effort.

Search engines can be national, international, of subject specific.  Most Internet users, however, use only two or three search search engines on a regular basis. You should certainly register your site with each of these.

Depending on your website objectives, you may also want to register with some of the international, regional or subject based search engines.  Alternatively, you can use a URL submission service to register your site with multiple search engines at once.

When a search engine becomes aware of the existence of your website, a "robot" or "crawler" will visit and index it based on words or phrases that it finds of the pages.

Each search engine has its own algorithms, however, in general, indexing is based on the number of times that specific words or combination of words are found in the titles, section headers and body of the page.

The title and first paragraph of each page is important for indexing purposes.  Consequently, the first paragraph on each page should provide a concise overview of the page. 

When building their database indexes, many search engines also consider meta tags. Meta tags are specified by the website developer using HTML statements that are invisible to the visitor. Alternative spellings and synonyms of important words on your page should be included as meta "keywords".

The website developer can also specify a meta "description" which summarizes the page content. This descriptive text is often used as the page summary in search engines. If a meta description does not exist for a page, the robot or crawler will select a few random lines of text from your page to be used as the page description.

In summary, you should take advantage of meta tags and use them wisely.