People have often asked me “I have a website up, now what do I do?” Let me start with the basics.
I am going to share with you a few things that you can do to increase your site traffic without putting a huge dent in your budget. In most cases, my suggestions will have minimal, if any, financial impact. Knowledge is power, as they say. Let’s look into some of the ways we can empower you to promote and market your site effectively.Obvious as it may seem, ask yourself, “What good is having a website if the search engines can’t see it?” It would be countless hours and dollars spent spinning your wheels. There are hundreds of thousands of websites not listed in search engines. You could have the best website online, but if no one knows that it is there, what good does it do you? None.  

How do you know if your site is in these search engines? Search engines frequently visit sites and file the information that they read.

This is called indexing.

It is important for us at this point to know what this means. There are several very large search engines out there that you may already know about. Among all of these will be Google and Yahoo. I am going to start with these search engines because they make up about 75% of the total searches done on the web.

The first and easiest way to see if your site has been indexed is to check if your site has been cached. Direct your web browser to www.google.com and enter the following into the search:

cache:http://www.yourdomain.com (replacing “www.yourdomain.com” with your website url)

For instance, if I wanted to check the cache for www.cwire.org, I would go to Google’s search engine and type in the following “cache:http://www.cwire.org/” and click SEARCH.

This will show you the pages that Google has in its cache. If you see that your site has been cached, you are in great shape! You are indexed on Google. If not, try to take the “www” out of the url that you typed in and hit search. If you still don’t see it then there may be a problem. I will explain how to fix this later on. This does not mean that Google doesn’t see your page. It may just mean that it has not cached it yet.

Next, let’s check to see if Google can see your site.

Direct your web browser to www.google.com and enter the following into the search:

site:yourdomain.com or site:www.yourdomain.com

What this will do is ask Google what pages under a certain domain that it sees. For instance, if I want to ask Google what pages are under the webwiseone domain, I would enter the following into the Google search engine “site:webwiseone.com” and it will show me all of the pages that webwise has in the Google database. Don’t worry if you can’t see anything. I will tell you how to fix this in a few minutes.

Next lets take a quick look at www.yahoo.com.

Go to www.yahoo.com. Enter in the same thing that we used for Google, “site:yourdomainname.com.” Lets look again at webwiseone.com . I will enter “site:webwiseone.com” into the yahoo search and this is what we get.

If you want to know if you are in the directory at yahoo (dir.yahoo.com requires paid advertising) do the following:

Direct your browser to dir.yahoo.com. This will point you directly to the yahoo directory search page.

Type in “yourdomainname.com.” I will use novell.com. You will not need to use www. or http//: .

This will show you all of your pages that Yahoo currently has in the directory.

What if your page did not come up under any of these? Or only came up under one of the search engines? Well, it is one of three problems. Your site is not indexed, it is very new and your site hasn’t been “found” yet or you spilled your coke on the server.

If this is the case, there are a few things that you can do.

1)Bang your head against your keyboard
2)Break a pencil
3)Scream loudly while jumping up and down

Or…

1)Find other websites that are willing to link to yours and ask them to link to your site. You may be a part of an online community or just have a friend with a website. In any case, find websites and get your link on there. I am not talking about a CLICK HERE link. I am talking about using your full url as the link. Such as www.yourdomainname.com. Its very important to use your full url for a number of reasons. This is very often the fastest way for you to get your site indexed.

Microsoft has some great information for finding, contacting and retaining contacts that will link your site. This information is located at Microsoft.

2)Ask the search engines to index your site. This is perhaps the most underutilized tool. You can add your URL to Google’s search engine at Google. You can add your url to Yahoo’s search engine at
Yahoo. This may take several days or weeks to take effect. These search engines send out programs called spiders to come to your website and register the data. Google has some good suggestions when adding your url to their engine.This can be found on Google.

3)You can pay to have your site listed. This is known as pay-per-click or sponsorship. When you type in “Vest” in Google’s search engine.
You will see links to the right and on the top in light blue. The links to your right are pay-per-click. These can be anywhere from 1 cent and up per click. The price is decided by a bidding process. The links on top are generally paid by a time period. These can range in the thousands of dollars. I will be sharing more strategies on pay-per-click posting on another day when I am not strung out on caffeine.

These steps may seem really easy. However, there are some websites desperately searching for ways to increase traffic, and don’t even have their sites indexed.

Again, if you have any questions or would like me to walk you through these steps, yell my name at your monitor really loudly 3 times. Or, you can just respond to the post.