Attract Visitors to Your Site: The Mini Missing Manual (2 page)

Some sites let you post tips, reviews, or articles. If that’s the case, you can use a variation of the technique above. Remember, dispense useful advice, and then follow it up with a byline at the end of your message. For example, if you submit a free article that describes how to create your groundbreaking vacuum enclosure, end it with this:

Sasha Mednick is a computer genius who runs the first-rate computing website (
http://www.HotComputerTricks.com/)
.

Promotion always works best if you believe in your product. So make sure there’s some relevant high-quality content on your site before you boast about it. Don’t ever send someone to your site based on some content you plan to add (someday).

Return Visitors

Attracting fresh faces is a critical part of website promotion, but novice webmasters often forget something equally important—return visitors. For a website to become truly popular, it needs to attract visitors who return again and again. Many a website creator would do better to spend less time trying to attract new visitors and more time trying to keep the current flock.

If you’re a marketer, you know that a customer who comes back to the same store three or four times is a lot more likely to make a purchase than someone who’s there on a first visit. These regulars are also more likely to get excited and recruit their friends to come and take a look. This infectious enthusiasm can lead more and more people to your website’s virtual doorstep. The phenomenon is so common it has a name: the
traffic virus
.

So how does your website become a favorite stopping point for Web travelers? The old Internet adage says it all—
content is king
. Your site needs to be chock full of fascinating must-read information. Just as important, this information needs to change regularly and noticeably. If you update information once a month, your website barely has a pulse. But if you update it two or more times a week, you’re ready to flourish.

Never underestimate the importance of regular updates
. It takes weeks and months of up-to-date information to create a return visitor. However, one dry spell—say, three months without changing anything more than the color of your buttons—doesn’t just stop attracting newcomers, it can kill off your current roster of return visitors. That’s because savvy visitors immediately realize when a website’s gone stale. They have much the same sensation you feel when you pull out a once-attractive pastry from the fridge and find it’s as hard as igneous rock. You know what happens next—it’s time to toss the pastry away, clear out the website bookmarks, and move on.

The other way to encourage return visitors is to build a
community
. Discussion forums, promotional events, and newsletters are like glue. They encourage visitors to feel like they’re participating in your site and sharing your web space. If you get this right, hordes of visitors will move in and never want to leave.

Adding Meta Elements

Meta elements give you a way to add descriptive information to your web pages, which is important because some web search engines rely on these elements to help visitors find your site.
Figure 1-3
explains how it all works.

You put all meta elements in the section of a web page. Here’s a sample meta element that assigns a description to a web page:

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

content="Noodletastic offers custom noodle dishes made to order." />

...

All meta elements look more or less the same. The element name is , the
name
attribute indicates the type of meta element it is, and the
content
attribute supplies the relevant information.

Meta elements don’t show up when your page appears in a browser. They’re intended for programs, like browsers and web search engines (see the box below), that read your web page from top to bottom.

In theory, there’s no limit to the types of information you can put inside a meta element. For example, some web page editing programs insert meta elements that say its software built your pages (don’t worry; once you understand meta elements, you’ll recognize this harmless fingerprint and you can easily remove it). Another web page might use a meta element to record the name of the web designers who created it, or the last time you updated the page.

Some meta elements are more important than others, because search engines heed them. In the following sections, you’ll learn about two of these: the
description
and
keywords
meta elements. These details, in conjunction with the