Walk Like a Giant, Sell Like a Madman

13.4. Promoting Your Web Site

Just because you invested a great deal of time and effort or money in designing and setting up a top-notch web site, this does not mean that immediately people are going to flock to your site. You need to attract attention and drive traffic to your site. Following are some techniques that can help:

• Make your site attractive to search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term used to describe various techniques for improving the ranking of Web pages in search results. One way to make your Web pages more visible to search engines is to pack your Web pages with key words and phrases that people commonly search for on the Internet when they're looking for content that your web site offers. Using HTML tags, such as <em> for emphasis, to call attention to key words and phrases also helps. For additional tips and strategies for giving your Web pages and blogs a higher profile, check out Search Engine Optimization For Dummies by Peter Kent (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

• Exchange links. Generally, the more highly ranked sites you have linked to your site, the higher will be your ranking with search engines. One way to encourage the creators of other web sites to link to your site is to link your web site to theirs. However, some SEO experts claim that shared links do little or nothing to improve your ranking. It's better to have a site link to yours without a link from your site to the other site.

• Contribute content to other sites. People in your industry ...