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Promoting Your Online
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Week 2 of "Promotion
for Writers: Establishing a Web Designing a Site to Attract Maximum Traffic Now that you know where you are (or at least you have a better idea of where you are!), let's back-track and go over the design of your site. You may not realize it, but the design of your site can make or break your promotions. Most people think they can get a domain name, throw a page onto the ether, and millions of people will flock to it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. However, if you do the detail work and design a site well, it can pull visitors in almost by itself. That said, here are the items you most need to concentrate on in design: *
Target Market Considerations For example, if your target audience is Christian women, consider specific items that Christian women would be likely to want: inspirational quotes, inspirational articles, Christian news, forums for talking with one another, tips on living, etc.
For now after you sign up, go to their keyword tool: (http://www.sitesolutions.com/bravenet/analysis.asp?F=Form&b=AC397EB4-487B-11D4-8C29-0090274F010C ). Start at the top of your list (which should be your most important keyword-if not, relist them in order of importance). For me, that word was "inspirational." When you type in a keyword, this tool will give you a list of all of the keywords branching from that keyword-choose those that most fit your site. Notice also how often those words are used in searches. You don't want a great keyword that no one ever searches for. This, like most of the web, is not an exact science. Come up with a grand list of about 40 keywords. IMPORTANT NOTE: Only use a keyword individually or in phrases no more than 3 times in your list! For example, I could have "inspirational, inspirational quotes, inspirational stories." If you use a single keyword more than three times, you are endangering your site to being thrown off of a search engine for "spamming." After you come up with your list of 40, you will use it to formulate the following components of your site (and in future promotions so hang onto it): · Metatags-the coding at the top of your site in the <head> tags that tells search engines what the page is about. You can see metatags for pages by going to a web page, clicking on view and then source. If the source code isn't blocked, you can read through all of the coding that makes up that page. At the top of each source code there will (or should) be two types of metatags-a keyword metatag and a description metatag. For the keyword metatag, you will literally use the list you've come up with, comma delineated (you can use the metatag builder at Bravenet to do this so you don't make mistakes). For the description metatag, you will write a description of your site in sentence-logical form using 250 characters or less (the closer you can get to 250 the better though) using as many of your keywords as possible-but note that this description needs to make sense to the average reader. True story: When I wrote the original course, my metatags were… umm, well, I can't use a word to describe how bad they were in polite company. Suffice it to say, they weren't very effective. Shortly after finishing the writing of the original course, I went back to see what advice I had given that I really needed to take myself. This was one area I decided to concentrate on. I went back and did extensive work on choosing my keywords and formulating them into metatags. When I resubmitted my site to the search engines, my site jumped from 64 average visitors a day to 82 and then to 93 visitors a day within a month (In less than six months I'm up to 127 visitors a day). So, I know this part is technical, and you'd rather not deal with it, but I'm here to tell you, it's worth getting this search engine optimization stuff right! · Title Bar-This is the blue line at the top of the web page (very, very top). This bar is extremely important. It is the line that search engines print at the top of each entry, the one that potential visitors read to decide if your site is what they are looking for. A couple of considerations when writing the title bar: Start it using a letter as close to the beginning of the alphabet as possible as some search engines and directories alphabetize their listings. Pack it with as many of your keywords as you can, but make it sound logical. AND most of all CREATE A TITLE BAR! My first one (blushing to admit this) said, "Staci Stallings------------------------------------" Now that is about as unhelpful to any potential visitor as you can get! Please, please, please be smarter about creating yours than my first webmaster was about creating this one! · Body Copy-It would make sense that the copy on your page should reflect the intent of your keywords; however, I want to stress the importance of consciously using your keywords in your copy. For example, say someone types, "Motivational Quotes" into a search engine. If you have "Motivational Quotes" in your Title Bar, your keyword metatag, your description metatag, and say twice in your body copy, your site will be listed above someone who only mentions that phrase once in one place. Obviously you don't want your copy to be so keyword intensive that it is unreadable, but it is important to use your keywords consciously and well in your copy to both attract targeted visitors and to get ranked high in various search engine searches. · Alt Tags-Alt tags are the little messages that appear if a graphic doesn't. (The blind use these extensively, and putting them in just for this reason makes a lot of sense.) However, one point that many don't realize is that your alt tags are actually part of the coding, which is what the search engine "crawls" over to decide where to list your site. Ah! A place to put more keywords! And it's a legitimate use, too! Important Note: Do NOT "stuff keywords" into your site by making them the same color as the background or using other nefarious methods. Stick to the legit ways to use keywords, and you will be just fine! *
Develop hooks to use in your headlines, sig files,
taglines To develop a hook, list the top five benefits of visiting your site. List the top ten benefits of exploring your site. Develop a hook around these. Entice your visitors to stay by hinting at that benefit, and focus the hook on the visitor not on you. For example, what I really wanted was for visitors to come away from my site feeling better about life and themselves. That was my dominant goal, so from that I developed a succinct saying that is included nearly every time I mention my site-in article taglines, in sig files, in print, everywhere. My hook? "You'll feel better for the experience!" You can see more on headlines, sig files, and tag lines if you've registered for the "extra information" at emarketing @stacistallings.com or if you register now. Other Site Design Considerations There are a few indispensable elements that you should consider incorporating into your pages. Graphics. Words are the basis of the 'net, but graphics can make or break a page-in more ways than one. Graphics are great for adding interest and emphasizing theme and purpose, but they must be used intelligently. According to studies, the average netizen will wait about eight seconds for a page to load (figure about 40 KB to be eight seconds). So, if your page is graphics intensive and takes say 30 seconds to load, few of your visitors-even if you get them there in the first place-will stick around to see all of your hard work! Now there are a few ways around this. For instance my home page is considerably larger than 40 K, BUT my wonderful designer arranged the coding so that the words come up first and then the pictures load around it. So visitors can immediately start reading and then get the full effect as the rest of the page loads. (A Note of Caution: My wording is dark on a light background. This trick doesn't work with light wording on a dark background.) Just remember graphics are great-IF they are done intelligently. (And one aside about graphics… I now have a program from Macromedia called Fireworks for my graphics. Using this program, you can create those super-neat banner effects when you save the file as an animated gif and then add frames. I can't go into all of that here, but suffice it to say, once I learned to do this, my viewership and subscriber rate jumped through the roof! Also, it's safe to add here that I am working on getting a permanent list through the ACRW that focuses on all of this online stuff. That way we can walk through all of these topics to our hearts content until we're all rivaling Yahoo! for that top Alexa spot! If you're interested in being included on this online promotion/learning list, let me know so I can demonstrate interest to those who make the decisions.) Email Box-Okay, this may seem very basic, but I can't tell you how many sites I've been to that I really want to interact with. Maybe I have an article that I think might be fabulous for them or maybe their site is great and I want to exchange links. But then I go hunting for an email, and there isn't one! Ugh. What that means then is… well, I just click off to another site that does have an email. So, two issues on this point. If you don't have an email address, icon, something VISIBLE, get one. And if you have one, keep it up-to-date. The only thing more frustrating than not being able to locate an email address on a site is finding one only to email that person and the message bounces back. Navigation System -You have to have a means of navigating your site ON EVERY PAGE! I can't count the number of times I've entered a site that looks like it might be interesting through a webring (hold on we're getting to those) only to see that I can't get to the homepage or any other page from the webring page. Don't make this mistake. Put some form of visible navigation system on every page. I prefer that it be the same, but even if you only give a button to get back home on every page, you've taken a step in the right direction. Also, one word of caution: don't use frames to accomplish this element. Frames confuse search engines, and you do not want to confuse any search engine-they are too important! Links-When you are first starting out, a linking campaign should be your second tool of publicity effort-right after search engines, and if done right, it can reap many more benefits than you'll lose in the process. However, in order to get your link on other people's sites, you must give them a reason to put your link on their site. One big reason is to tell them that you will put a link to their site on yours. It's called a link exchange. As you design your site, seriously consider adding one page for links. Now on my site there is indeed one page, but it is then broken down into a wide variety of other pages-such as Christian Links, Author Links, etc. I think this is a good policy so that a viewer coming to your link page can easily view only the links he or she is interested in. Down the road, you can use your link partner sites as places to post articles or send press releases as is appropriate. Webrings-When I first started on the 'net, one of my first best friends was the webring system. Two reasons for this: 1) I could find a lot of sites that were similar so when I found one I liked and wanted to contact for a link, I could then travel around the webring and find other sites like the first one. 2) It's the secret hiding place for email addresses. You will notice in the navigation bar of the webring there will be something that says, "This Christian Romantic Webring Site is owned by Staci Stallings." The underlined part is… you guessed it: AN EMAIL LINK! Joining targeted webrings is a decent way to get your site out there, but in order to take advantage of this, you have to have a webring page. Remember the caveat about 40K pages? Well, this is what trips a lot of sites up. Their page isn't all that big, but they throw in three or four (or seven or eight) webring graphics at the bottom of the home page, and suddenly their main page takes forever to load. Don't let this happen to you! Design intelligently! A FINAL THOUGHT ON DESIGNING A SITE Always design with Velcro in mind. What can you do design-wise to accomplish the three main goals of any webmaster: 1) Get visitors to come!
(Meta tags, Title Bar, Keywords, Search Engine Optimization, Webrings) HOMEWORK EVALUATE YOUR SITE: 1) Formulate a list of keywords. Onward & Upward! Peace to all, Staci Stallings Visit www.stacistallings.com |
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