Online web site builder, website software, homepage creator, personal ecommerce.

Marketing Your Site

Once you have completed your site, you need to get visitors. We have some information and features that can help you. This includes information on search engines, how to get listed and how to improve your ranking.

1. Getting Listed on Search Engines

There are 3 ways your site can get listed on search engines and directories:

Submit your site to each individual search engine and/or directory. To do this, go to each search engine and/or directory and look for a link to submit your site.
Important: Make sure you submit the exact full address of the first page in your index. It should include the /page/page/12345.htm or customized extension that follows your address. Although when you enter in just your web address (e.g. www.abc.CitySlide.com), it actually forwards to whatever page is first in your index, most search engines will not accept a site address which forwards as they think you are trying to cheat with a doorway page that helps increase your ranking.
Hire a company to submit your site to search engines and/or directories. Often companies that provide this service have several ways of getting your site listed higher up. They also often have the option of signing you up to just a few search engines or hundreds or thousands of search engines and/or directories.
Site is randomly found by a spider or bot and indexed. Many major search engines and/or directories regularly send out a spider or bot to rove the internet and index sites not yet in their listing. There is no guarantee that your site will get listed this way.

Remember 85% of all website traffic comes from search engine results.

More Info

For more info on search engines in general, see www.searchenginewatch.com.

2. Improving Your Ranking

There are many things you can do to improve the ranking of your site when people are doing searches on a search engine or directory. Two excellent sources of information are www.searchenginewatch.com and www.spider-food.net. Here is a summary of some things you can do to help your ranking:

Use important keywords in your text on your homepage. Use them near the beginning of your page and in the Titles.
Use important keywords frequently on your homepage. Note: Do not just repeat them one after another or the search engine will know you are trying to trick it. Use your keywords such that they flow with your page.
Try to get other sites to link to you. When many sites link to you, it tells the search engine you are a popular site. Note: You linking to other sites does not make a difference as anyone can just create links to any sites. Try joining web rings or clubs with similar sites to your own. Try to swap links with other sites.
Add meta keywords and a meta description to your site. See below.
If you have code like javascript or are using formatting like tables which require extra coding, do not put them on your homepage or make sure they are below wherever your important keywords in your content shows. This will keep your more important words near the top.
Use text to describe your content. Images are just seen as an image file. A search engine does not read any text that is within an image.
Do not spam search engines or try to trick them. This can result in your site being removed from their listing.

3. Meta Keywords and Meta Description

Meta tags (i.e. meta keyword tags and meta description tags) are sometimes used by search engines to help decide where to rank your web site. Each search engine has its own set of criteria and may change it from time to time. Usually the meta tags are inserted in the heading section of your html code. Within the tags, you would put a description of your site for the meta description and some keywords for the meta keywords.

We have two methods of adding in your meta tags. The first method adds the same meta tags to all your pages. The second method allows you to have individual meta tags for each page. The second method will override the first method for any page you add individual meta tags.

For the best benefit, you can add meta tags to all your pages first and then customize individual pages as needed.

Adding Keyword & Title Tags to All Your Pages

Click 'Marketing' -> 'Meta Tags'.
In the space provided, type in your keywords and your description. Separate each keyword or keyword phrase by a comma. You do not have to have a space after the comma if you need more character space.
Click on the 'Save' button. To see the results, right click on your page and view the source code. Scroll down and you will see your keywords and description.

Adding Keyword Tags to Individual Pages

Go to your page and click 'Edit Page'.
Click 'Internet Marketing'.
In the space provided, type in your keywords (separate each keyword or keyword phrase by a comma) and your description. Please note that there is maximum character limit of 500.

Lastly, click the 'Save' button at the bottom.

Adding Additional Code into Head Tags

For advanced users, you can enter additional code designed for the head area of your source code for each page. To do this:

Go to your page and click 'Edit Page'.
Click 'Internet Marketing'.
In the box under ' < head > < /head >', enter in your code and click on 'Save'.

Please note that you should not enter in your meta keywords or meta description code here and leave the designated boxes we give you blank.

When this is done, you end up with something like this in the code:

Many search engines will only view the two blank meta codes.

Step 4. Title Tags

The info in your title tag is often used by search engines as the text to link to your page.

Each page has its own title tag info. Some search engines may also look at your title tag for keywords that will bring up your site on their listings. Your title tag info also appears at the top left of your browser window.

You can access the title tag info by clicking 'Edit Page' and then clicking 'Internet Marketing' .
Under 'HTML Title Tag', enter in your title, then click 'Save'.

Then, save.

Note that if no title tag is entered, your title tag info is filled in with whatever page title you enter.