Web tips
This page is part of Ron Mertens' web page guides.
This is my last guide, which is really a collection of tips I recommend reading and doing.
Alerts
If you have a content based site, I recommend you use some sort of Alert service to get notified of new web sites, blog
entries or news.
I personally use both Google and Yahoo's alerts. Google alerts is really nice. It will send you an e-mail when some news
story, blog entry or web site contains your keyword. It's a great way to be updated, to keep track of your site or competitors,
etc.
Forums / Blogs
A good way to publicize your new site is participating in forums and reading and commenting in Blogs. Of course I don't want
you to SPAM those places with link to your site. But let's say I see some forum discussion about OLED displays, or a new
blog entry about OLEDs.
I can send an e-mail, or even post a comment (or reply to the forum) with a short message that explains all about my
OLED-Info site, and why it is interested to the readers. More often then not, the
moderator will keep the message, because it is useful to the readers.
Articles
Another potentially useful thing is to write articles. There is a huge amount of royalty-free articles lying around. Webmasters use
them to insert quality content for free into their web sites.
The idea is that you write some article about the subject of your web site (It's not an ad! it's a real article), and sign it
out with your name and a link to your web site.
Then hopefully other sites will pick up the article and display it.
There are many article submission sites, you might want to submit your article to all of them. Here are my favorites ones -
Link requests
One of the best ways to get traffic and increase your search engine position, is to get links from other sites. Hopefully when
your site is good and popular, people will link to it by themselves. But for beginners, you might consider simply asking for links.
It works!
Just send a nice e-mail to the web site you wish to get a link from, explain what your site is about, and politely ask
for a link.
Link exchanges
A link exchange is when you ask a site to link to you, and you will promise to link to them too. I always get messages
about link exchanges with other sites.
Personally I don't like this. First of all, it's known that Google do not like link exchanges, because they know it's not
something that really tells something about your site. Second, if the link is not really relevant to your site, then it
will just be annoying or confusing to your readers.
Google site map
Google will like you to make a computer site-map (not something for visitors, but a special XML document) and submit it to
them. It helps them with crawling your site. And it might help you because your site will get indexed quickly and better.
There are free tools to create your site map, and if you have a CMS site (like drupal) than there are
modules that create them on-the-fly.
Blog and ping
Blogging is one of the best ways to get "heard" and known in the internet. If you write a blog, make sure you "ping" other
sites.
Pinging means that when you place a new entry, you notify blog-directories or blog-search-engines. There are many such
sites, and if you ping them, they'll include the new post automatically. Usually the ping is done automatically, for
example when using WordPress or Drupal, you can set the system to ping automatically the most known web sites.
Google trends and Alexa ranking
Two nice tools that you might want to look at are Alexa ranking and Google. Alexa ranking is an Amazon service.
It basically gather information from people that use the Alexa toolbar, and then displays web site ranking, using several
parameters . You can see the relative position of your site, or of competitor sites. It's a cute tool, but the main
problem is that it is very skewed - because only certain people use the Alexa tool bar...
The second tool is Google trends. You can type a keyword (or several, separated
by comma) and you'll see the past search volume and news volume. This is really cute.
What's next?
There's nothing next. I hope you enjoyed these guides... Back to the index.