ptg Getting Links from Other Sites It doesn’t take much surfing to figure out that the Web is huge. It seems like there’s a site on every topic, and when it comes to popular topics, there may be hundreds or thousands of sites. After you’ve done the hard work of creating an interesting site, the next step is to get other people to link to it. The direct approach often works best. Find other sites like your own and send a personal email to the people who run them introducing yourself and telling them that you have a site similar to theirs that they may be interested in. If they are, there’s a good chance that they’ll provide a link to your site. Oftentimes, there’s a quid pro quo involved where you might link to someone else’s site and ask them if they’re interested in linking to yours in return. This doesn’t mean that you should go out and pester people or email them repeatedly if they don’t do as you request. The subtle approach often works best. Figure out what kinds of people might be interested in what you’re publishing, and let them know what you’re up to. If you are launching a site for a new restaurant, it’s worth searching for blogs that cover the city or neighborhood where the restaurant is and letting them know about the site. Many people are on the lookout for things to write about or link to, so if you have something of legitimate interest, they’ll be glad to hear from you. Just make sure your email is to the point and that they know it was written to them personally, so they don’t assume you’re mass emailing people like them. Promoting Your Site Through Social Media First, what are social media? Most people define social media as websites that enable their users to socialize with one another. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace are popular examples. Weblogs can be considered social media, too. There are also link sharing sites like Digg and Reddit, where users can submit links, vote for them, or com- ment on them. Links that get more votes are featured more prominently on the site. Social media is about people connecting to one another, and promoting a site through social media is as simple as talking about your site on those sites. The tricky part is doing so in a way that makes you a valuable participant in the conversation rather than a tedious self-promoter. In Lesson 22, “Content Management Systems and Publishing Platforms,” I explain how you can integrate some of these social media sites with your own website, but first I explain ways you can use these sites to reach people who might be interested in your site. Many people talk about “viral” marketing. The concept is simple: Instead of pur- chasing an advertisement that may be displayed for hundreds or thousands of people, you tell just a few interested people about your site (or essay, or product, or movie, or whatever it is that you’ve created), and then they in turn share it with people they think 606 LESSON 20: Putting Your Site Online Download from www.wowebook.com ptg will be interested, and so on, until it has reached a large audience. The advantage, assum- ing that it works, is that it’s inexpensive, and that your message has been delivered by people who the audience is actually willing to listen to—people they already know.The difficulty is in creating something that is interesting to large audiences in the first place, and in telling the right people about it so that they are interested in sharing in what you’ve created. Taking advantage of social media is one way to accomplish the second part of the task. Regardless of the outlet, the two steps are to establish a presence and to be interesting. Twitter (http://twitter.com) is one of the most popular social media sites these days. After you’ve signed up for an account, you can follow other people on Twitter, and people who find you interesting will follow you. There are a lot of people on the Web giving advice on how to attract large numbers of followers, and there are a lot of people on Twitter who follow thousands of people in hopes that people will follow them in return. Focusing on follower counts is the wrong approach. Remember, the goal with social media is to establish an audience of people who actually care about what you’re doing. Let’s say you’ve created a new website for knitting enthusiasts, and in hopes of promot- ing the site, you’ve created a Twitter account to go along with it. Registering and Advertising Your Web Pages 607 20 Creating a Twitter account is easy and free. To create a Twitter account, you need only supply an account name, a full name, an email address, and a password of your choosing. The account name and full name can be anything you like. After you’ve followed those steps, you’re all set. For starters, you should create posts on Twitter with links back to your site whenever you publish something new. You should also follow people who say interesting things, prefer- ably on the subject of knitting. And you should respond to them when you have some- thing interesting to say, too. If you do so, eventually they may follow you in return. If things go well, eventually you’ll have a great outlet for promoting your site, and even if they go poorly, you’ll be participating in a community of people who like to talk about the subject of your site—knitting. That’s social media in a nutshell. Creating a Facebook Page for Your Site There’s an additional way to promote your site on the popular social networking site Facebook. You can create a page that represents your site to the Facebook community. To do so, you need a Facebook account. After you’ve signed up, go to http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages and click Create a Page. You’ll be taken to the Create a Page form, shown in Figure 20.1. NOTE Download from www.wowebook.com ptg FIGURE 20.1 The Facebook Create a Page form. 608 LESSON 20: Putting Your Site Online In the form, I’ve already selected Brand, Product, or Organization and then chosen Website from the select list. At that point, I just have to enter a name for my page to cre- ate it. The brand new page I created for this book appears in Figure 20.2. FIGURE 20.2 The new Facebook page I created for this book. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg After the page has been created, I can customize it in a variety of ways, controlling who’s allowed to post on it and what kinds of content they’re allowed to post. The Facebook page gives Facebook users who are interested in this book a place to congre- gate to discuss it, share links related to the book, and meet one another. Site Indexes and Search Engines Nearly all web users know how to find things using search engines, and you’ll want to make sure that they can find your site. Search engines work by creating an index of all the sites they can find. You need to be sure to add your site to the index when you pub- lish it so that search engines will start including it in search results. As long as people link to your site, search engines will find it eventually whether you tell them about it or not, but asking them to index your site will ensure that it’s added immediately. Here’s a list of the top four search engines: : Google http://www.google.com Bing http://www.bing.com Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com Ask Jeeves http://www.ask.com I’m going to describe how to submit your sites to some of the popular search engines. There’s a set of interlocking relationships among search engine providers that can make it difficult to keep track of who is providing search functionality for whom. The search engines listed previously maintain their own indexes. After your site is included in their index, it will be available via all the search engines that use their index, too. Site Indexes and Search Engines 609 20 The search engine descriptions are brief, and because of the rapidly changing nature of the search engine industry, may be out of date by the time you read them. For more information about search engines, I strongly recommend Search Engine Watch at http://www.searchenginewatch.com. Google Google is currently the most popular search engine. Its search results are ranked based not only on how frequently the search terms appear on a listed page, but also on the number of other pages in the index that link to that page. So, a popular page with thou- sands of incoming links will be ranked higher than a page that has only a few incoming links. NOTE Download from www.wowebook.com ptg This search algorithm does a remarkably good job of pushing the most relevant sites to the top of the search results. It also rewards people who publish useful, popular sites rather than those who’ve figured out how to manipulate the algorithms that other search engines use. Many sites that aren’t dedicated to providing search functionality use Google’s index, so getting into the Google index provides wide exposure. As of summer 2010, Google’s share of the search engine market is 65%. 610 LESSON 20: Putting Your Site Online How Search Results Are Ranked Every search engine has an algorithm that ranks sites based on their relevance. It might take into account how many times the keyword you enter appears on the page, whether it appears inside heading tags or in the page title, or whether it appears in text inside links. It might also take into account how high on the page your search terms appear. Such algorithms are trade secrets within the search engine industry, but some of them have been unraveled to greater or lesser degrees. Armed with this information, some site authors write their pages in such a way that search engines will give them a higher relevance ranking than they deserve. For example, some sites have long titles with lots of information in hopes of appearing first in search results. Yahoo! Yahoo! has been around since 1994. It provides both a human-edited directory of the Web, which I discussed earlier, and web search. Yahoo’s search engine currently uses its own index, but it has an agreement with Microsoft to use the Bing index at some point in the future. Yahoo!’s share of the search engine market is around 17% at the time of this writing. Microsoft Bing Bing is Microsoft’s web search offering. Like Google, Microsoft maintains its own index of the Web. Bing was launched in May 2009, and as of May 2010 had an 11% market share among search engines. Ask.com Ask.com is another search engine that maintains its own index. Ask.com indexes fewer pages than Google or Yahoo! Ask.com controls only about 2% of the search engine mar- ket as of summer 2010, but is listed because, like the other sites listed previously, it has its own index. Download from www.wowebook.com ptg Search Engine Optimization Not only do you want to make sure your site is included in the popular search engines, but you also want to make sure that it shows up near the top of the results when people are searching for topics that are related to your site. If you create a site about model rail- roads, you want your site to appear as high as possible in the results for searches like “model railroad” and “model train.” Unfortunately, search engines don’t publish instructions on how to make your site rank near the top of their index. Before Google, search engines ranked sites mostly on the basis of their content. The more prominently a term was placed on your website, the higher it would be ranked for that term. So if your model trains page had “model trains” in a page title, or in heading tags on the page, that page would be more highly ranked for the terms “model train.” That’s why you sometimes see pages with lots and lots of words listed in the title—it’s an attempt to improve search engine rankings for those words. At one point, search engines enabled you to provide hints about your site by way of meta tags. There was a tag that enabled you to specify a description for the page, and another that enabled you to list keywords associated with each page. The content of the tags was invisible; it was only used to help search engines with indexing. Unfortunately, people who published websites immediately started abusing meta tags, putting in keywords that were not related to the page content, or putting in far too many keywords to try to gain a higher ranking. Now all the popular search engines disregard meta tags entirely. Search engines now consider not only what’s on your site but also who links to it in determining the relevance of your pages, so the more sites that link to yours, the better your placement will be in search engine results. A number of companies sell search engine optimization services that attempt to exploit this method of improving search rankings by paying popular sites to link to your site, or even creating fake sites and fill- ing them with links to their clients. You should avoid these types of services and be wary of search engine optimization services in general. Instead of worrying too much about how to make your site more friendly to search engines, you should worry about writing good HTML and making your site friendly for users. As your site gains in popularity, your search engine ranking will come along. One thing that can help is writing good, descriptive titles, and making sure to use heading tags for headings rather than just using large fonts. Search Engine Optimization 611 20 Download from www.wowebook.com ptg Paying for Search Placement All the popular search engines have programs that allow you to pay for search place- ment. In other words, you can agree to pay to have a link to your site displayed when users enter search terms that you choose. Generally this service is priced on a per-click basis—you pay every time a user clicks on the link, up to a maximum that you set. After you’ve used up your budget, your advertisement doesn’t appear any more. Most search engines display paid links separately from the regular search results, but this approach still provides a way to get your site in front of users who may be interested immediately. You just have to be willing to pay. Business Cards, Letterhead, Brochures, and Advertisements Although the Internet is a wonderful place to promote your new website, many people fail to consider some other great advertising methods. Most businesses spend a considerable amount of money each year producing business cards, letterhead, and other promotional material. These days it’s rare to see any of these materials without web and email information on them. By printing your email address and home page URL on all your correspondence and promotional material, you can reach an entirely new group of potential visitors. Even your email signature is a good place to promote your site. Just put in a link and the title or a short description, so that everyone you correspond with can see what you’re publishing on the Web. When you’re promoting your website, the bottom line is lateral thinking. You need to use every tool at your disposal if you want to have a successful and active site. Finding Out Who’s Viewing Your Web Pages Now you’ve got your site up on the Web and ready to be viewed, you’ve advertised and publicized it to the world, and people are flocking to it in droves. Or are they? How can you tell? You can find out in a number of ways, including using log files and access counters. 612 LESSON 20: Putting Your Site Online Download from www.wowebook.com ptg Log Files The best way to figure out how often your pages are being seen, and by whom, is to get access to your server’s log files. How long these log files are kept depends on how your server is configured. The logs can take up a lot of disk space, so some hosting providers remove old logs frequently. If you run your own server, you can keep them as long as you like, or at least until you run out of room. Many commercial web providers allow you to view your own web logs or get statistics about how many visitors are accessing your pages and from where. Ask your webmaster for help. If you do get access to these raw log files, you’ll most likely see a whole lot of lines that look something like the following. (I’ve broken this one up into two lines so that it fits on the page.) vide-gate.coventry.ac.uk - - [17/Feb/2003:12:36:51 -0700] “GET /index.html HTTP/1.0” 200 8916 What does this information mean? The first part of the line is the site that accessed the file. (In this case, it was a site from the United Kingdom.) The two dashes are used for authentication. (If you have login names and passwords set up, the username of the per- son who logged in and the group that person belonged to will appear here.) The date and time the page was accessed appear inside the brackets. The next part is the actual file- name that was accessed; here it’s the index.html at the top level of the server. The GET part is the actual HTTP command the browser used; you usually see GET here. Finally, the last two numbers are the HTTP status code and the number of bytes transferred. The status code can be one of many things: 200 means the file was found and transferred cor- rectly; 404 means the file was not found. (Yes, it’s the same status code you get in error pages in your browser.) Finally, the number of bytes transferred usually will be the same number of bytes in your actual file; if it’s a smaller number, the visitor interrupted the load in the middle. Most web hosts provide log processing software that will take the logs generated by the server when users visit your site and turn them into reports, often with graphs and other visual aids, that you can use to easily see how many users are visiting your site as well as how those servers are finding your site, whether it’s through search engines or links on other web pages. You’ll want to check out the support site for your web host to deter- mine how to set things up so that your logs are processed and find out the URL of the reports that are generated. Finding Out Who’s Viewing Your Web Pages 613 20 Download from www.wowebook.com ptg Google Analytics There are other ways to keep track of who’s visiting your site and what pages they’re viewing, too. Processing log files is one way to get an idea of who’s visiting your site. Another option is to use Google Analytics, a tool provided for free by Google that keeps track of all the visitors to your site and generates reports about your visitors. The nice thing about Google Analytics is that you don’t have to deal with any log files. Google Analytics works by providing you with a code that uniquely identifies your site. On each of the pages that you want to track, you include a reference to a JavaScript file that Google provides, and pass in the code for your site. Whenever users visit the pages with a link to the tracking script, Google records information about their visit. Google then uses this information to create the reports for you. One particularly nice thing about Google Analytics is that you can usually add it to your site even if the site is on a server you don’t control. So if you create a weblog (blog) on a site like Tumblr, you can edit the theme of the site and paste in the Google Analytics code. Installing Google Analytics To get started with installation, you’ll need to go to the Google Analytics website, http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for an Analytics account. If you don’t already have a Googe account, you’ll need to sign up for one, too. After you sign up for your account, you need to create a profile for your website. Click the Add Website Profile link on the Google Analytics home page to create the profile, and you’ll see the form in Figure 20.3. To add a profile, you just enter the URL of your website in the form provided and choose the time zone for your site. After you’ve saved your new profile, Google provides the code to paste into your own web page so that customer visits can be tracked. The code itself is a snippet of JavaScript that loads the Google tracking code. To install the Google tracking code on your site, copy the code that Google provides into your own pages. Google recommends that you paste the tag just inside the closing <head> tag on your pages, but for reasons of performance, it probably makes more sense to paste it just before the closing <body> tag. To start out, edit the HTML for your site’s home page and paste in the Google Analytics code. Upload the page to your server if necessary, and then visit that page in your browser. After the page has been loaded with the Google Analytics tracking code in place, Google Analytics will indicate that it has started tracking visits to your site. At that point, add the Google tracking code to your other pages and upload them, too. 614 LESSON 20: Putting Your Site Online Download from www.wowebook.com ptg Finding Out Who’s Viewing Your Web Pages 615 20 FIGURE 20.3 Setting up a new Google Analytics profile. Using the Google Analytics Reports After Google Analytics has been installed, it will start creating reports for your site about 24 hours later. To view the main report for your site, just click View Report for your site in the Website Profiles list. The Dashboard shows some basic statistics about use of your site—how many visits you’ve gotten each day for the past month, a map showing where most of your visitors come from, and which pages on your site are the most popular. You can see an example of the Dashboard in Figure 20.4. FIGURE 20.4 The Google Analytics Dashboard. Download from www.wowebook.com . that it fits on the page.) vide-gate.coventry.ac.uk - - [17 /Feb/2003 :12 :36: 51 -0 700] “GET /index .html HTTP /1. 0” 200 8 916 What does this information mean? The first part of the line is the site. Microsoft maintains its own index of the Web. Bing was launched in May 2009, and as of May 2 010 had an 11 % market share among search engines. Ask.com Ask.com is another search engine that maintains. Engine Optimization 611 20 Download from www.wowebook.com ptg Paying for Search Placement All the popular search engines have programs that allow you to pay for search place- ment. In other words,