As everyone knows by now, cyberspace is lousy with shady "business" types. MLMs, GRQs (get-rich-quick), chain letters, pyramid schemes and pigeon drops abound. Snake-oil salesmen, flim-flam men, charlatans and mountebanks...You get the idea. A large percentage of these wide boys are targeting you, the Webmaster or Web publisher. Some want your money, while others only want to waste your time. A complete list of the ways to get ripped off in cyberspace might be an appropriate topic for a multi-volume book, but for this article we'll just take a brief look at some of the pitfalls in the Website marketing and promotion field.
March 10, 1999
Everybody wants to promote their Web site. Nobody wants to spend much money doing it. Dispensing advice to Webmasters who want to increase their traffic is big big business these days, and it may be the field of Internet endeavor that is most rife with bad advice, shady deals, and just plain rip-offs. The problem is that in fact it is very important to promote your site, and there are a lot of legitimate resources that can help you a lot, so how to separate the valuable from the vapid? Read on.
Bogus Site-Promotion Services
Submitting your site to the major search engines is of critical importance, and there is more to it than meets the eye. In fact, several newsletters are devoted to the arcane science of getting high rankings in search engines. Search Engine Watch is a good one. As with most things, however, doing your submissions properly requires an investment of time, so there are ten million cats out there offering to do it for you for a fee. Some are good, some are incompetent, and some are simply scamsters.
"We'll submit your site to 400 search engines for $19.95!!" Why is that a bad deal? For starters, there aren't 400, or even 200, sites that are worth submitting to. The top half-dozen search sites get 95% of the hits, and most of the so-called search engines out there get zero. Promotion time is much better spent figuring out how to maximize your results in the important search engines, and in specialized directories that are appropriate for your site. The sharpies aren't going to do all that for $19.95.
In fact, all they're going to do is to plug your URL into an automated program that submits to all the search engines with the click of a button. However, search engine submissions do not always "take" on the first attempt, and some engines deliberately exclude "automated" submissions. So your $19.95 is gone, and your site may have only gotten into 3 or 4 worthwhile directories, something you could have accomplished yourself in about 15 minutes.
This is not to say that all auto-submission services are bad. Submit-it, Add-it, and my new favorite, selfpromotion.com, are all reputable setups that work well if you use them properly, and don't incur the ire of the search engines. They're basically do-it-yourself solutions that save you a lot of time by allowing you to enter all your information one time in one place, then keeping track of which submissions have been succesful.
Some businesspeople with less time or Web expertise to spare may choose to use a consultant to do their submitting. Yours truly the author offers such services, in fact (for $300 a pop). The difference in price reflects the level of service delivered. To submit a new site properly, here's what needs to be done:
Good marketing begins with site design. Keywords should appear often in body text, headings, page titles and even filenames. Don't go overboard - keep headings and titles readable and sensible. Pages should also include META tags, with page description and keywords.
There are probably some pages that you don't want spiders to index (templates, experimental sections, etc.). Include a file called robots.txt in your root directory with a list of directories that shouldn't be indexed. It's annoying to go to a search engine and find out that your home page doesn't show up, but a bunch of out-of-context pages from four levels down do show up.
By the way, never submit your site until it's ready for visitors. No "under-construction" signs and such.
Once the site has been thoroughly tested and proofread, submit to the top 50 or so general search engines and directories. An excellent list of the top 100 is at:
http://www.mmgco.com/top100.html
Next, seek out specialty directories that fit the site's subject matter. For example, there are specialized travel directories, directories of online shopping sites, etc.
There are plenty of international directories out there, so if a site features a language other than English, or even serves a market out of the US, it may be appropriate to submit to some of them, too. Selfpromotion.com has a huge list of specialized and international indexes.
Most search engines send out an email confirmation message. These messages should come to you, the Webmaster. Keep them, as some contain passwords that you may need to modify your data later. They also serve as confirmation that your submitter is doing what he/she was paid to do.
Any submitter worth his or her salt goes back to the majors a month later and checks that the site really did get added. If not, try, try again. While a professional submitter can't be expected to follow up more than once or twice, the wise Webmaster will do so periodically, and resubmit when necessary. There are various automated ways of checking to see that your site is still listed.
Be especially wary of submitters who claim to have some special sneaky trick that they use to guarantee you top placement in search engines (one company boasts of a patented process that "force feeds" pages to the search engines). The search engines wage a continuous battle with these characters, and they may refuse your submission if they deem that you are trying to "unfairly" influence rankings.
Melvin's Link Page
If only the top few general search engines (and some specialty directories) get any hits, why are there so many search engines, directories, etc. out there? Why do people bother (the perennial question of the Web)? More important, how do you avoid wasting your time with crap pages?
In the early days of the Web, many people thought that a business Web site needed some gimmick to "draw traffic" - some useful feature such as a search engine. Lots of ISPs, network companies and other early Web presences set up search engines on their sites. Most abandoned them when they realized how much work they would be. If you have an old list of search engines, you may find that many links lead to some ISP's site, the search engine long gone. Why do ISP sites always have a white background, while Web design firms' sites always have a black background?
Anyway, some of the small-fry search engines are scams of either the money-wasting or time-wasting variety. The first kind offers "free" listings, but they are only a thinly-veiled excuse to try to sell you a paid listing. I place most "classified ad" sites in this category too. To get your "free" classified ad, directory listing or whatever, you'll fill out a lengthy form (the site owner has a fantasy of someday selling the "demographic" data to some spamlist broker), and your submission will be added to a sequential list of links, alongside get-rich-quick, weight-loss and the rest of the cyberflotsam. Even if anyone ever did visit this site to search for something, they would never find your link anyway, because it's just in a random list with all the rest. You, however, will receive an email every couple of weeks for the rest of your life, asking if you wouldn't like to upgrade to a great big color listing at the top of the page for only $xx.95!
Other sites are what I call "impression mills." Naively believing that if they can just serve up lots of page impressions, they're bound to get rich, they offer all kinds of arcane link swaps, revenue-sharing deals, banner exchanges, you name it. A search engine, an award, etc. - anything to get you to put up a link to their site, or even just to stay on their site and rack up another impression or two. Every page is covered with Link Exchange banners, Amazon, Cyberian, and any other deals they could come up with.
Not that link swaps and banner exchanges are bad - au contraire. The Internet Link Exchange is the best-known of the banner exchanges, and it's a reputable and well-run outfit. Their email newsletter is also a good resource for members and non-members alike - various site-promotion issues are discussed. The Hyperbanner networks are a similar deal, except that they let you target a specific category of site. There's the Music network, the Travel network, etc.
The buying and selling of ads is another area that's replete with ripoffs and stiff with scams. This might be a worthy subject for a future article, but for now, check out Mark Welch's site (markwelch.com). This is a complete guide to everything to do with Web advertising and banner exchange programs.
To Link or Not to Link?
Exchanging links individually with other related sites is one of the best things you can do to increase traffic. However, it's really only worth doing with sites that have some real connection with yours. Human nature being what it is, the name of the game for some is getting as many links as they can, and squirreling the reciprocal links away on a "links page" where nobody ever goes. Far more useful is a short page of carefully selected links that are really of interest to your readers. For example, a company might have links to sites that published favorable reviews of its products, etc. In fact, in the crazy world o' the Web, many sites even have links to their competitors. Others shun offsite links altogether, reasoning that they induce people to leave the site, and therefore reduce page impressions. I recommend a balance - it's up to you to decide whether a particular link is good or bad for your site. Of course, if you can talk other sites into giving you a link without promising to reciprocate, then good on you!
The Wages of Spam
Half the spam I get is from vendors of "bulk e-mail" software, offering to set me up as a spammer too. Golly, if you can send an ad to 5 million addresses for $19.95, how can you lose? Well, you've already lost your $19.95, and you're all set to lose your ISP, half your customers, and your soul to boot!
Have you ever tried to send email to 5 million people at a time? Even if your mail server could handle it, it would take hours to send the messages out. Of course, long before then, the folks at your ISP would shut you down, and even cancel your account if you were unrepentant. Real spammers use roundabout ways of sending mail, forging IP addresses, etc, so they're hard to trace, and manage to stay one step ahead of the anti-spam patrol.
Let's say you do get your 5 million out. About 4 million of those will be bad addresses, so get ready to receive 4 million bouncers. Now sort out the positive responses (there must be a few) from the bounced messages and the indignant "Take me off your list!" flames. A cost-effective marketing tool? Not likely, especially when you consider the risk involved. If you're branded as a spammer, you can be barred from sending mail to AOL, Mindspring and other large ISPs. "Bulk Email Works!" claim the sellers of bulk email software. It may work for them, but for anyone trying to build a business on the Internet, it's bad news. Don't be tempted.
You want to promote your site, but you don't want to waste money and time on snake oil. The bottom line is not to be too trusting. Educate yourself about which promotion methods, and which promotion-related products and services, are reputable, and can document results. Alas, even the process of learning about Website promotion can be an expensive lesson for the unwary Webmaster. An acquaintance of mine recently paid $19.95 to download an "incredible Website promotion tool," which turned out to be basically a list of search engine URLs. Useful information indeed, but it could have been had free from any of several Web sites.
Promotion Resources
There are millions of sites and mailing lists devoted to Website promotion, but many are sleazy backrooms frequented by the get-rich-quick crowd. Some of the good ones, however, are:
Refer-It
http://www.refer-it.com
A listing of the various "affiliate" programs out there.
Submit-It
http://www.submitit.com/
The elder statesman of the autosubmission services.
Self Promotion
http://www.selfpromotion.com
Another autosubmission service, which works on a shareware principle. Also lots of good submitting tips here.
WebPromote
http://www.webpromote.com/
They offer promotion services. Their site has some good advice, and they also have a Web promotion mailing list.
Web Marketing Today (WilsonWeb)
http://www.wilsonweb.com/
More good marketing advice, and a couple of weekly newsletters.
This article is part of the Web Developer's Journal's Web Site Promotion Guide, a collection of articles on how to increase Web site traffic.
Everybody wants to promote their Web site. Nobody wants to spend much money doing it. Dispensing advice to Webmasters who want to increase their traffic is big big business these days, and it may be the field of Internet endeavor that is most rife with bad advice, shady deals, and just plain rip-offs. The problem is that in fact it is very important to promote your site, and there are a lot of legitimate resources that can help you a lot, so how to separate the valuable from the vapid? Read on.