Meta-tags
What are meta-tags? Meta tags are very important for a website. They are the parts of the website, kept in the 'head' area, that tell the browser all about the website. A description of the site, the site's title, the name of the author of the site, and key words that describe the website or page. Why are they needed? The amount of data on the Internet is increasing rapidly. With so much information around if a search was performed on a search engine (e.g. Yahoo) then the results would show every single sight whose title contained the words that were searched. That would be a lot of sites. It was decided that a way of sorting data was needed so that searches could become more refined. Meta-tags were created. Although Yahoo (the most visited search engine) doesn't use meta-tags, most of the others do so if you want people to find your website on a search engine then you need to include meta-tags in your page. Below are the meta-tags for my football website:
The 'name' part of the meta-tag must be kept the same as shown here but the 'content' area should be changed to suit your website.
How to get people to get to your website
There are four main way in which you can get people to get to your website.
i)List your site with a search engine:
Doing this varies with each search engine. The biggest and most used search engines are Yahoo, Infoseek, Hotbot, Excite and Altavista. Yahoo is the only search engine (at time of publishing) that does not require the use of meta-tags on the webpage. Instead a lot of question about your website are answered on their on-line questionaire. The other search engines need only to know the web address. Their systems go to the website and read the meta-tags in the web-page and store the data on them.
It takes about a year for the web-page to appear on Yahoo as each page is checked by Yahoo staff and it takes between a day and two weeks for a site to be listed on the others.
ii)Join a webring:
A webring is a group of websites that share the same content and that are linked to each other (usually in a banner provided). These are usually free and all that you have to do is place an HTML tag (provided) in to a part of your website. Make sure that the ring don't specify that you place the tag in a certain area.
iii)Join a banner exchange company:
A banner exchange company is a company that takes banners from their customers and displays them on other customers websites. One of the most popular of thse is called Link Exchange at http://www.linkexchange.com. You sign up by filling out their registration form, create a banner to the specification that they tell you, submit it to them, and then your banner is displayed on other peoples websites. A click on this banner directs the person to your site. All that you have to do is place an HTML tag on your site so that other customers banners can be displayed on your site.
iv)Buy a domain name:
Your site (if uploaded to a server) will allready have its own name but it's likely that it is quite long. For example my football website was placed on the webspace that came with my account (with Virgin Net). The address for it is http://freespace.virgin.net/gennaro_james.rapa3. What a mouthfull. A domain name would shorten this to http://www.football.com or any name that you wanted. There are loads of companies that offer domain names. A one off charge is payed plus a charge (usually around �30.00 or $50.00) per year. There is no need to move the webspace from it's location either. This increases trafic to a website as the name is easier to remember.
If the website is a bussiness website then you might want to think about buying advertisements. This could be in the form of paying another website to put a banner on their site. It is best to advertise on a site such as Yahoo as many people use this site, therefor your target audience is larger. As a result it is more expensive.
