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April 2, 2007

Toughest part of managing a web site

Do you have your own blog or web site?

They are cheap and easy to do these days. Want your own blog? Go to Blogger.com, fill out the form, (it's 3 steps), and in a matter of 15 minutes, you will have your very own blog. Total cost =$0.

What? You don't want a blog? You want a full fledged web site? That'll cost you a bit, my personal site costs $60/year in hosting fees. That's the cost I pay to the company that lets me put my files on their server.

But then you need someone to make you a site. Well, that'll cost you. Unless, you decide to use a system called Joomla. It's also free. It uses a template and a lot of complicated computer script to set up your site- all you have to do is add your own content.

It takes a little bit of time to get the hang of it, but once you do, you will have a fancy web site that didn't cost you an arm and a leg.

Now what? You have your very own blog or web site, but how does the rest of the blogosphere know you exist?

Ah, now we have reached the hard part.

There are millions of web sites out there, so how do you get surfers to come to you.

Step 1: make sure Google knows you you exist. Step 2: make sure Yahoo knows too. Step 3: tell all the other search engines you can find that you are online, this way, they will all crawl your site.

That means they will have their computers visit your site and "index" all your content, so when someone types in a search into the search engine, if your web site has what the reader is looking for, your site will be listed on the results page.

Here's a little test. If you have a web site, type the name of the site into Google's search box, and see if your site is listed in the results. If it isn't, Google doesn't know you exist.

So now, the search engines know you are out there, how do you get them to list your site when a surfer is requesting information about something?

KEYWORDS. KEYWORDS. KEYWORDS.

The most important thing you can do to get your content seen is remember that when searchers go to Google, and search for information, they are entering keywords in the search box. Then, Google looks for matches in their database from all the sites they have indexed. For example, If you are writing a story about censorship, make sure censorship is in the headline, so Google will return your article to searchers looking for information on censorship.

The single, biggest problem newspapers have with search- cute headlines are terrible for search engines.

You might have a great article on a given topic, but when the search engines look at your site, the headline you gave it doesn't tell the search engines, or readers what the article is, and they will never know what a great story you have.

We had a story on the opening of UConn's basketball season with a headline of "Off and Running". How many people knew that was a story about the opening game of UConn basketball? How many people would type "off and running" into Google to get stories about the first UConn game of the year?

There are countless web sites out there full of great information that no one will ever find because the search engines don't know the site exists, or they can't find the stories that are on them because the headlines aren't written correctly.

Just because you put content online doesn't mean people will be able to find it.

Putting your stuff online is easy, getting people to read it, that's the hard part.

Posted by Bustraan on 7:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack