24. Getting People to Visit

With billions of Web pages in existence and thousands more being created every day, you may have to shout a little to get your page noticed. This chapter explains the (X)HTML tags you can use to identify your page to search engines like Google and Yahoo as well as a few strategies you can use to get noticed by these portals to the Web.

There are a number of good resources on the Web for improving one's ranking in search engines. For this chapter, I am indebted to two excellent WebMonkey articles written by Paul Boutin (hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/23/index1a.html and www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/99/31/index1a.html) and to the site put together at searchenginewatch.com by Danny Sullivan.

There are several search engine optimization companies who would like to charge you for completing the steps I outline in this chapterwhile making big promises about search engine results. Unfortunately, some of them go too far and spend much too much energy (not to mention your money) trying to trick visitors into coming to your site (or trying to trick search engines into listing your site). Their slimy techniques, apart from annoying potential visitors, can even get you removed from some search engines. If you have real (non-pornographic, non-gambling) content on your site, you can do just as good or better without them.