Web Development Insight

August 2009 search engine market share.

Just having a web site or blog is not enough. People need to know about it. Spreading the word about your blog or web site takes time and perseverance to monitor the effectiveness of your efforts.

Consider putting your web site and blog in email signatures, business cards, address labels, and letters. I have seen automobiles and trucks with web addresses on them…even t-shirts! A tattoo may be going too far.

Posting articles on news sites like Digg helps spread your URL around. It can be a lot of work (and luck) to get a big story on Digg. You never know.

Of course you can go crazy and post it on a billboard along a busy road.

Just mentioning your web site or blog URL in conversation may get some results especially if it is easy to remember. Often when I mention web sites people are taken aback: oh, you have a web site?

If you have a brick and mortar store, posting the web site near the entrance will bring some exposure. Printing your site on each receipt will get countless eyes looking at it. Offer a discount or some other incentive on the receipt along with a promotion code to track where it came from. Advertising your web site on grocery carts may be another idea. Local chambers of commerce generally have web site listings of area stores.

Leaving useful comments on a forum will instill credibility and hopefully people will seek you out. Putting a URL in a post may get tagged with a no-follow tag so search engines will not follow it…but people may.

If you have an email list, send out an announcement of your blog or an important posting on it. Many times people like to forward useful emails.

Link exchanges are popular but diminishing in value for search engines. Make sure the link you exchange is a quality link. You are known by the company you keep.

That is it for now. There are many other ways of letting the world know of your online presence. I’ll post another batch of ideas later…

One feature that is valuable in getting the word out is making it easy for people to subscribe to RSS feeds. When I speak of RSS I mean RSS or Atom feeds. Read about RSS – probably more than you want to know.

Blogs and many web sites use RSS feeds to communicate new information, such as press releases, new software, and upgrades available. It should be as easy as clicking on your favorite RSS reader logo (or if it is not listed click on the universal RSS icon and paste it into your reader) and go. I try and list the most common readers without getting out of hand.

A help page on feeds is a necessity since many people still do not know what feeds are or know enough about feeds to feel comfortable subscribing to them.

If you are a user of WordPress for your blogging, one of our favorite syndication plug-ins is subscribe me. Once activated there are many choices of syndication buttons to choose. They show up on the sidebar under a ‘Syndication’ heading.
For particular sites containing RSS readers such as Bloglines, Google Reader or Newsgator have buttons that can be added to your blog or website so users can subscribe to your feed. Note that most personalized home pages such as MSN, Google, or Yahoo have ways of adding RSS feeds to them.

Here are some examples of how an RSS feed button can be added to your blog/website. Click on ‘Add’ and it will take you to the appropriate site so you can create your own syndication code then cut-and-paste into your blog or website area.

• Add to Google
• Add to Yahoo!

Services such as FeedBurner, Squeet, or FeedBlitz can handle syndication for you. Some blog software, such as WordPress, have plug-ins to reroute your feed to FeedBurner where the subscriber then chooses which reader to use. A nice side effect is you can monitor your subscriber base.

If you choose to add feed subscription yourself you can add the universal RSS feed button or a text-only link which is directed to FeedBurner. When a subscriber clicks on it, FeedBurner takes over and offers various subscription buttons.

Millions of people search for images every day. And if yours is near the top that is a marketing opportunity. Some people report they get nearly as many visits through image searching as regular searching.

Google Images

Google uses a different bot to crawl for images. Its sole purpose in life is to index images. One key thing to realize is the bot visits are much less frequent that the Google indexing bot. It may be up to 6 months between visits.

To see what images have been found so far:

1. Go to images.google.com
2. type in: site:mydomain.com (replace mydomain.com with your domain)

The images specific to your website will show up along with an image description. It is important to get a good, pertinent description for each image. According to Google they use the alt tag, surrounding text, overall web page theme, and filename to aid in determining on how to label the image.

Go to images.google.com and type in the description that is under one of the images. It will probably show up on the first result page. As you can see, the URL of your website is below it albeit unclickable…but the image is clickable and will take you to where the image exists – your website.

Image Search Positioning Tips

Here are some tips on improving your image search positioning:

• Give meaningful filenames to your images (describe in 3 words or less)
• Fill in the alt tag for each image with a meaningful description
• Big images have more impact than small ones
• Add a descriptive caption beneath the image
• Use alt=”” for unimportant images

Conclusion

A little bit of focused work on images can pay off with big dividends. Your work on images will carry over to other image search engines such as Yahoo and MSN.