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Getting Links from Other Sites
It doesn’t take much surfing to figure out that the Web is huge. It seems like there’s a site
on every topic, and when it comes to popular topics, there may be hundreds or thousands
of sites. After you’ve done the hard work of creating an interesting site, the next step is
to get other people to link to it.
The direct approach often works best. Find other sites like your own and send a personal
email to the people who run them introducing yourself and telling them that you have a
site similar to theirs that they may be interested in. If they are, there’s a good chance that
they’ll provide a link to your site. Oftentimes, there’s a quid pro quo involved where you
might link to someone else’s site and ask them if they’re interested in linking to yours in
return.
This doesn’t mean that you should go out and pester people or email them repeatedly if
they don’t do as you request. The subtle approach often works best. Figure out what
kinds of people might be interested in what you’re publishing, and let them know what
you’re up to. If you are launching a site for a new restaurant, it’s worth searching for
blogs that cover the city or neighborhood where the restaurant is and letting them know
about the site. Many people are on the lookout for things to write about or link to, so if
you have something of legitimate interest, they’ll be glad to hear from you. Just make
sure your email is to the point and that they know it was written to them personally, so
they don’t assume you’re mass emailing people like them.
Promoting Your Site Through Social Media
First, what are social media? Most people define social media as websites that enable
their users to socialize with one another. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace
are popular examples. Weblogs can be considered social media, too. There are also link
sharing sites like Digg and Reddit, where users can submit links, vote for them, or com-
ment on them. Links that get more votes are featured more prominently on the site.
Social media is about people connecting to one another, and promoting a site through
social media is as simple as talking about your site on those sites. The tricky part is
doing so in a way that makes you a valuable participant in the conversation rather than a
tedious self-promoter.

In Lesson 22, “Content Management Systems and Publishing Platforms,” I explain how
you can integrate some of these social media sites with your own website, but first I
explain ways you can use these sites to reach people who might be interested in your
site. Many people talk about “viral” marketing. The concept is simple: Instead of pur-
chasing an advertisement that may be displayed for hundreds or thousands of people,
you tell just a few interested people about your site (or essay, or product, or movie, or
whatever it is that you’ve created), and then they in turn share it with people they think
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will be interested, and so on, until it has reached a large audience. The advantage, assum-
ing that it works, is that it’s inexpensive, and that your message has been delivered by
people who the audience is actually willing to listen to—people they already know.The
difficulty is in creating something that is interesting to large audiences in the first place,
and in telling the right people about it so that they are interested in sharing in what
you’ve created. Taking advantage of social media is one way to accomplish the second
part of the task.
Regardless of the outlet, the two steps are to establish a presence and to be interesting.
Twitter () is one of the most popular social media sites these days. After
you’ve signed up for an account, you can follow other people on Twitter, and people who
find you interesting will follow you. There are a lot of people on the Web giving advice
on how to attract large numbers of followers, and there are a lot of people on Twitter
who follow thousands of people in hopes that people will follow them in return.
Focusing on follower counts is the wrong approach. Remember, the goal with social
media is to establish an audience of people who actually care about what you’re doing.
Let’s say you’ve created a new website for knitting enthusiasts, and in hopes of promot-
ing the site, you’ve created a Twitter account to go along with it.
Registering and Advertising Your Web Pages
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Creating a Twitter account is easy and free. To create a Twitter
account, you need only supply an account name, a full name, an
email address, and a password of your choosing. The account
name and full name can be anything you like. After you’ve followed
those steps, you’re all set.
For starters, you should create posts on Twitter with links back to your site whenever you
publish something new. You should also follow people who say interesting things, prefer-
ably on the subject of knitting. And you should respond to them when you have some-
thing interesting to say, too. If you do so, eventually they may follow you in return. If
things go well, eventually you’ll have a great outlet for promoting your site, and even if
they go poorly, you’ll be participating in a community of people who like to talk about
the subject of your site—knitting. That’s social media in a nutshell.
Creating a Facebook Page for Your Site
There’s an additional way to promote your site on the popular social networking
site Facebook. You can create a page that represents your site to the Facebook
community. To do so, you need a Facebook account. After you’ve signed up, go to
and click Create a Page. You’ll be taken
to the Create a Page form, shown in Figure 20.1.
NOTE
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FIGURE 20.1
The Facebook
Create a Page
form.
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LESSON 20: Putting Your Site Online
In the form, I’ve already selected Brand, Product, or Organization and then chosen
Website from the select list. At that point, I just have to enter a name for my page to cre-

ate it. The brand new page I created for this book appears in Figure 20.2.
FIGURE 20.2
The new Facebook
page I created for
this book.
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After the page has been created, I can customize it in a variety of ways, controlling
who’s allowed to post on it and what kinds of content they’re allowed to post. The
Facebook page gives Facebook users who are interested in this book a place to congre-
gate to discuss it, share links related to the book, and meet one another.
Site Indexes and Search Engines
Nearly all web users know how to find things using search engines, and you’ll want to
make sure that they can find your site. Search engines work by creating an index of all
the sites they can find. You need to be sure to add your site to the index when you pub-
lish it so that search engines will start including it in search results. As long as people
link to your site, search engines will find it eventually whether you tell them about it or
not, but asking them to index your site will ensure that it’s added immediately. Here’s a
list of the top four search engines: :
Google
Bing
Yahoo
Ask Jeeves
I’m going to describe how to submit your sites to some of the popular search engines.
There’s a set of interlocking relationships among search engine providers that can make
it difficult to keep track of who is providing search functionality for whom. The search
engines listed previously maintain their own indexes. After your site is included in their
index, it will be available via all the search engines that use their index, too.
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The search engine descriptions are brief, and because of the
rapidly changing nature of the search engine industry, may be out
of date by the time you read them. For more information about
search engines, I strongly recommend Search Engine Watch at
.
Google
Google is currently the most popular search engine. Its search results are ranked based
not only on how frequently the search terms appear on a listed page, but also on the
number of other pages in the index that link to that page. So, a popular page with thou-
sands of incoming links will be ranked higher than a page that has only a few incoming
links.
NOTE
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This search algorithm does a remarkably good job of pushing the most relevant sites to
the top of the search results. It also rewards people who publish useful, popular sites
rather than those who’ve figured out how to manipulate the algorithms that other search
engines use. Many sites that aren’t dedicated to providing search functionality use
Google’s index, so getting into the Google index provides wide exposure. As of summer
2010, Google’s share of the search engine market is 65%.
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How Search Results Are Ranked
Every search engine has an algorithm that ranks sites based on their relevance. It
might take into account how many times the keyword you enter appears on the
page, whether it appears inside heading tags or in the page title, or whether it
appears in text inside links. It might also take into account how high on the page
your search terms appear. Such algorithms are trade secrets within the search
engine industry, but some of them have been unraveled to greater or lesser degrees.

Armed with this information, some site authors write their pages in such a way that
search engines will give them a higher relevance ranking than they deserve. For
example, some sites have long titles with lots of information in hopes of appearing
first in search results.
Yahoo!
Yahoo! has been around since 1994. It provides both a human-edited directory of the
Web, which I discussed earlier, and web search. Yahoo’s search engine currently uses its
own index, but it has an agreement with Microsoft to use the Bing index at some point in
the future. Yahoo!’s share of the search engine market is around 17% at the time of this
writing.
Microsoft Bing
Bing is Microsoft’s web search offering. Like Google, Microsoft maintains its own index
of the Web. Bing was launched in May 2009, and as of May 2010 had an 11% market
share among search engines.
Ask.com
Ask.com is another search engine that maintains its own index. Ask.com indexes fewer
pages than Google or Yahoo! Ask.com controls only about 2% of the search engine mar-
ket as of summer 2010, but is listed because, like the other sites listed previously, it has
its own index.
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Search Engine Optimization
Not only do you want to make sure your site is included in the popular search engines,
but you also want to make sure that it shows up near the top of the results when people
are searching for topics that are related to your site. If you create a site about model rail-
roads, you want your site to appear as high as possible in the results for searches like
“model railroad” and “model train.”
Unfortunately, search engines don’t publish instructions on how to make your site rank
near the top of their index. Before Google, search engines ranked sites mostly on the
basis of their content. The more prominently a term was placed on your website, the

higher it would be ranked for that term. So if your model trains page had “model trains”
in a page title, or in heading tags on the page, that page would be more highly ranked for
the terms “model train.” That’s why you sometimes see pages with lots and lots of words
listed in the title—it’s an attempt to improve search engine rankings for those words.
At one point, search engines enabled you to provide hints about your site by way of
meta
tags. There was a tag that enabled you to specify a description for the page, and another
that enabled you to list keywords associated with each page. The content of the tags was
invisible; it was only used to help search engines with indexing. Unfortunately, people
who published websites immediately started abusing meta tags, putting in keywords that
were not related to the page content, or putting in far too many keywords to try to gain a
higher ranking. Now all the popular search engines disregard meta tags entirely.
Search engines now consider not only what’s on your site but also who links to it in
determining the relevance of your pages, so the more sites that link to yours, the better
your placement will be in search engine results. A number of companies sell search
engine optimization services that attempt to exploit this method of improving search
rankings by paying popular sites to link to your site, or even creating fake sites and fill-
ing them with links to their clients. You should avoid these types of services and be wary
of search engine optimization services in general.
Instead of worrying too much about how to make your site more friendly to search
engines, you should worry about writing good HTML and making your site friendly for
users. As your site gains in popularity, your search engine ranking will come along. One
thing that can help is writing good, descriptive titles, and making sure to use heading
tags for headings rather than just using large fonts.
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Paying for Search Placement

All the popular search engines have programs that allow you to pay for search place-
ment. In other words, you can agree to pay to have a link to your site displayed when
users enter search terms that you choose. Generally this service is priced on a per-click
basis—you pay every time a user clicks on the link, up to a maximum that you set. After
you’ve used up your budget, your advertisement doesn’t appear any more.
Most search engines display paid links separately from the regular search results, but this
approach still provides a way to get your site in front of users who may be interested
immediately. You just have to be willing to pay.
Business Cards, Letterhead, Brochures,
and Advertisements
Although the Internet is a wonderful place to promote your new website, many people
fail to consider some other great advertising methods.
Most businesses spend a considerable amount of money each year producing business
cards, letterhead, and other promotional material. These days it’s rare to see any of these
materials without web and email information on them. By printing your email address
and home page URL on all your correspondence and promotional material, you can
reach an entirely new group of potential visitors.
Even your email signature is a good place to promote your site. Just put in a link and the
title or a short description, so that everyone you correspond with can see what you’re
publishing on the Web.
When you’re promoting your website, the bottom line is lateral thinking. You need to use
every tool at your disposal if you want to have a successful and active site.
Finding Out Who’s Viewing Your
Web Pages
Now you’ve got your site up on the Web and ready to be viewed, you’ve advertised and
publicized it to the world, and people are flocking to it in droves. Or are they? How can
you tell? You can find out in a number of ways, including using log files and access
counters.
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Log Files
The best way to figure out how often your pages are being seen, and by whom, is to get
access to your server’s log files. How long these log files are kept depends on how your
server is configured. The logs can take up a lot of disk space, so some hosting providers
remove old logs frequently. If you run your own server, you can keep them as long as
you like, or at least until you run out of room. Many commercial web providers allow
you to view your own web logs or get statistics about how many visitors are accessing
your pages and from where. Ask your webmaster for help.
If you do get access to these raw log files, you’ll most likely see a whole lot of lines that
look something like the following. (I’ve broken this one up into two lines so that it fits
on the page.)
vide-gate.coventry.ac.uk - - [17/Feb/2003:12:36:51 -0700]
“GET /index.html HTTP/1.0” 200 8916
What does this information mean? The first part of the line is the site that accessed the
file. (In this case, it was a site from the United Kingdom.) The two dashes are used for
authentication. (If you have login names and passwords set up, the username of the per-
son who logged in and the group that person belonged to will appear here.) The date and
time the page was accessed appear inside the brackets. The next part is the actual file-
name that was accessed; here it’s the index.html at the top level of the server. The GET
part is the actual HTTP command the browser used; you usually see GET here. Finally,
the last two numbers are the HTTP status code and the number of bytes transferred. The
status code can be one of many things: 200 means the file was found and transferred cor-
rectly; 404 means the file was not found. (Yes, it’s the same status code you get in error
pages in your browser.) Finally, the number of bytes transferred usually will be the same
number of bytes in your actual file; if it’s a smaller number, the visitor interrupted the
load in the middle.
Most web hosts provide log processing software that will take the logs generated by the
server when users visit your site and turn them into reports, often with graphs and other

visual aids, that you can use to easily see how many users are visiting your site as well as
how those servers are finding your site, whether it’s through search engines or links on
other web pages. You’ll want to check out the support site for your web host to deter-
mine how to set things up so that your logs are processed and find out the URL of the
reports that are generated.
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Google Analytics
There are other ways to keep track of who’s visiting your site and what pages they’re
viewing, too. Processing log files is one way to get an idea of who’s visiting your site.
Another option is to use Google Analytics, a tool provided for free by Google that keeps
track of all the visitors to your site and generates reports about your visitors.
The nice thing about Google Analytics is that you don’t have to deal with any log files.
Google Analytics works by providing you with a code that uniquely identifies your site.
On each of the pages that you want to track, you include a reference to a JavaScript file
that Google provides, and pass in the code for your site. Whenever users visit the pages
with a link to the tracking script, Google records information about their visit. Google
then uses this information to create the reports for you.
One particularly nice thing about Google Analytics is that you can usually add it to your
site even if the site is on a server you don’t control. So if you create a weblog (blog) on a
site like Tumblr, you can edit the theme of the site and paste in the Google Analytics
code.
Installing Google Analytics
To get started with installation, you’ll need to go to the Google Analytics website,
and sign up for an Analytics account. If you don’t
already have a Googe account, you’ll need to sign up for one, too.
After you sign up for your account, you need to create a profile for your website. Click

the Add Website Profile link on the Google Analytics home page to create the profile,
and you’ll see the form in Figure 20.3.
To add a profile, you just enter the URL of your website in the form provided and choose
the time zone for your site. After you’ve saved your new profile, Google provides the
code to paste into your own web page so that customer visits can be tracked. The code
itself is a snippet of JavaScript that loads the Google tracking code. To install the Google
tracking code on your site, copy the code that Google provides into your own pages.
Google recommends that you paste the tag just inside the closing <head> tag on your
pages, but for reasons of performance, it probably makes more sense to paste it just
before the closing <body> tag. To start out, edit the HTML for your site’s home page and
paste in the Google Analytics code. Upload the page to your server if necessary, and then
visit that page in your browser.
After the page has been loaded with the Google Analytics tracking code in place, Google
Analytics will indicate that it has started tracking visits to your site. At that point, add
the Google tracking code to your other pages and upload them, too.
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Finding Out Who’s Viewing Your Web Pages
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FIGURE 20.3
Setting up a new
Google Analytics
profile.
Using the Google Analytics Reports
After Google Analytics has been installed, it will start creating reports for your site about
24 hours later. To view the main report for your site, just click View Report for your site
in the Website Profiles list. The Dashboard shows some basic statistics about use of your

site—how many visits you’ve gotten each day for the past month, a map showing where
most of your visitors come from, and which pages on your site are the most popular. You
can see an example of the Dashboard in Figure 20.4.
FIGURE 20.4
The Google
Analytics
Dashboard.
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