Registering a Website


Search engine icon

The World Wide Web offers a great opportunity to promote your work. There are a variety of ways to bring traffic to your corner of cyberspace. Competing for attention with millions of other sites makes the task challenging. Don't be discouraged though. With realistic expectations, you can increase the chances of people finding your website. How do you do it? Read on for some strategic advice.

Register Your Site
Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! receive tens of millions of hits a day, because people use these tools to locate specific information on the Web. Free and simple, this is probably the best  way to get people to visit your site. What better way to increase your visibility than by being listed where everyone goes to find things?

The best results are obtained by registering your website with each search engine individually. To do this, you'll have to go to each site and fill out its online form. While you may not want to do this for dozens of sites, do it for the top ten search engines.

When registering with directories like Yahoo!, it's important to determine how you want your site to be categorised and by which keywords you would like to be identified. For example, if you are a retailer selling computer products you would probably register under the Computers and Internet category. You could also register under the Commercial/Business category and include keywords that relate to specific content at your site, such notebook computers, handheld computers, palmtop computers, pen computers and pocket computers.

Although Yahoo! lets you register in multiple categories, many others will only accept your URL. To make certain that people can find your site, make sure the text on your home page accurately describes the site's purpose and contents. Whenever possible, HTML document titles and file names should be self-explanatory. This increases the chances that your website will turn up in more searches.

Also be aware that once you register your site, it can take weeks before the listing shows up. Check often to make sure the listing is there. If it hasn't appeared after a month, contact someone at the service to find out why your listing isn't there.

Check that you understand what these words mean in this document
Cyberspace: an imaginary area without limits where people meet and discover information about any subject through computer networks. 
Hits: requests to access a web page on the Internet that is then counted to calculate the number of people looking at the page.
Visibility: the degree to which something is seen by the public.
HTML(HyperText Markup Language): The coding language used to create Hypertext documents for use on the World Wide Web.
To turn-up: to appear unexpectedly at a place.