Making the Web Work For You

Making the Web work for you is where you conduct your Web promotion campaign. As with any campaign, your promotion efforts start with careful planning and a firm understanding of the subjects you are going to tackle--like Web site promotion through search engines. While we've all used search engines to find Web resources, few people truly understand how search engines do what they do. Now it is time to make those search engines work for us. Instead of visiting InfoSeek's Web site, you will use InfoSeek to bring visitors to your Web site.

You start by learning to take advantage of the way search engines find and retrieve information. Although the inner workings of search engines aren't exactly state secrets, each individual search engine does things differently which is why you will use many different techniques to make your Web pages more friendly to search engines. Web pages that are optimized for search engines using the techniques you will find in Saturday Afternoon session, "Capitalizing on Search Engine Fundamentals," will help put your Web site on the map by making it easier to obtain references to your Web pages.

Once you have a firm understanding of how search engines work, you should register your Web site with the search engines that are used by the majority of Web users. I call these search engines, the top search engines on the planet and you will find them in the latter part of the Saturday Afternoon session.

While your promotion efforts begin with search engines, we don't stop there. Afterward you will move on to Web guides, lists and directories, such as Your Personal Network.

Just as few people understand how search engines work, few people have ever taken the time to plot out how to get the most out of Web guides, lists and directories, which is exactly what you will find toward the end of the Saturday Afternoon, in the section titled "Submitting Your Site to the Top Guides, Lists and Directories." Again, the focus is on the top guides rather than all guides. The reason for this is I believe you should use your time and resources wisely. Why waste your time registering with every single search engine and directory on the planet when 90 percent of Web users find what they are looking for through the top 10 percent of the Web search and directory sites.

In the top search and directory sites you will find there are many search and directory sites that focus on specific types of information. These search and directory sites include: yellow page directories, white page directories, category-specific directories and specialty directories. Although these search and directory sites have narrow focuses, they are popular and frequently used to find information.

Anyone looking for a business listing can use a yellow page directory, such as ComFind.