Now you've created your website you want people to look at it, this page includes some hints and tips on getting yourself noticed.
Table of Contents
Search Engines
Most people find websites using search engines such as Google. You could go to each individual search engine, find the submit page, and add your website, but the quickest way to get into search engines is to have them discover you!
Search engines will find your website via a link from somewhere else. So my top-tip is to get people linking to you; friends or other websites with similar areas of interest.
To help you with this, we can provide your first link on our Customer Websites Directory. By submitting your website to our directory you stand a better chance of Google and other search engines finding you.
Internet Directories
In addition to our own directory, there are many others around the internet. Probably the biggest and best directory is DMOZ Open Directory Project, it?s even used by certain search engines for their listings.
DMOZ is rigorously maintained by a team of editors to make sure the links are as accurate as possible, and as such it may be a day or two before your site appears, but it?s worth the wait.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. There?s an entire industry dedicated to making sure your website is primed to appear as high on search results as possible. But instead of paying a company, you can follow these basic tips and do it yourself:
Have the page title describe the content of that page (ours is Valcato Hosting - Getting Noticed). It is the page title that search engines display in their results pages, so if it?s an accurate description people are more likely to click it.
Include an HTML meta tag with a description of the page. Search Engines look for meta tags in the HTML code into which you can type a brief description of your page:
Include ALT tags in your images. ALT tags allow you to describe images on your website, this is great because search engines can now tell what your pictures are:
Make a sitemap. Sitemaps list all the pages on your website along with a brief description of them and Google are great advocates of them, in fact they?ve dedicated an entire section on their website about them.
The End
That?s all there is to this guide, you should now be equipped to create a good website and promote it. I hope you found it useful, if you have any feedback please leave it in our Community Forums, we?d love to hear from you.
