Site Extras
Unless you have a lot of really good content in your site you
will need to include some extra services for your visitors to keep
them coming back and referring others to you. One company which
I use is Master which
supplies search engines for both your site material and the web
as a whole. They also have other features available such as message
boards, stock quotes, news feeds and feedback forms that are quite
impressive which you might want to investigate.
Many companies now provide these extras which makes it difficult
to determine how big a site really is. One company that even allows
you to customize categories and add links automatically is GossamerThreads.
News Headlines
This fantastic feature can produce on your site the headlines
of one of hundreds of news and trade journals geared just for your
site from financial to technical, from the U.S. to Uganda. It's
sure to impress.
Your Position In The Search Engines
After about two months from when you first submitted to the major
search engines you will want to start concerning yourself about
where you stand in their rankings when someone searches for the
keywords you think will lead them to you. The following services
give you your ranking for free, or at least show that you are in
the search engines database.
Tracking Links to You
After all the work of linking to other sites you want to see which
show up on a search. Every engine is different and some can't find
you at all but these ones do a good job of it.
To do such a link search type in the phrase link:yoursitename.com
-url:yoursitename.com This eliminates all the links
from your site pages to give a clearer idea of outside links. If
you are on a pay-per-click system you will also want to eliminate
that url as well.
Comments So Far
Guestbooks and Message Boards
Message boards and guest books are ideal for providing an aura
of interactivity and responsiveness until you can, if you wish,
respond directly to your viewers questions or concerns.
They are great for showing just once, how to solve a problem rather
than answering the same thing over and over. You can break them
down into categories for easy navigation, as well as screen and
edit the queries and responses for clarity and deletion of profanity
or slander.
Email Lists
If you wish to maintain contact with your viewers you can request
that they join your mailing list, provided you have something worthwhile
to send them. Do not annoy or spam people who are nice enough to
give out their address and anticipate something worthwhile in return.
E-mail Auto Responders
Free Products and Services
Major sources of free downloads are Filebasket, WinSite, Freeware
Network and CNET.
Web Ring
It may be possible for you to establish or join a web ring of
like-minded or similar content web sites to share access to each
others combined popularity and ease of access for your viewers. WebRing has
the infrastructure which handles all of the technical software
needs for free, but you need to manage your ring yourself.
This gif was produced for free and took about two minutes to prepare.
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