Attract Visitors to Your Site: The Mini Missing Manual Read Free

week, you’re ready to flourish.
    Never underestimate the importance of regular updates . It takes weeks and months of up-to-date information to create a return visitor. However, one dry spell—say, three months without changing anything more than the color of your buttons—doesn’t just stop attracting newcomers, it can kill off your current roster of return visitors. That’s because savvy visitors immediately realize when a website’s gone stale. They have much the same sensation you feel when you pull out a once-attractive pastry from the fridge and find it’s as hard as igneous rock. You know what happens next—it’s time to toss the pastry away, clear out the website bookmarks, and move on.
    Tip: Signs of a stale site include old-fashioned formatting, broken links, and references to old events (like a Spice Girls CD release party or a technical analysis of why Florida condos are an ironclad investment).
    The other way to encourage return visitors is to build a community . Discussion forums, promotional events, and newsletters are like glue. They encourage visitors to feel like they’re participating in your site and sharing your web space. If you get this right, hordes of visitors will move in and never want to leave.
    GEM IN THE ROUGH
    Favorite Icons
    One of your first challenges in promoting your site is getting visitors to add your site to their browser bookmarks. However, that’s not enough to guarantee a return visit. Your website also needs to be fascinating enough to beckon from the bookmark menu, tempting visitors to come back. If you’re a typical Web traveler, you regularly visit only about five percent of the sites you bookmark.
    One way to make your site stand out from the crowd is to change the icon that appears in visitors’ bookmarks or favorites menu (an icon technically called a favicon ). This technique is browser-specific, but it works reliably in most versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. The illustration in this box shows the favicons for Google and Amazon.
    To create a favicon, add an icon file to the top-level folder of your website, and make sure you name it favicon.ico . The best approach is to use a dedicated icon editor, because it lets you create both a 16-pixel×16-pixel icon and a larger 32-pixel×32-pixel icon in the same file. Browsers use the smaller icon in their bookmark menus, and Windows PCs display the larger version when visitors drag the favicon to their desktop (Macs don’t support the desktop-icon feature). If you don’t have an icon editor, just create a bitmap (a .bmp file) that’s exactly 16 pixels wide and 16 pixels high. To get an icon editor, visit a shareware site like http://www.download.com/ .
    Adding Meta Elements
    Meta elements give you a way to add descriptive information to your web pages, which is important because some web search engines rely on these elements to help visitors find your site. Figure 1-3 explains how it all works.
    Figure 1-3: Ever wondered where the information you see in search listings comes from? The underlined link in the above example (“Sugar Beat”) is the title of the Web page the search engine found. The search engine pulled the site’s description (shown underneath the title) directly from the page’s hidden description meta element.
    Note: Fun fact for etymologists and geeks alike: the term “meta element” means “elements about ,” as in “elements that provide information about your Web page.”
    You put all meta elements in the section of a web page. Here’s a sample meta element that assigns a description to a web page:
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
    
    
        content="Noodletastic offers custom noodle dishes made to order." />
    
    
    ...
    
    All meta elements look more or less the same.