Spiders
The internet search engines have programs called spiders that travel the net going from site to site by way of links. The purpose of spiders is to find the most frequently visited sites which are then placed in search results according to the frequency of site visits, the more your site is visited the higher up the list your site is placed. So by having a landing page for a group that page will be visited more often than an individual site placing the group higher up in the search engine page. Example: (JoJo’s Antiques.com gets 5 hits per day; Antique Alley Shops.com gets 300 hits per day. JoJo’s will be on search page 127, Antique Alley Shops will be on page 1) You can pay to have your site listed with a search engine but a site that is visited more often than yours will be placed above yours in the listings even if that site has never paid a dime to be placed there, the search engines after all are competing with each other and those who give the best results for searches made are the search engines that get the most business. If you pay to be placed in a search engine you have to pay each search engine that you are listed on, gets very expensive very quickly. I won’t go into the details of how to get listed and what it costs but what I will tell you is that if you pay to get listed there are competitors programs out there that seek out those who pay to be listed that is the same as their listing which will click through your link on the search page repeatedly for the sole purpose of driving up the cost of your listing with the search engine.
Links
Links are important as this is how a spider gets around the net and your website. So the more links you have the more the spider will like traveling through your site. You also have to remember that the net loves words and links ignoring images. So the landing page needs to be rich in words and links. Do not place images at the top of your page unless you absolutely must, the idea is to get the spider to travel through your site and they will ignore it if it’s full of images at the top. You will notice on my site OutOn731.com that the writing is on the left and one image on the right, the purpose of this is to invite the spider through the site. (Important: When you insert a link into your site CHECK IT! and make sure that it works and that it is doing what it is supposed to do.
Key Words
Key Words are something that I cannot stress enough. The use of key words are what as you may or maynot know is what a search engine uses for looking up what it is that people are searching for. There are sites that will provide you with lists of key words some are free some are not I personally use goggle adwords: Keyword Tool.
Advertising
If you read the welcoming page you will remember that I said to advertise the group site, an idea is to place a flyer at or near the door that proclaims that you’re a member of that group, at or near the cash register a placard with business cards giving the name of the site. Remember that a name that’s easy to remember will allow the costumer to remember the name even if they don’t take a card.
The most important thing you need to know is that a web site does not have to cost you an arm and a leg there are many things that you can get to enhance what it is that you are tring to do that can be done for free, each site that you get these things from may have certain requests that you preform for them usually by acknowledging them in some way for the service that they have provided. Remember links and spiders? Agood way to get those spiders to love you, killing two birds with one stone.
How much does a website cost? You can get some for free but the domain name is cumbersome and hard to remember and to be honest looks bad, others can get quite expensive. This one costs me $15 dollars a year.
There are things that you can do to monitor the success of a site but I will cover these later.