Building traffic to your web page: Vernon College

Increasing Traffic to Your Web Page

Effective Titles Meta Tags Announce Site Miscellaneous Links

Choose an Effective Title

All documents need a title in the <HEAD></HEAD> section. Before you can choose an effective title, you need to understand how titles ARE and ARE NOT used .

The Title is used by browsers for the text associated with a bookmark.
The Title is used by the search engines to determine content of your page for indexing. Words in the title carry more weight than words in the body of the document.
When a search engine lists your page in response to a someone's query, the Title will be shown as the text linked to your web page.
The Title is NOT displayed as part of your page. Don't bother with bold, center, etc. The title DOES show as the very top line of the screen in Netscape.

Here are 2 examples of a suggested title for a web page for a faculty member:
<TITLE>Jim Farber: English Instructor at Vernon College in Texas (VC)</TITLE>
Searches on Jim Farber, English instructor, Vernon College, Texas English instructor and VC should return the address of this page after the search engines are made aware that it exists.
<TITLE>Christine Ellis Slosser: Vernon College (VC)</TITLE>
Including a woman's maiden name in the title will help the search engines index the page on both names.

Using Meta Tags

Like the title, meta tags go in the <HEAD></HEAD> section of a document and are not visible on the screen when viewed through a browser. Nevertheless, they have an important function. There are 2 Meta tags you should use:
The Meta description tag:Have you ever noticed in a list of pages returned by search engines that some pages have meaningful descriptions in complete sentences while others are a jumble of words? If a meta description is present, most search engines will return the content from the tag as the text to describe a site. If the tag is missing, the search engines use the first words found on the page. Sometimes this produces meaningful results, but frequently it does not.

Here are some examples of Meta content tags:
<META name="description" content="VC is a Texas public institution of higher education offering academic & vocational programs plus rodeo, baseball, softball and volleyball.">
<META name="description" content="Home page of Jim Farber, English instructor at Vernon College. Biographical information plus list of favorite web sites.">

The Meta keywords tag:Many search engines use the words in a Meta keyword list as they index a site. These words are apparently given more weight than words in the body of the page but less weight than those in the title. To choose your keywords, put yourself in the place of a person trying to find a page like yours. Try to think of all of the words you might search on. Build your keyword list from these potential search terms.

Here is the keyword list used for the VC home page:
<META name="keywords" content="Texas junior college, Texas community college, junior college, Texas, USA junior college, USA community college, US junior college, USA community college, Texas college, US college, USA college, higher education, 2-year, 2 year, two year, two-year, academic, academic transfer, vocational, nursing, cosmetology, automotive technology, rodeo, softball, volleyball, baseball, associate degree">
Here is a possible keyword list for an instructor:
<META name="keywords" content="Jim Farber, Jimmie Farber, English instructor, instructor, Vernon College, VC, Texas, Phi Theta Kappa sponsor">
Place the meta tags after the page title but before </HEAD>.

Announce Your Page

The search engines work in a variety of ways. Some visit the VC server regularly and index all of the pages. Others visit and index the home page plus a sample of the other pages. Still other search engines will only index a page when they are asked to. You should visit the major search engines and submit your web page address. Visit each of these search engines and indexes and look for the indicated words on the main screen. Go the the "add" page and follow the instructions on the screen. The URL of faculty/staff and student web pages on the VC server follows this pattern: http://www.vernoncollege.edu/~emailname. For instance, Chris Slosser's email is cslosser@vernoncollege.edu. Her home page address is http://www.vernoncollege.edu/~cslosser.

At..	Look for...
Yahoo	how to include your site
Excite	add url
Lycos	add your site to Lycos
Infoseek	add url
HotBot	add url

Other Ways to Build Traffic to Your Page

Tell people about your page.

Put your address on your business card.
Include your address as part of your email signature file
Mention it in any press release or news story about your program or department.
If you are an instructor, give your students the address.

Sign all guestbooks that allow you to give your web page address.
Add your page address to the free-for-all lists.
Add your page address to link lists.

Links

Here are some sites which will give you more information:

Virtual Promote
Search Engine Watch

last updated: January 21, 1998

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