Announcing your site

There is little point in having a site which no-one visits so potential visitors need to be given a way of discovering the existence of the site. The first step is to optimise the site's findability with the popular Internet search services. You do this by registering it, for instance with major search engines such as AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Hotbot, etc. and with directories such as Yahoo!. Also, if there are relevant specialist directories, let them know too. Most search engines and directories will provide an obvious and inviting link to their site registration page. An alternative to doing it yourself is to employ a service which does it for you such as Submit It! (http://submitit.linkexchange.com/). In either case, search engines will simply put your URL into a lengthy queue of URL's which their spider will visit eventually for the purpose of collecting data for the search engine's index. Once your site is in the index, in theory it can be found by keyword searching. With directories such as Yahoo!, the important item in your submission is the description of your site which will be processed, not by a program, but by a person, who makes the decision on whether or not to include it in the directory.

These are a few guidelines for optimising findability with search engines:

• With each Web page, come straight to the point with concise, descriptive text for the title and headings and also the first paragraph. Use words which are directly relevant to the subject of the document. With some search engin es, the words used early in the document are more significant for findability than those used later, but repeated occurrences of words and phrases also influence findability (beware of index spamming!).
• Insert meta-tags for keywords and description into the head of your documents, particularly pages which are framesets and pages which start with Javascript.

Maintaining your site

Once your pages are in place and notching up healthy usage figures, you will need to monitor the currency of the information. Check hypertext links regularly to make sure that they still work. There are tools available for doin g such housekeeping tasks automatically. Also read and revise the text if necessary. From time to time, you may wish to review the style too (how impressed are you today by a page of plain black text on a grey background!).

Usage statistics are an important aspect of maintenance. They will tell you, for instance, if anyone is accessing the information you are providing or if they encountered errors in finding any of the files you linked to. Some s tatistics packages also track the route that users follow through the site.