What’s New

I don’t write restaurant reviews, and this isn’t one. But, I had an interesting experience that reminded me of the peculiarities of Web sites. During a recent visit to Centennial, Colorado I had the opportunity to have lunch at an excellent Mexican Restaurant, Carlos Miguel’s. I can only say, “Wow!” If you are ever in the neighborhood, you absolutely must stop in.

As it turn out, the restaurant had recently opened and they were training some of their staff. While the food was excellent, the service was a tiny bit off at times. However, the positive attitude of everyone in the place was unbeatable, and, as a result, I was back in Carlos Miguel’s for dinner the next evening.

So, what does this have to do with Web sites? Everyone expects Web sites to work perfectly 100% of the time. Just as there are the picky few who expect restaurant service to be perfect 100% of the time. Yet restaurants and Web sites are subject to unexpected problems. Both are designed and operated by humans, both involve computers, and both are subject to things that our outside of the control of the people who own or use them.

In a restaurant the point of sale computers may act up, on a Web site the host servers may have a glitch. If a power cable is accidentally chopped by a construction crew a restaurant and a Web site will go black equally fast. Faced with the range of problems could happen, how you you make sure that visitors keep coming back to your site is something goes wrong?

Here are some suggestions. First and foremost, make sure you have a backup plan. Know who to call if your site goes down. Have the phone numbers of your host company in a place where you can get to them readily. If your email goes out, make sure you are prepared to use your telephone for both solving the problem and contacting your customers. Don’t rely on your power company to keep your electricity flowing. If you are on the Web regularly working on your site, you may want to keep the batteries in your notebook computer charged and have an connections via dial up ready to be activated. Remember, People PC and NetZero offer very limited free Internet access that might be just what you need in an emergency.

Perhaps most important of all is that you should understand that bad things happen, and the best way to deal with them is just to confront the problem with a positive attitude and find solutions. That’s what the staff did at Carols Miguel’s and that is why I went back, and more importantly, why I suggest that if you are in Colorado you visit them, too!

Our second myth is that you have to pay somebody to get listed on the search engines. This is a classic myth, and one doesn’t have to be a Mythbuster to prove this myth busted. Let’s examine this in detail.

I bet you have received tons of spam saying that a particular service will get you listed on hundreds, or even thousands, of search engines. Well, let’s get this perfectly clear. There are only three search engines of consequence for most of us. The number one search engine is Google with about half of all the searches conducted on the Web. Yahoo! has around a quarter to a third of the remaining searches, and Microsoft’s Live Search (or whatever it is called at the moment) handling most of the rest.

If you are listed on any of these search engines you will end up being displayed on other search engines and sites with search functions. How is this? As it turns out, many so-called “search engines” pull their results from the Big Three. The same is true with Web sites that have search engine features built in. So, if you get listed on any one search engine you will tend to appear on other sites that pull search results from that particular engine.

Pretty cool, eh?

How do you actually get listed on a search engine? The actual steps vary depending on the search engine in question. But, the basic techniques are pretty much the same from engine to engine. You should know that each search engine has a place to take submissions. In one the place may be labeled “Submit a URL” while on another it could be “Suggest a Site.” How do you find the place? Simple! Just search for it. You can go to Google and enter “submit to Google” and before you know it the appropriate page will come up in the results.

The trick is that you must follow the rules for submission at each search engine. One search may require registration, another may not. The key thing to remember is that all you have to follow their rules and you will be listed. That is, you will be listed eventually.

These days it takes between two and size weeks to eventually come up on the search engines. The reason for this is easy to understand. There are so many new Web sites appearing every day, and so many old sites that have to be re-indexed, that it takes a long time for the spiders to visit a site, index the site, and have it cataloged for appearance in the search engine.

If you are interested in the gory details of search engines and how they work you may wish to visit www.searchenginewatch.com.

One of my favorite books on the topic is 101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site by Susan Sweeney. You can visit her site at www.susansweeney.com.