Nowadays, to place a home page in a WWW server doesn't mean much, even when you feel that it an extremely invaluable resource. The problem is that your page will be competing for visits with millions of other pages in the WWW; so that if you don't advertise it properly, the page will visited by very few persons, indeed.
The most important thing to do is to start a full power "marketing campaign" to promote your WWW. page. Here are some tips on how to do this.
First of all, send email messages to your colleagues, friends, pen-pals, Internet discussion lists and newsgroups which you feel are relevant to the topic of your home page. This you will bring some results, although you should not use this resource in an abusive way (people don't like to receive unsolicited email, particularly multiple postings).
In case the Internet Access Provider you are using to harbor your page has a specific index to his customer's home pages, drop a note to ask for a reciprocal link.
Following this, you should start to register your page with the many WWW catalogs, search mechanisms, indexes, etc. Begin with the general and most accessed services, such as Yahoo!, Altavista, Excite, InfoSeek, HotBot, Lycos, WebCrawler, etc.They accept voluntary submissions, and in some of them (the "spiders", which are automatic roamers of the Internet), it is enough to provide the address of your home page. Please remember also that it may take between a few hours and several weeks until your link becomes available in the catalog, depending on how busy it is.
In fact, in case you want to do a torough job, there are more than 200+ indexes and catalogs worldwide, and many more which are specific of a given country. The requirements for filling up submission forms to all these resources can vary from a simple address up to detailed forms which are several pages long. In this case, the best solution is to use all-in-one submission services, which facilitate the task, by providing a single, complete submission form and then proceed to send it automatically to all catalogs, adapting the fields in this process. These "web site promotion services" are usually not for free, and the fees may vary from 200 to more than 1,000 dollars per home page. However, you can try a few who do provide free limited services, such as Submit It! (http://www. submitit.com), which submits your site to 20 catalogs and indexes. There are also computer programas for Windows and Macintosh which automate the submission job. One of the best is Site Promotion. .
Finally, depending on the subject matter of your site, there are many specialized catalogs and indexes, such as in Medicine and Health. In this case, so far we do not know of any automatic all-in-one submission service, so it will be necessary to enter one by one. Please read the article in the current issue of Intermedic, titled "How to Find Medical Information on the Internet", in order to have a good idea about the most important and relevant catalogs and indexing sites in this area, before submitting your home page.
Renato M.E. Sabbatini
Published by:
Center for Biomedical Informatics State University of Campinas, Brazil © 1997 Renato M.E. Sabbatini |
Apoio:
Searle Brazil |