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Getting listed: Publicizing your Web site

You can write the course site URL on the blackboard during the first class or include it on your handouts or email it to all your students, but everyone should also be able to find your site without knowing the address: students with handout-eating dogs, department chairs considering your petition for tenure, colleagues looking for ideas to use in their own teaching. An active effort to get listed in the appropriate forums is the best way to maximize your site's visibility.

Note that Web sites often get listed without any effort on the author's part. Your site may be discovered by one of the search engine "spiders" that crawl the Web looking for new sites to add to their index. Once indexed by a search engine, your site is one of the millions of potential sites that may be returned as a "hit" from a search query. Then a user may discover your site using the search engine and decide to create a link to your site from his or her own, and voilà! You're famous! Even so, a more proactive approach to publicizing your site will give you greater control over where and how your site is listed.

Institutional listing

Make sure that your site is listed on all relevant pages on your institutional Web site (departmental pages, course listings, and so on). Look around your school's site and identify potential pages, then contact the page authors and ask that they publish a link to your site on their pages.

Related sites

Many sites are discovered by users following links from related sites. For example, for a site about classical music, you are likely to gain the notice of music scholars and enthusiasts if your site is included as a link on other classical music sites. In fact, the more links you have from related sites, the better your chances are of being found and indexed by search engines (see Listing with search engines, below).

Although much of this cross-linking happens by chance, you can take steps to get your site listed as a link on other sites. The biggest challenge may be finding contact information for the authors of the related sites. If you successfully identify a contact, send along a note with your URL and site description. Ask the author to post a link to your site, and offer to post a "reciprocal" link to their site on yours.

Some search engines allow you to search the Web for sites that have posted a link to your site. For example, typing "link:www.dartmouth.edu" in the AltaVista search field would return all sites containing a hyperlink to the Dartmouth College home page. Another way to find out which sites have links to your site is to review the Web server logs. Each time a user requests a page from a Web server, information about the requestor is logged in the server log file. One tidbit the server can log is referrer information, or the URL of the page the user was on before he or she requested your page. If you visit the referrer URL, chances are that you'll find a link to your site somewhere on the page.

Specialized directories

A number of sites simply list directories of sites on specific topics. Many of these directories are vetted, which means that the sites listed have been reviewed and approved by some authority. For example, there are sites dedicated to gathering information and URLs for course Web sites. Users visiting these compilations can search for sites in their field to see how educators around the world are using the Web to teach. If you would like to list your course site in such a forum, first identify the compilations that pertain to your field, then follow the submission procedures detailed on the site (a professional organization's Web site for your discipline is one place to look for such compilations). Make note of the places where you've listed your course site so that you can keep your listing current (that is, edit or remove the listing based on the status of your site).

Listing with search engines

A search engine is a database of Web pages that users can search to locate information, buy merchandise, do research, or book a trip. The database is compiled by a software "spider" that "crawls" the Web looking for new or changed pages, whose information it adds or updates in the second component: the index. Users searching the Web interact with search engine software that scans the index for matches and returns the results to the user, usually sorted in order of relevancy, or relatedness, to the search query.

In a study conducted in February 1999, Steve Lawrence and Lee Giles report that approximately 85 percent of Web users use search engines to find information. They estimate there are about 800 million pages on the Web (there will likely be twice that number by the time you read this). The bad news is that they determined that no search engine indexes more than about 18 percent of those pages and that there is a marked bias about which 18 percent are indexed: many search engines follow links to discover new pages and so are more likely to find popular sites that have many links to them. Even for sites that are listed, there is the great challenge of getting noticed on a long list of search results. How good are your chances of being found if your course site on John Milton is result number 10,000 on a user's search for "milton?"

Given these statistics, the utility of search engines for course Web site authors is uncertain. For commercial sites, the advantage of listing well with search engines is considerable, but for your course Web site you may be inclined to leave it up to chance and hope that your site will someday be discovered by a spider. If you wish to actively pursue search engine listings, your greatest effort should be directed at garnering links to your site from other sites (see Related sites, above), because that will greatly increase your chances of discovery. You can register your site for indexing with all the search engines. Last, you can take several measures to optimize your pages in the event that your site gets indexed.

Registering your site

Most search engines have a feature whereby Web authors can register their sites for indexing. To register your course Web site, go to the search engine home page of your choice and look for a link that leads to a submission page. Registering does not assure your site a position in a search engine's index, so many search engines offer anxious Web authors an easy way to find out whether their URL is listed. Say, for example, that your course site URL is "www.myschool.edu/music101." If you type "url:myschool.edu/music101" into the Infoseek search field, any of your pages that are in the Infoseek catalog will be returned because their URL contains "myschool.edu/mus101."

Optimizing your pages

Getting indexed is only the first challenge in having your pages represented on the Web. It is far too easy to get buried in the vast collection of Web pages that have content that is related in some way to the content of your pages. Several measures will help ensure that users who are seeking materials such as those you offer on your site can find your pages.

Keywords

When optimizing pages for Web search engines, the term keywords signifies the word or words that best describe the content of your Web document. This is not to be confused with the keywords used when searching, for example, a library catalog, where many keywords are used to describe every topic covered in a document. In the search engine context, keywords are really key words: two or more words that best describe the entire document. Using the library catalog analogy, keywords are more in the category of document subject than keywords.

Keywords are relevant to Web content for an important reason: whereas library catalogs are created by library catalogers, search engine "catalogs" are created largely by computers. The search engine software "reads" Web pages and makes calculations based on frequency and location: frequency being how often a word or phrase occurs in a document, and location being where in the document the phrase occurs (a phrase that appears repeatedly at the beginning of a Web page is considered more relevant than those appearing at the end of a page). The search engine uses these measures to define the subject of a Web page. For example, if a user is looking for pages on "Medieval and Renaissance music," and your page has that exact phrase as the page title, and the phrase appears several times in the first section of the page, a link to your site is likely to appear toward the top of the user's search results page.

The best way to define keywords for your content is to predict what search string users would enter to find your content, for example, "Nietzsche and anti-Semitism" or "Molecules and radiation." Keywords function best when they are specific: for example, choose "Biography of John Milton," not "Milton Bio," for a site dealing specifically with the life of the author John Milton.

Once you've defined your keywords, use them consistently throughout the site. For example, the text that appears inside the <TITLE> tag is considered a primary descriptor of page content by many search indexes. Use the full text of your keywords as the page title:

<TITLE>Biography of John Milton</TITLE>

Search engines also index the content of pages, giving extra attention to text at the beginning of the page. Use your keywords as often as makes sense in your text, particularly in the headings and first paragraphs of the page. Also, when you refer to keywords in the text, do not truncate them. For example, write, "John Milton was a misogynist," not "Milton was a misogynist."

META tags

META tags are special tags that appear in the top section of your HTML document. They are invisible in that they do not describe any physical aspect of the page, but they can be used for myriad purposes, one of which is to describe the content of a Web page for indexing.

The following are the main META tags that influence searching (note that not all browsers and search engines support all META tags):

Page information

From Web Teaching Guide
Copyright 2000 Sarah Horton

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