[WEB400] Re: visit counters

[Hans Boldt <boldt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Franz wrote:

> What exactly does management want to know?
>
> Hans,
> A very good point. This is coming from the owner, and he, in a very
> non-tech way wants to know if his site is being viewed. They did not want
> to pay for any placements, but I did post to as many search engines as I
> could find. The meta tags are filled for the crawlers. It is a very simple
> "brochure" site, on an extremely limited budget. I've already created a
> query over the log files, and filter it to an ip address and date, so he can
> get "visits" and see if amyone comes back. Hopefully they will want to move
> beyond brochure.
> jim

You raise a good question: How to increase the hit rate for your site? 
Just submitting the page to the search engines isn't really enough. 
Consider Google for instance, which is pretty much the default search 
tool for most of us these days. They rank sites based on how many 
*other* web sites link to them. So the key is to get links to your site 
from others. More specifically, other sites that are already indexed by 
Google. That is, there's not much point in having a link to your site 
from a page that only registered site members can get to, and not the 
GoogleBot.

Unfortunately, getting links to your site isn't quite as easy as it 
sounds. If your company were in an iSeries related business, you could 
go to <http://resources.midrange.com/> and add your site there for a 
start. For other types of businesses, you'd have to hunt around for 
similar sites.

Ideally, you want others to find your site, then explicitly recommend 
your site on their own web sites or blogs unsolicited. Each time that 
happens, your rank in Google increases.

What you want to avoid is schemes that promise increased web hits. The 
developers at Google are pretty sharp and can usually spot attempts to 
artificially increase Google rank.

Cheers! Hans