Recently the Governmental Services newsletter published in Ashland, MO, reported some interesting internet traffic trends. The facts they uncovered were these: VeriSign, the operator of much of the Internet infrastructure, was processing 600 million domain requests (when someone types in a .com, .net, etc address) a day in early 2000. Now, they process nearly 9 Billion per day.
As far as searches go, in three years Google, the most popular search engine, has gone from one hundred million searches a day to two hundred million searches. Only one third of them come from within the US. Others are in eighty-eight different languages. Thanks to Thomas Friedman for reporting this data.
The above facts are certainly interesting, if for nothing else than their sheer enormity. In light of many publishers’ endeavor to provide news via the web, these facts provide insight in to the importance of making your site visible on the information super highway.
One of the features that was added with Version 4.0 is an easy way to post meta-tags to your site. Meta tags are the indicators that internet search engines use to index your site. The more accurate and descriptive your meta tags, the more accurate search results will be. If you're not a MWP client, check with your webmaster to determine if your site allows you to fine-tune your meta-tags, thus achieving better search engine placement.
Remember that search engines take anywhere from 30-90 days to index the web. If you haven’t added site specific tags, search engine spiders pick up some standard data that’s very limited, and may cause your paper to be listed only in very narrow categories and perhaps low in the search results. By posting tags that describe the town and region where you publish, key names and words that are prevalent in your circulation area, proper names of sports teams on whom you frequently report, etc, etc, search engines such as Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo!, and others will list your paper when web visitors search for those items as well.
For related articles about how to maximize search engine results for your site, click here.
Sidebar: One Sure Way to Drive Traffic |
