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16.3 Advertising Your Site
Once you’ve set up your web site,
there are a few things you can do to
attract visitors to your site. First, you can simply tell people
about your site. If your site has a memorable name, or if you’ve
printed up business cards, you can invite people you meet in the field
to view your photos on the internet. Some internet forums (see
Appendix A) allow users to post links
to their photo albums, and this
can be a good way to get other people to come to your site.
Another option is to join a so-called webring;
the sites in a webring link to each other in series, so that viewers
can traverse the whole ring of sites easily. If you belong to any
email lists (such as a listserve)
for nature or photography groups, including your web site URL in your “signature” at the bottom of your posts can
help to increase your
traffic as well.
A very important method for increasing the
visibility of your site is to register your site with the major search
engines, such as Google and Yahoo. Once you’ve
registered your site with these search engines, their crawlers (also called spiders) will index the pages in
your site by scanning them for keywords; when users search for those
keywords via the search engine, your site will then come up in the list
of results (though it may be far down on the list, depending on your ranking). Some search
engines will also index the images, based on their filenames or on the alt attribute in your img tags:
<img src="greathornedowl.jpg" alt="great horned
owl">
In this case I’ve used the alt attribute to indicate that this
is an image of a great horned owl, in hopes that users searching for
this species will find my image.
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