Increase Your Web Traffic in a Weekend

If you've just put up a site and need to understand how to promote it yourself, you'll find this a very helpful book indeed. The author has divided the material into five sections corresponding to each part of a weekend.

Friday Evening covers introductory material. The real work begins on:

Saturday Morning: First you gain understand about who your visitors are from looking for patterns in the website's log files. The author also makes the helpful suggestion of gaining lost readers by finding problems with your website from error logs.

Saturday Afternoon: "Putting the Motion in Promotion." Here the author goes into some detail about how search engines work, and then explains exactly what the six key search engines -- Alta Vista, Hot Bot, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and WebCrawler -- are looking for, and what will cause you problems. There is considerable information on how to construct META tags, as well as using NOFRAME tags correctly so frame sites are correctly indexed.

Sunday Morning: The next step is registering with the primary business search engines, yellow pages directories, industry-specific directories, specialized directories, and how to win a "Cool Site of the Day" recognition.

Sunday Afternoon: The weekend concludes with how to use registration services such as Submit-It, using e-mail to promote the site on mailing lists and news groups, offering freebies, soliciting reciprocal links, and signing up with various banner exchange programs.

Though this type of book becomes out-of-date rather quickly, if you purchase it soon, you'll get a lot of hands-on advice. Rather than teaching principles of Web marketing, the book focuses on the how-tos of site promotion. I found it practical, readable, and quite useful for first-timers.