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Expose Yourself
As the Net grows and evolves the visibility of individual Websites is increasingly threatened. The days of "personal home pages" is gone. Now everything is a Portal or Community or a confusing conglomerate of Websites that have partnered up, joined together, commercialized until the individual Website is more or less lost in the shuffle.
If an artist wants an Internet presence now it can be a daunting task to find a suitable location on the Web and to get set up so that the major search engines will list them in their directories.
One of the first priorities is to establish what you want the site to be:
- Will it be a commercial site with advertising and e-commerce?
- Will it be a Portfolio site that is used just for display of samples your work?
- Will it be a part of a larger site?
- Will it have it's own domain name?
If you want the site to be a commercial one that you can sell your work online then you probably should consider getting your own domain name. Having your own domain name gives your site it's own identity, distinct from other Websites, and is less likely to cause you a common problem experienced by others who have sites located in some of the many Free Website locations. Putting your Website in one of the many locations that offer free Web space can cause a problem with getting the site listed in search engines. Many search engines and directories do not like to list Websites in free spaces because there is so little quality control in those spaces, sites come and go, some sites may be inappropriate, and there are so many of those sites now that it amounts to spam of the search engines.
Also, if you choose to install your Website in a Free Space you have no control over the type and amount of advertising that appears on your pages. Having your own domain name eliminates these problems.
If you choose to have your own domain you will have to either pay a fee to one of the Free Space providers or pay another provider and register your URL with Internic.
If you want to be able to sell your work online then you will have to have a secure site. Secure sites have security encryption so that personal information such as credit card numbers are not displayed. There are various providers of security for e-commerce online.
Building your site:
Some of the Free Space sites provide page building tools in site so that you don't need much of a knowledge of Webpage programming. You just follow the instructions and you will get your pages built.
If you want more control over how your pages are displayed it helps to have some knowledge of HTML programming. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. There are HTML Tutorials online. With this information you can build your site to your own specifications and have the elements of page design that you want and leave out anything you do not want.
Submitting your site:
Now that you have your Website built and a home for it on the Web it is now time to start submitting your site to search engines. Some search engines periodically spider the Web and list Websites automatically but it is highly unlikely that your site will ever get listed this way. Other search engines are not really search engines at all but directories. Yahoo is one directory. Submitting your site periodically is the best way to keep the engines aware of your presence.
When using meta tags be sure that the key words in your meta tags are repeated several times throughout your page. The more times a keyword shows up the more likely the search engines will pick up on it.
Some search engines are Meta Search Engines. You cannot submit your URL to them because they use several different engines in their search. You have to submit your URL to the individual engines. DogPile is an example of a meta search engine.
There are several places online that you can submit your site to multiple search engines at one time. An example is SimpleSubmit.
Different search engines have different priorities and methods of searching pages. One thing to remember is that search engines rank your site partially by the number of other sites that have links to yours so getting other popular Websites to link to yours is a good way to increase your exposure. Going to other artist's Websites and signing their Guest Books and including your URL where possible is another way to get exposure. Some search engines even list the URLs of sites found in Guest Books.
Well, now that you've decided what you want your site to be and where you want it to be, it's time to Expose yourself on the Web!
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