What's the Buzz? Constructing Your Web Site Search Engine Update What's the Buzz According to Forrester Research, a mere sixteen percent of the fifty interactive advertisers it polled will spend more than $1 million each on Web advertising in 1997. Yet, forty-two percent will spend that much or more to develop their own Web sites. Most of us will probably spend far less than $1 million to develop our sites. So, what is the average cost to develop a web site? In Constructing Your Web Site, we begin a discussion on this very topic. Georgia Tech's, GVU7 Internet User Survey, reports that search engines are the way that eighty-seven percent of us find web sites. So, you have probably noticed a search result listing for say, Yahoo, when you are doing a search at Excite? Since spiders never sleep, they should be indexing every existing web page available, which would include the pages within competing search tools. Look below for this months lead time updates on the major search tools. The WebPromote Team Constructing Your Web Site Anyone can prepare a web page, but since you're advertising your online business for the world to see, and to judge by first impressions, you need Internet professionals who can help. There is never a finish to the start that you make when developing a web site. In fact, developing a professional web site for your Internet business will take you through several stages. Some steps will necessitate being repeated for the lifetime of your site. How much can you expect to spend? The answer to that question relies specifically on what the owner of that site wants to do with that site and where they're located. Conceptualize You must envision what the ultimate purpose of your web site will be. Whether your dream is to sell M.I. Hummel figurines or pay tribute to country music by setting up a chat room and CD store, all tangible aspects of your web site should originate from these seeds of thought. Unless you are well read or experienced in all areas of web site development, your initial construction efforts will result in a very basic framework. Think and rethink. Toss your ideas at others with web site experience. Surf web sites and bookmark those that you really like to use as a resource. Draw thumbnails of your site's design and the blueprints for progression through your site. Some commonly asked questions might be: Will I use graphics? How will I process orders taken online? Will I register a domain name or use a virtual domain? How many email accounts will I need? How many pages are necessary for my web site to come across in a clear, user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing manner? Where will my web site be housed? Who will maintain it? What amount of promotion do I desire to achieve solid visibility? How will I anticipate growth and measure the effectiveness of certain strategies? Construct If you know how to program in HTML and Java and have the contacts or technical genius to set up transactions software then you can get started right away. The resources at http://bignosebird.com can guide you in building your own web page. Otherwise, you should investigate web design services. Be sure to install META Tags between the and tags behind the scenes of your site. Get free guidiance from our META Tag builder. A Crain Communications study lists the following prices as a benchmark for how much you can expect to pay per hour to build a web site. Service Price Per Hour Database Programming $ 150 Java/Shockwave $ 135 Copywriting $ 125 Interface/Page Design $ 125 CGI Scripting $ 120 Basic HTML $ 90 For the solution to buying and selling goods or services over the Internet, visit InterWorld Corporation at http://www.interworld.com. Maybe you'll add audio to your site. Find out how at http://www.cnet.com/Content/Builder/Authoring/Audio. Optimize The process of evaluating, reorganizing, shifting and changing should be continual. Providing a channel for feedback from site visitors, reading web site design trade journals, surfing the Internet and asking others should always provide you with ideas to freshen the appearance of your site. You should measure the effectiveness of any promotion through web auditing. Update and Market Announce your online presence to the world. Register your web site in search engines, directories and yellow pages. Create linking relationships with other web sites that target the traffic in your niche market. Purchase targeted banner ads, develop a newsworthy press release, and initiate an opt-in direct emailing campaign. Over the months following the birth of your web site, you should listen carefully to feedback, seeking the opinions of marketing and web site design professionals as well as consumers, your lifeblood, about their experiences at your web site. You'll need to be aggressively marketing your Web site if you expect to get a steady, growing number of visitors. Work diligently toward the goal of branding. There may be no instant and magical allure to your web site, but with a strong commitment, there can be a magic combination of promotion, design and customer service that will position your online business for success. You can visit http://www.netb2b.com/cgi-bin/cgi_wpi_archive to look at NetMarketing's hypothetical Web Price Index. Search Engine Update It is important to keep abreast of major search engine and directory site listing lead times when you are doing business on the Internet. The nature of the Internet is such that these leads times can change quickly. As a tool to help you work more efficiently, we will keep you updated with our observations through this newsletter. Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com): They are listing sites in about four weeks. Toward the end of November, Yahoo changed the look of its results page. Upon returning the particular keyword triggered results, Yahoo now offers an immediate segue into Alta Vista, related news stories, and net events through the use of a colored table. You can still jump directly to other search engines, but you must travel to the bottom of the web page before you can find the hyperlinks. This gives precedence to Alta Vista's special relationship with Yahoo. Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com): Indexing within minutes of submitting your URL. NorthernLight (http://www.northernlight.com): It looks like Gulliver, the robot for our friends at Northern Light has been very busy. Indexing time is now about four weeks. AltaVista (http://www.altavista.digital.com): Results from our study indicate that they are indexing anywhere from two days to one week. HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com): HotBot has removed their front page link to the AddURL page. You can get to it by going directly to http://www.hotbot.com/addurl.html . They are indexing in under seven days. Excite (http://www.excite.com): They are still running at two weeks. Join the voice of Internet America at Excite's daily poll http://nt.excite.com/poll. Lycos (http://www.lycos.com): Indexing time falls between three and four weeks. You may have noticed that earlier this month, searches with popular or common keywords at Lycos had been returning Lycos' own pages at the top of every search results page, ranking Lycos-based web pages at #1, #11, # 21, #31, etc. This pre-ranking of its' own pages has apparently ceased. WebCrawler (http://www.webcrawler.com): Still running at about one week. Magellan (http://www.mckinley.com): All submissions are handled by their parent service, Excite. An "editorial transition" restricts any submissions directly at the Magellan site. No projected date for a policy change. OpenText (http://index.opentext.net): Currently running at about four weeks. LinkStar (http://www.linkstar.com): Currently running at three hours. Looksmart (http://www.looksmart.com): Alta Vista dominates the search returns. Indexing into the Looksmart directory is still between three and six weeks. PlanetSearch (http://www.planetsearch.com): Between one and two weeks. They update their index once each week. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Original article at: http://www.webpromote.com/dec97vol1.html - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -