Your Friendly Philosopher & Guide

My friends and I had a discussion about how to popularize my website – www.askenni.com among netizens, and Rajan (also called Chota Rajan) came up with an idea of making it visible on the search engines using meta tags and also by understanding how search engines really works. Vamsee (a designer cum lover boy) supported his views mmm but I wasn’t happy with the idea!

My opinion about popularizing a website doesn’t come under making it searchable on search engines like google or yahoo or lycos. All the sites I personally know or all the sites I personally visit on an everyday basis are not the one, which I got through search engines.

The sites I visit regularly are rediff, yahoo, indiainfo, indya and few porn sites. And none of these sites came to my understanding through search engines. It was word of mouth and also the promotions that they ran on various media that dragged me onto their websites.

Of course SOMETIMES search engines helps you to get people onto your websites, but in that case your site should be thrown in the first 3 pages of the results thrown. Google might claim to throw some 25 search-result pages, but then who on earth is so jobless to go through all the 25 pages!

And when it comes to meta tagging, you should think about keywords that are searched by most of the people around the world and also it should not be used by other veterans on the web. Forget it. Search engines won’t help you in the long run.

What brings traffic to your site?

I feel it is still the content that will pull traffic to your site, so keep it as exciting or humorous or I should say as controversial as possible.
Think about content that will kindle interest among your readers.
Make your site a daily habit.
Let your close friends know about your site, and let them do the marketing part. You need not ask them promote your site just provide content that will keep them busy. They will spread the message on their own.
And see to it if a person comes to your site once - by word of mouth or by accident - he should not miss your next edition!

So what should you concentrate on?

What else? Brand Building. Concentrate on getting your brand name on top of readers’ mind. This could be done by word of mouth, offline promotions, building community on the net, chats, discussions and now blogs. Try not to waste time on search engines - it might get you one person everyday that too accidentally but then that is not your motto.

Build a brand like yahoo.com, google.com, rediff.com, and now askenni.com. But see to it people spell your URL or address correctly!

Your comments are welcome…

Next Article…

I am contemplating on a new term called P-40 IT syndrome…(Post Forty Information Technology Syndrome) that would discuss about the pain and mental anguish the present IT crowd will face when they reach the age of 40.