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8-Week Shape Up Course
Week 7: Sitting in the Waiting Room

Bored computer reading a book as time flies by

Build it and they will come. Unfortunately, that works better with baseball fields than it does web pages. Your web page has important information that people should know about. But no one is coming. How can you promote your web page?

*Name it Like it is
Those few words between <TITLE> and </TITLE> are extremely important. They are what every search engine including Cameron’s uses to identify your page.
For an alphabatized index, the first word of the title should be what someone would search for first.
If your title has nothing to do with your page or doesn’t identify it accurately, you’ve lost a hit. Avoid using "Cameron University whatever" in your title. Cameron’s index for the main pages alphabetizes by title. A person searching for Admissions will look under the A’s - not the C’s for Cameron University Admissions. Instead, add Cameron University to the end of your title: "Admissions Office for Cameron University."

Two more things to check in order to make sure your title appears correctly in the index.

  1. Capitalize the first letter.
  2. Don’t put any space between <TITLE> and the first letter. Otherwise, your title will be alphabetized under the space instead of your first letter.

*Ever met a META?
Ever wonder how a search engine chooses your page? It can either read every word on the page and try to match the page with keywords someone is searching, or you can tell the search engine.

Right below your <TITLE> tags, you can put two <META> tags. One for a short description of your
Use META's to give search engines descriptions and keywords.
page and one to list keywords that describe your page. Here’s the code:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Your Title</TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="short description of your page (200 words or less)">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" content="keyword keyword keyword">
</HEAD>

 Some of the keywords you will want to include are "Cameron University Lawton Oklahoma." Others might include your department name, "students" or "college."

Several search engines print the first few lines of your page in their search results. If you have a <META> description tag, they print your description instead and give the searcher much more information as a result.

*Announce It!
Once you have a better page for search engines to index, you need to let the search engines know that your page exists. There are several sites that allow you to submit your site for indexing.

One such site is http://www.submitexpress.com/. This company will submit your page to over 40 search engines and other sites.

One of the most important ways of promoting your page is including it on any paper publications you produce. Include your URL on syllabi, newspaper advertisements, flyers, business cards, and anything else you mail or give out to people.

You don’t have to just sit and wait for people to come. Announce it to the world! Then they’ll come. :-)


Page maintained by Julie A. Duncan, Information Designer.