Promote your homepage

Promote your homepage, but stop receiving spam

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Written by Cynthia Fridsma
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Amsterdam, April 8, 2004

If you have a homepage, than you want to tell the world that you have a homepage. What’s the best way to attract more visitors to your homepage? And more important: how do I do that without receiving spam on my email account?

The first thing you need are meta tags

If you think that it is enough to submit your homepage to different search engines and use a fake email address, than the answer is no! What you first need are meta tags, because a search engine index your files with the use of the meta tags that are nested in the header of your homepage.

Meta tags contain important information about your

Meta tags contains a short description of your homepage, keywords, in which language your homepage is and also information about the author. In other words: meta tags contain important information about your homepage. You can compare it with the index of a book.

How do I use meta tags?

Now you know the purpose of meta tags and you wonder: “How do I use meta tags?” First you have to open your index page with a text editor (like notepad in MS Windows)

You will see something like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>My homepage</title>
</head>

Now you have to insert your meta tags file between the head section. Meta tags starts always with <meta name=” and ends with “>

It looks like this:

Explanation

	The tag “<meta name=”author” tells the search engine who the author of the homepage is.
	The tag “<meta name=”description” tells the search engine something about your homepage.
	The tag “<meta name=”keywords” lang=”en” tells the search engine which key words have to be used to find your homepage.
	The part that starts with “lang=”en” tells that the page is in the English language.

Insert this after the <head> section.

<html>
<head>
<title>My homepage</title>
<meta name="author" content="your name">
<meta name="description" content="This is my first homepage. I hope you like it”>
<meta name="keywords" lang="en" content="me, you, homepage, like, welcome, hello">
</head>

This is how they know that your email exist

Now you need a valid email address because most search engines want to have your email address before they add your site in their database. It have to be a valid email address because you have to sent an activation code back to them (in most cases). This is how they know that your email exist and yes the spam attack begins!

Create a free email account

If you want to submit your homepage to a search engine and they want to have your e-mail address, then I suggest that you should create a free email address first. We have done this with the use of http://www.mynetscape.com (not a hotmail account because we don’t want to give Bill Gates all the credits).

Another way to promote your site is to search for guest books on other homepages, write something nice about their site and add your URL to your message and let the traffic begin. I also suggest that you should use your ‘spam email address’ if you need to give your email address because you can receive junk mail.

Good luck!