HTML Coding
Lost and Found
By Laura Lemay
Few people actually surf the Web anymore. Or at least, not in the original definition of the word. Plenty of people explore the Web. Lots of people, myself included, spend far too much time reading pages (and waiting for them to download). But few still jump from one site to another site to another by following links, hoping to find something interesting.
There's simply too much stuff on the Web these days to wander aimlessly in search of good stuff. Many Web surfers these days rely on word-of-mouth to find interesting sites (URLs sent to them by friends or reviewed in magazines or other sites), or they use one of the half-dozen or so professional search engines such as Alta Vista, Yahoo, or Excite to locate sites that focus on a particular topic.
While all of us would love to have our site profiled in a magazine or on TV, search engines are the most immediately useful tool for getting noticed on the Web. After you've finished designing and creating a site, the next step is to get it listed in as many search engines as you can and to tailor your pages to take advantage of a search engine's features.
Getting Listed in Search Engines
The first step, of course, is to get your site and its pages listed in as many search engines as possible. Different search engines have different ways of accumulating pages for their databases. Indexes such as Yahoo rely on site managers to add their own listings to the index. More popular are the Web spiders or robots, such as Alta Vista, that jump from link to link and accumulate pages on their own.
