Chapter 4
Making Your Site
Useful and Visible
In This Chapter
Understanding the basic rule of Web success
Knowing why search engines like content
Making your site work for visitors and search engines
O
bviously, it’s important to create Web pages that search engines will
read and index, pages that you hope will rank well for important key-
words. But if you’re going to build a Web site, you need to step back and
figure out what purpose the site should serve and how it can accomplish that
purpose.
Creating a useful site is the key. Even if your sole aim is to sell a product online,
the more useful the site is to visitors, the more successful it’s likely to be. Take
Amazon.com, for instance. It certainly wasn’t the first online retailer of books
and music, or any of the other products it offers. But one of Amazon’s real
strengths is that it doesn’t just sell products; it’s a really useful site, in many
ways:
It provides tons of information about the products it sells. The informa-
tion is useful even if you don’t buy from Amazon.
You can save information for later. If you find a book you’re interested in
but don’t want to buy right now, save a link to it and come back next
month, year, or five years from now.
Other site owners can become partners and make money by promoting
Amazon.
Other businesses can easily sell their products through Amazon.
You can read sample chapters, look at tables of contents, listen to snip-
pets of music, and so on.
You can read product reviews from both professional reviewers and
consumers.
