by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1996 by Michael Finley

It is galling to realize that a site like www.chrysler.com, which exists solely to part people from their money, and plenty of it, gets 150,000 "hits" a day, while you, whose objective is to have someone you don't know send you some friendly e-mail, get 11.

So what can you, a small player in the World Wide Web, do to coax traffic in? The conventional approach is to tell the Internet search engines that you exist, and then sit on the front porch and wait for the parade. Which never comes.

One possibility is to try a search engine service like Submit-It (http://www.submit-it.com/) or Add-it (http://www.liquidimaging.com/submit/). These free services will submit information about your site to as many as 50 search engines. But your visitor count will still be light. Why? Because being listed along with 10,000 other sites in your category is not much use. Most searches yield 10 citations, and few searchers look beyond those 10.

An army of non-free web publicity firms has sprung up in recent months to help you get your business to the top of those searches. The main technique they use is adding META tags and keywords to your HTML files so that search engines will list you closer to the top of that list. They all guarantee you will be in the first 10 -- all 10,000 of you. Do the math.

But even for $400, you won't be getting much individual attention from these firms. They are basically form-driven services: you fill out a questionnaire, and the program calculates how best to describe you, and sends e-mail to the search engines in question. Whoopie dinghy.

There's got to be a better way, and I thought I'd found one. A friend of mine, Mark Gisleson, alerted me to an interesting new promotional gimmick. It's called Web Side Story: The Web's Top 1000 Pages (http://www.hitbox.com/wc/world.html). It's a free method for tracking your website's hits, and to promote it to other users. Mark uses it to promote his resume service (http://www.gisleson.com/).

When you sign up for Web Side Story, you add their logo to your website, and thus both you and they enter into an escalating spiral of cross-references. Your visitors find Web Side Story, and if you are getting a critical mass of traffic, Web Side Story's visitors find you. The higher your ranking goes, the more likely people are to take a look at you.

Plus, Web Side Story is a fun program because it creates neat graphs showing you how many people visited you in an hour, and how many were repeats, and how many were first-time visits. Click your mouse and you can compare your July hits with your August hits. If you're into stats, you'll love Web Side Story.

But the funniest thing happened. My website, The Why Things Don't Work Institute (http://mfinley.com/), had been getting a steady, if modest, 50 visits a day. Ten of these are probably from me, because it is my home page, and I log on about that many times a day. But two weeks after signing up with Web Side Story, my daily count has fallen to about 20 visits a day.

I have a long way to go to eclipse the #1 ranking site, The Drudge Report (http://www.drudgereport.com), a compilation of news items and columns which fetches 15,500 hits every day. Especially since I'm losing, not gaining ground.

I also notice that my "ranking" (#165 of all registered "media" web sites using Web Side Story), which fluctuated wildly the first two weeks, has been frozen at #165 for over a week. Which makes me think Web Side Story has itself gone belly up from lack of interest. Which makes me wonder exactly how Web Side Story is making money. I have left e-mail and, as is the way of these things, all I get as an answer is one of those automated responses. ("We thank you for your interest in Web Side Story.") Thank you, Tobor.

That's my cue to get philosophical. I mean, what difference does it make if 20 or 50 strangers stop by every day, especially if 10 of the strangers are you? And what would I do, really, if 50,000 people stopped by, keen to find wisdom to soothe them on their listless plod through the cyber regions? There's too many to feed, and I was never good at names. Maybe that's why Chrysler sells cars -- to fill up the silence.

My new plan is to overhaul the place, throw up a firewall to create an impression of exclusivity, and allow entry by-invitation only. Quality, not quantity, will be the order of the day. That's the ticket. I've got my automated response generator working on it already.

To visit Mike, bring your handwritten invitation to http://mfinley.com, and knock three times. Or write him directly at mfinley@mfinley.com.

Stimulate the economy, give a poet a dollar.