The Active Web Page

So now your web page is active and available for the world to see.  There are steps you can take to make sure users can locate your library on the web:

• Make sure links to your library are added to obvious jumping off points- academic libraries will ideally want a link on the institution's home page- http://www.eckerd.edu/ and http://www.lynn.edu/. Public libraries will want links from community and government web pages, chambers of commerce, visitor bureaus, etc. Smaller towns may put the library directly on the home page- http://www.appleton.org/, while larger cities might list the library in a "directory" section- http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/. Special libraries will want links from parent organizations http://www-lib.fnal.gov/or other closely affiliated organizations/institutions http://www.nlm.nih.gov/locatorplus/locatorplus.html

• It is important to have the library web pages appear as one of the first three results in a web engine/directory search.  Automated programs (bots and spiders) scour the web each day adding, deleting, updating links to their databases, but you can speed the inclusion process along by directly submitting the site's URL. You can do this at http://www.liquidimaging.com/submit/ or you can add your URL at an individual search engine site.  For example, at the very bottom of the AltaVista home page  http://www.altavista.com/, click on "Add a URL".

• Use your META tags wisely! (What are meta tags? see: http://www.altavista.digital.com/av/content/addurl_meta.htm) Make sure the name of your library appears in the META tags and in the title tags.   Relevancy ranked search engine results are often based on the these tags.   Be consistent from page to page, but also keep in mind that HTML editing software, such as Microsoft FrontPage, will add its own META tags.  You can replace auto-generated tags with your own, though.

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