How To Market Your Class Reunion
Making a class reunion website is the best thing you can do to help plan
your reunion and generate a lot of interest that will make your classmates
want to attend the event. Today, it is easy to create a class reunion
website with no technical skills whatsoever using a reunion website builder.
The key to getting people to view your class reunion website is encouraging
word of mouth among your classmates. You should get as many email addresses
of classmates as you can and send a broadcast email that encourages everyone
to forward the website address to their old friends from high school. People
should be encouraged to update their profile on the class reunion website
with a picture and a brief description of what they have been up to.
It is recommended to create a missing classmates page on your high school
reunion website and list those whose contact info you don't have so that
your classmates will help you look for specific people. You should also ask
your high school and alumni association if you can put a link from their
websites to your class reunion website.
Getting Listed In Search Engines:
The best way to broadcast your class reunion website is through word of
mouth, but people do often ask how their high school reunion website can be
found in the search engines if their classmates search for it.
The same principles that exist for any website also apply to your high
school reunion website. Showing up in the "regular" listings of the search
engines is no easy feat. The search engines change the criteria that they
use in their algorithms regularly. However there are a few accepted
principles that the experts agree you need to do in order to have a chance
of appearing in the natural search engine listings.
Submit Your Website to the search engines:
Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL are the biggest search engines. You should
submit to each of them one at a time. Never use a service that tells you
they will submit your website to hundreds of search engines. The search
engines do not like when people auto submit and they will not index you if
you do it. Don't waste your time with every little search engine, the ones
mentioned above are the biggest and cover most of the Internet.
Search Engine Submission Links
google.com/addurl.html
search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
dmoz.org/add.html
Try to get other sites that are relevant and that already appear in the
search engines to link to your website. Ask your high school, and alumni
association to link to your website as well.
You should try to use the keywords people search on to find a website like
yours, in the content of your website. It is important to strike a balance
between having important keywords and still making sense to the reader.
Customize your Meta tags. Meta tags are invisible tags, or code, embedded in
your web page which are read by the search engine robots to learn more about
the content of your website. The jury is out on how beneficial they actually
are, (some say not at all) but it certainly does not hurt, and probably
helps a lot, to follow the proper protocol in order to help your website get
listed.
Even after you do all of the things above, there is no guarantee you will
get listed on the first couple pages of the search engines. Your chances of
getting listed on the first page for certain keywords depends on many
factors, such as how competitive your topic is, the quality and quantity of
the links going to your website, how long your website has been live for and
some factors that change all the time. You should at least show up under the
title of your website though, which is important for most people.
Remember though that the number one factor for marketing your class reunion
is through word of mouth. The old adage of they told two friends and so on
and so on, holds true for a class reunion as much as anything.
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