The library has many entrances - millions, actually, but in practice, only about a hundred or so that see significant traffic. These entrances have a number of signs in front of them directing people to various rooms, shelves, books and pages. It's a very, very big library, so almost no one is going to stumble on a specific book just by randomly browsing around. Some people like to follow interesting-looking paths through related sites, and others ask a "librarian" for the material they want, or use a "card catalog" called a search engine that indexes pages according to what's written on them.

A page that is featured prominently near one of the "front entrances" of the library that many people walk in through is likely to get plenty of exposure. However, a page put down at random on the shelves of this incredibly massive library may never be seen at all, ever, by anyone, if it is not properly indexed and filed by the "card catalogs" and the "librarians" of cyberspace.

For instance, if you would like to find a web page on the topic of Native American recipes, you can head to a search engine such as Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek or AltaVista and type in your search parameters. These can be simple or complex. For instance, +(native.american OR Indian) +recipes -India -curry will yield you some likely results and eliminate some of the items you don't want. For narrower results, "native american recipe" might work just as well. Check the syntax of the particular engine you are using, as they vary somewhat in their ifs, ands, ors and buts. What all search engines have in common is that you must ask them for web pages that meet your criteria, and they will deliver them to you.

It's important to understand that you do have to ask before you get any information delivered to your screen at all. If you (or your customer) does not know how to ask for your web page, or it isn't prominently linked to an already popular site, he or she isn't likely to stumble on it by accident. Your website's popularity depends on its being presented to people who ask for the kind of information that is on your site.

So what can a Web site do for you, if it isn't quite the instant road to riches that the salesman promised? Think of it as a convenient way to conserve paid ad space in regular, "push" oriented media such as magazines, newspapers or radio. Anyone who has your URL (and a computer, and a modem, and a good browser) can choose to pull up a great deal more information than you can afford to deliver in a paid ad. The trick is in getting them to make that choice to access it.

You can advertise your web page URL in a regular magazine or newspaper ad. Your customers who see the ad can then print out an easy map of driving directions to your restaurant, gaze hungrily at attractive photos of your restaurant and your signature dishes and read your full menu listings and entertainment schedules. You can include other fun extras, such as clicking on menu items to get a mouthwatering photo of the dish being described. You can link to other food sites with reviews of your restaurant (hopefully positive), or to recipes for your popular dishes, or interviews with the chef.

Think of your web page as an advertising brochure that doesn't cost you anything for printing, because people can access it at home. The trick is getting them to access it. It is not an automatic process. Even if you do submit your page to the major search engines, keep in mind that thousands and thousands of other people with pages similar to yours are doing the same thing, and someone typing in a query about Cajun restaurants in Los Angeles is likely to get a page or more of listings of other people's web sites before yours even hits their screen. Your restaurant's page might not even make the top fifty, even though there might not be fifty Los Angeles Cajun restaurants. The reason for this is the complex way that search engines use key words and coded HTML tags to determine rankings.

No, this method is not fair, especially when a lot of unscrupulous page owners use techniques like "salting" a page with a great number of hidden words in order to get them to show up on many totally unrelated searches. Fortunately, search engines are getting smarter every day, and many of them have learned to recognize "salting" and bogus keyword repetition techniques. The subject of how to get your site ranked more highly on search engines is a highly complex one, and worthy of some additional reading and research. A few tips follow.

Tips To Increasing Web Site Traffic

You could design a frames-only, graphics heavy site that has moving animation, live video feed from a webcam to the kitchen, QuickTime movies of the chef in action, dancing carrots and chickens, glorious MIDI sound and music and a culinary search engine with a hundred web ring foodie links.

Bells and whistles on the Web are very large and very impressive and can do lots of nifty things. Having a lot of interesting links can be very useful and educational. Except that these things can actually be detrimental to a commercial web site aimed at the general market of restaurant-goers.

Only the most dedicated foodie is going to hang around for more than fifteen seconds to let your home page load, and only a dedicated graphics geek is going to have or download the esoteric extra software plugins necessary to actually see or hear your complicated chorus of dancing chickens. Don't make this mistake - keep your website attractive and even interactive, but simple enough to be accessible to people with older computers and browsers who don't have a T1 line or the latest graphical interfaces. That's going to be the majority of your market.

A good rule of thumb concerning links on your page is to ask yourself whether or not the average person surfing outwards from your site is likely to come back and look at the rest of what you have to present, or whether you have just distracted them right off your site for good. If your site is content-heavy enough that you're willing to bet they'll come back, it's probably safe to offer as many links as you have room for. If you have reciprocal links, these can also make it easy for your would-be customer to return. But if your page is simple and boring, and you direct readers to a professionally slick site like Bon Appetit Online, the chances of their ever coming back are slim to none.

There are HTML tools that can help with this particular issue by directing a browser to open a second window to view the linked site, without ever leaving your site in the original window. Some people serve the contents of other sites in frames from their own site, but this is often considered an annoying or even unethical practice. Study the issues involved, learn the code, and make your own decisions on how to handle the issues of bells, whistles and links.

The Big Mistakes, Or "What's Up With The Dancing Chicken?"

A summary of some of the mistakes commonly made when building a restaurant web page:

• Bells and whistles - You may think your dancing fried chicken animation is the neatest thing you've ever seen. But if it takes forever to load, and visually distracts the customer from the real information on the page, you're not helping your cause any by overloading your site with annoying bells and whistles. Music can be a cool addition, but nothing is more annoying that a repeated loop of the same sounds over and over again, and a longer clip takes more time to load. Not every browser is equipped to handle frames. Keep it clean, tasteful and simple, and easily accessible to people that don't have a T1 line and $10,000 worth of computer equipment and software.

• Leaving it in the dark - Don't build a web page and expect people to go look at it simply because it's there. They won't. You have to make them want to pick out your page as a destination out of the millions of other destinations available on the Web. That means making active efforts towards publicizing your site, both in conventional media and online with search engines and links from already established and popular sites.

• Copyright violations - just because it's up on somebody else's web site does not mean it is free for your use. You can get into an unbelievable amount of trouble if you steal somebody else's graphic without permission and use it on a commercial site. There is such a thing as royalty-free art, but make sure you investigate the terms before using anything you find in a collection of "free" graphics. Also, don't necessarily trust that everything you find on the Web is safe or true - anyone can put up a collection of somebody else's copyrighted material and tell you that you can go ahead and use it for free. And often, they do. Invest in a simple digital camera, buy an inexpensive photo editing program and learn to make your own icons. Or pay someone else to do it. Just don't steal.

• Intrusion without alternatives - This is really a corrolary to the bells and whistles rule. JavaScript and cookies are potentially cool and useful, but they are intrusive - they compromise the security of the end user's computer, and many people will not allow their use. If you don't offer alternatives (cgi scripts or other non-intrusive alternatives to producing the effects you want), people who won't allow security compromises won't want to visit your site.

There are a lot of sites, some of them free, some of them quite expensive, that claim to submit your URL to "hundreds of search engines" or more honestly, to hundreds of "link pages". What they won't tell you, especially before they take your money or your email address or both, is that the vast majority of these sites (all but perhaps twenty) are either completely worthless to you or exist only for the purpose of harvesting your email address and personal statistics to sell for commercial uses. These sites are called "spam traps", and they are pure cyberspace poison.

Once your email address is in the hands of a spamtrap site, you can expect to recieve mass amounts of junk mail for years to come. This is truly the gift that keeps on giving, since spammers continue to make money off of you by selling your email address and any other information they have about you to as many junk mail businesses as they can.

Safer Web Surfing: Don't Take Cookies From Strangers

Normally, all this means is that you can see nifty graphics, play their interactive games or listen to their sound bytes. Ethical web site owners use the capability of executing commands on your computer to offer you better and richer content that you can enjoy. But not all web site owners are ethical, and you should understand that it is A Bad Idea to give these permissions to everyone.

While you are searching around for sites which can submit your URL or help publicize your web site, you may well come across some of the sleazier sites in the marketing category. There are some very intrusive data collecting programs resident on many of these sites, and it is unlikely that you would give your permission to some of the things they do on your computer if you knew about them. To help increase your personal safety and privacy online, you should consider the following Safer Surfing checklist. Use the "help" function on your browser for instructions that are more specific to the software you are using.

• Turn cookies off, or ask the browser to warn you before accepting a cookie. If possible, ask your browser software to perform a security check on the issuing site to make sure that it is one you trust before you make the decision to accept anything it wants to put on your hard drive. Netscape has this feature built in; you only need to point and click.

• Turn Java and JavaScript off. Only turn them back on after asking for a security check to make sure that this is a site you trust, if the site has some good graphics, music or games you want to play that are dependent on Java.

• Change your email settings and preferences before you go surfing. Never leave your email address set when you are randomly browsing the Web. Type it in manually before an email session begins. If this is too much trouble, use your free Hotmail address as the default setting, as this is easily spam-filtered and disposable if necessary.

Here are a few tips for keeping spam from your door in other places on the Net.

• When you post to Usenet, don't leave your real email address in the headers - add nonsense characters or a word like NOSPAM or REMOVE.THIS that a human can identify and screen out, but a sieving spambot cannot.

• For goodness sake, don't commit spam yourself. Never advertise your commercial web page on Usenet unless you know that the charter of a particular newsgroup specifically allows such postings. Most don't. Unsolicited email to promote your page or product is equally unwelcome, and considered the equivalent of cyber-vandalism. You can lose your account if you spam.

• Don't use mailto links on your web page, unless you link them to a disposable email address that you're prepared to deal with filtering spam through. There is software constantly running on the Web that harvests and sells these email addresses to persistent junk mailing lists.

• That same spammer software is constantly hunting Usenet and the Web to look for valid email addresses. Any time you publish a valid email address, it is likely to be pounced on immediately. The solution? On Usenet, you can ask your email program to munge the address (baygourmet@hotmailNOSPAM.com) so that humans can decipher it and bots cannot. On your web page, you can insert HTML tags into the address to make it display correctly to a browser, but not to a spambot that only reads source code.

Many WWW spiders are good and useful. Search engines rely on spiders to get your website indexed, and others are used for research purposes. Without the power of spiders, the Web would be a pretty confusing place, because it would be much harder to sort out the large mass of data. But wherever a piece of good, powerful technology exists, it's pretty much a given that some people are going to take advantage of it for themselves, sometimes in selfish or even destructive ways.

You want to encourage the good spiders to come and visit your web site so that you can be listed and accessible to folks who are looking for the kind of information you offer. However, you should know that there are also bad spiders belonging to people who want to gather literally millions of email addresses so that they can sell them to companies who want to send out massive amounts of junk mail. These spiders will crawl your web page and grab any email addresses they find there. The next thing you know, all of those email addresses are on junk mail lists forever, and you can expect to wake up on a regular basis to find that you, along with several million other people, are being asked to call questionable phone numbers that begin with 1-900, purchase the secrets of how to steal from cable companies or to buy into a telemarketing scheme.

The annoyance factor is bad enough, but what makes it worse is that businesses that spam are literally stealing to advertise their products. It costs nothing but some time hooked up to an existing Internet connection to send millions of pieces of email. But it costs the people who own the machines that make up the network real money for the connection time and hard drive storage space for all that data that is sent. If you have a quota on your account space, some of those storage costs can get passed along to you directly.

A fair analogy is that of the now-illegal "junk fax", where the spammer makes you pay for the expensive paper and ink used in his advertising. Junk email is basically the same thing, only it's someone else's hard drive space instead of someone else's paper and ink that gets stolen for spammer moneymaking schemes.

Ethical businesses pay fair and square for their own advertising. Spam isn't fair, and you don't want any. So let's learn how to squish those bad spiders.

The conclusion is fairly obvious: these (and perhaps a handful of others) are the only really useful search engines to be listed in. You can submit your URL to them manually by clicking on the appropriate links and following their directions. It doesn't cost anything to do this. Voila - you've just saved yourself a lot of money, or spam email, or both, by taking a few minutes per major search engine to do this yourself.

The downside about the large search engines is, of course, that many other web pages with content similar to yours are listed before you. The average person doing a web search selects a few results from the first page he or she is presented with, and discards the rest. So if you aren't in the top 20 listings for your category, chances are that you will get many fewer hits from that search engine.

You can help your search engine rankings by making sure that key words appear often on your site. You want someone who types in a query about seafood restaurants in Boston to come up with your site, if you happen to be such an establishment. That means that those key words (seafood, Boston restaurant) should appear often on your site, particularly in your header tags. Remember, no cheating - many search engines have algorithms that tell them if you have unfairly loaded your page with repetitious key words with no other text in between. They'll boot you back to the bottom of the listings if they catch you, or remove you from their index altogether.