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Advanced Tips For Promoting Your Website
Professional
WebMasters will often submit your webpage to major search engines.
Due to the vast amounts of new sites they receive every day (literally
thousands) it is hard for anyone to guarantee that your site will
appear in the top sites listed, or even above your competitor's
listing. And naming your site AAAA-ABLE-WIDGETS.COM
does not necessarily guarantee you will show up before your biggest
competitor with ZYZYX-WIDGETS.COM.
Many search engines use other factors when ranking relevancy of
returns to a search inquiry.
Now don't think just
because you built it they will come you have to submit it to the
search engines. A lot of the sites that used to take free
submissions now are charging. Yahoo for example now charges 299.99
per year for a listing and because the listings are alphabetized
you might be many pages down the list.
"So,
how do I get my web site recognized?" you ask... Optimize
and Advertise! Here are some suggestions to help you promote
your website, including some tips on how to submit them yourself,
and get the recognition and traffic that your site deserves.
Remember a true unique domain name will always win out over
a site hosted on a free service like geocities or homestead.
This means that if your address is www.tcsn.net/mybusiness,
a site named mybusiness.com will rate higher and hence be listed
higher on the search engines if they even list the first type
of address at all.
OPTIMIZE
Site
Name
You may even decide that for maximum visibility and name recognition
you need a top level domain name (my_company.com).
This helps give your site a more professional look. E-mail links
can make you appear even bigger: (example info@my_company.com
or sales@my_company.com instead of
joe@my_provider.net). It also helps
with search engines and spiders indexing your site.
Keywords
or META TAGS
These are the words that many search engines display (except Yahoo
who uses the description that you supply). If you go to your home
page and click on View:Source you will be able to see
these key words. Review them to ensure they capture any search
that might apply to your site.
Content
Is King!
Remember the guys that had the competing widgets sites? Why does
one show up on lists before the other? CONTENT! Does your
site mention your topic, product or service often within the text,
or have you relied strictly on cool graphics to spread your message?
Remember, many search engines and spiders dig down into your site
when they index it and look at the text content and rank listings
by relevancy based on content. Some will read the actual
File
Names and the
Alternate Text tags for graphics,
too, when ranking sites, so don't overlook those! Also, some engines
rank sites higher that contain more pages on a search topic, so
it's often better to break up long-winded pages into several shorter
ones. Also makes easier reading!
ADVERTISE
Conventional
Media
Where should you include your internet address? Everyplace your
company name and phone number appears! Be sure to include your
URL or website address in all the advertising that you
do, including business cards, newspaper, radio and television
ads. Include the cost of Internet advertising into your overall
business plan and business expenses.
Search
Engine Submittals
Here is your chance to finally do something productive while
your surfing around the internet.Your WebMaster may handle this,
or you may choose to submit them yourself or have a submittal
company do it for you (like www.WebPromote.com
). It is important to keep abreast of major search and directory
listing lead times and keep this in mind when you make your
submittals. One site you might want to give a try is http://simplesubmit.com
Promoting Your Site
After you have spent hours creating your site, and have posted
it on a
server, you really want people to come look at it. But in
order to get people to visit your site, you have to promote it.
Very few people will find your site by accident -- something has
to lead them there.
There are many different techniques you can use to draw
people to your site. This chapter will teach you many of the
angles you can use to increase site traffic.
Registering With Search Engines
Search
engines read a Web page and index all of the words from the
page. Users of the search engines can find your page by
searching for keywords. The good thing about search engines is
that they let you find everything that contains a certain
word, or set of words. The bad thing about search engines is
that they generally return a lot of chaff with the wheat.
From a Web promotion standpoint, the nice thing about search
engines is that it is easy to get your site listed on them. Each
search engine includes somewhere on its page a "submit a site"
link, or something along those lines. Using this link, you will
be able to complete a form (some lengthier than others) which
requests to have your site listed with them. Your site will not
be added immediately, and sometimes it will take several
submissions over a period of time before your site is listed.
Each search engine is different. Also, be sure to submit each
one of your pages individually to make sure that the keywords
from each separate page are incorporated.
Here is a list of the URLs to some of the major search
engines' "submit-a-site" pages:
For an extensive list of other search engines, try
this list from Yahoo.
Registering With Link Sites
A link site lists various sites in some sort of hierarchical
structure. Each site is placed in a category and given a short
description. Yahoo is the best example of this sort of site, but
there are now many others trying to do the same sort of thing in
different ways.
Most of these sites are very slow to pick up new
sites, because people must review each submitted site before it
can be added to the collection of links. The following links
point to the home pages of each of these link sites, because you
have to review the site to figure out the category for your
submission before you can add your URL. Once you find the proper
category, look for an "Add URL" button to add your site.
For an extensive list of other link sites, try
this list from Yahoo.
Business Listing Services
If your site is business-related, you should submit it to all of
the following sites. These sites will list your business in
their directories, some for free and some for a fee:
Registering for Awards Sites
Award sites either present your site to the world (typically for
an hour or a day as a unique or "Cool" site), or they give your
site some sort of award that you can display in the form of a
logo pasted on your site. In all cases, you must register with
these sites in order to be considered for recognition. The
following sites are some of the most popular award sites
available:
For an extensive list of award sites, try
this list from Yahoo!.
Registration Services
The companies listed below will register your site on hundreds
of search engines, sometimes for a fee. Most of them also offer
other Web promotion services as well. Several of these sites
offer information on promoting your site yourself, so you might
want to visit them to see if you can pick up ideas.
The key thing to recognize, especially when considering
whether or not to use these services for search engine
registration, is that they are doing nothing that you can't do
yourself. You can register your site just as well as they can,
and all you need to know is in this series. It is simply a
question of how best to use your time.
For an extensive list of other registration services, try
this list from Yahoo!.
Reciprocal Linking
Reciprocal linking is an "I'll scratch your back if you'll
scratch mine" activity. The idea is to locate sites related to
yours and send them e-mail asking them to link to you. In
return, you generally offer to link back to them.
The best way to set up reciprocal links is to simply browse
the Web looking for related sites and send e-mail to them. You
will find that the response rate is perhaps 25 percent. But it
can't hurt to try, and the more links you have on the Web the
more traffic you will get. One link in exactly the right place
can make a BIG difference in the traffic that a new site
receives.
The following are a couple of resources for creating
reciprocal links:
Paid Advertising
If you need traffic fast, one of the best ways to get it is to
pay high-traffic sites to advertise your service. Paid
advertisements typically appear as long, thin, blinking ads at
the top of Web pages, and they are called
banner ads
(there are lots of other types of ads, though -- check out
How
Web Advertising Works for details). Here are three examples
of banner ads:
Most larger sites, with traffic in the range of 10,000 or
more visitors a day, have standard advertising programs. A
typical rate is something in the area of $15 to $70 per 1,000
presentations of your ad. The key is to find a site that will
let you target your advertisements specifically to people who
will be interested in your message.
For lots of information about banner ads, see
How Banner
Ads Work. The following links offer information on the
advertising programs of some of the larger search engines. Most
search engines offer some form of advertising -- look around on
the home page and you will generally find a link to information
about advertising on the site:
More Information on Web Site
Promotion
The following articles will be useful in learning more about Web
site promotion and marketing:
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Resources!
- The HowStuffWorks
Big List of HTML Tags - A printable, one-page
reference guide that contains all of the common HTML tags
on one easy sheet!
- The
Try It! page - Type in (or cut-and-paste) any
piece of HTML code and see how it will look immediately! (Try
It Now!)
- This article's detailed
Table of Contents - Helps you find things fast!
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I'm sure these
handy tips will help you to develop your site profile and increase
traffic also. Remember... a busy site is more profitable and more
hits equals more buyers.
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