There is a general disbelief that as soon a website has been uploaded on to the internet, the search engines will automatically index their site and people will start visiting it from Day 1. For this to happen you need to concentrate on website promotion, the most important step in making your business succeed online.
To help you promote and maintain your web site, we have dedicated a whole section of our web site to site promotion. We hope that you will find these articles, guidelines and tips useful.
Let's start with the basics that will help give your website a powerful Net presence.
But an important note before that -There are many methods that you can use to promote your web site; however one rule remains the same. Make sure that your web site is 100% ready to be submitted before you begin with promotion so that there is no chance of either
- anyone rejecting your web site or
- disappointing visitors who come to your site.
Now, back to the basics
- Submitting to Search Engines
The first and most important method of promotion is submitting your web site to search engines and directories. To achieve this, the webmaster fills out a form that tells the search engine or editor (in case of a directory or site) to visit and index the suggested site.
Here is a checklist of things you must do in order to submit your website to search engines-
- Preparing your web pages by inserting Meta tags
You must submit your web site only after you have prepared your web pages for the search engines by inserting appropriate meta tags such as keywords, description and title, on all your web pages.
Preparing your web pages for effective web site promotion is crucial as it can lead to high search engine ranking for your website.
For your site to score high with search engines, you will need to optimize your web site, which means you have to improve your
- HTML
- website load time
- browser compatibility and
other factors only after which you should submit your site.
Note – you can evaluate and improve your website by using Free Web Site Analysis Software.
- Finally, it's time to submit!
Once the site has been optimized, you can submit your site to various search engines. Since search engines generate approximately 90% of web site traffic, we recommend that you submit your site to all the major search engines.
For submitting your website
- Use the form for site suggestions by clicking on the links such as "Add a site" or "Suggest a URL.", found on the home page of the top search engines OR
- Jump to our article which has links to all submission forms and tips on submission, so you don't have to spend hours looking for them OR
- Click here to see a list of major search engines and their submission pages
2. Submitting to Directories
Once you have submitted your web site to all the top search engines, it is time to submit your site to the important directories such as Yahoo, Looksmart, AOL etc. Submitting to Directories is different from submitting to Search Engines as human editors review your site and accept or reject your site according to its quality.
Before submitting to Directories, you need to
- make sure that your site is 100% ready
- carefully follow the guidelines while you submit your site.
Click here to read more about submitting your web site to directories.
Note: Though there are a number of free search engine submission tools available, but I suggest that you
- submit your web site manually the first time
- never use these free tools while submitting to Directories, instead do it manually.
Don't worry, submitting to search engines is very easy. Preparing your web pages with the appropriate meta tags is the only aspect that is a bit time consuming.
3. Other Internet Marketing Techniques
Since web site promotion is an ongoing process with thousands of web sites being added every day, the competition is getting tougher by the minute! Therefore most of the sites listed on the search engines are getting lost as a result of the 100 -10,000 other web sites in the same field. This is because most people don't look at more than 2-3 search result pages, thus the web sites that are not found in these pages are lost in the competition.
Hence new promotion techniques are being developed to deal with this problem. Some of them are as follows:
"Link popularity" refers to the number of sites that are linked to your site and is a very important Internet marketing technique which is rapidly gaining importance. Search engines usually check your link popularity and based on how popular your site is, give you a higher ranking. Therefore you must try getting as many quality links as possible to boost your search engine position.
Click here to read more about link popularity and ranking high in the search engines.
Most people come to the Internet for quality information. Therefore by writing quality articles
- You can get visitors flocking to your site.
- You can build your credibility and reputation, your visitors thereby using your services in the long run
- You will get more links to your sites \
- Publishing your own ezine or newsletter
Ezines or e-mail newsletters are the latest buzz for marketing on the Internet. Popular ezines usually give current information and resources that will keep subscribers informed and updated. Therefore by publishing your own ezine you can
- increase traffic, hits and sales
- keep in touch with your visitors.
More Internet Marketing Tips Coming Soon! We will continue to update this page so don't forget to bookmark it for your future web promotion endeavors
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