First determine if you really need to promote your site. If you are selling something or trying to get your message out to a very broad audience, then you may need to promote your website. If the content of your site is directed to a small user base or a closed group of people (a bulletin board for a church for example), there is no need to promote the site to the entire World Wide Web. Site Promotion is really not that difficult. It just takes a little time and effort. There are several promotion mechanisms on the web. Search engines are the most common promotion tools and there are many of them. Link Exchanges, Banners and Web Rings are other promotional tools that can be used to attract traffic to your site.
Search engines and indexes
Search engines are search services such as Yahoo and Google. They use an index of URL listings that have been submitted by site owners and reviewed for content and approved for inclusion to the index. To get listed on search engines one should submit to all the major search engines. Use an automated submission service to properly promote your site to all the major search engines and indexes. We use SelfPromotion.com as our standard submission service. Using a submission service is quick and easy, but be prepared for a long wait. Major search engines are taking months (that's months, plural!) to add new listings. Sites submitted to indexes are reviewed either by human reviewers or spiders (automated programs that collect information out of Meta tags and content in your pages). Because search engines get several thousand submissions per hour, it is fair to say that they all have a serious backlog. Bruce Clay, an Internet Business Consultant has developed a
Search Engine Relationship Chart And the links are all active.
Pay Per Click Services
If you sell items or services on the web? It might be worth considering a Pay Per Click service. These services will place your website in the top positions on major search engines based on keywords you select and set a "bid Price" on the amount you pay per click. If someone else has bid 5 cents per hit on the word "puppy" and you bid 7 cents, the search engine will place you above them. The improtant feature of these services is that they generally will place on the first page of a search query. In our opinion, the two best Pay Per Click services are Google's Adword Select and Overture.
Meta tags and key words
Meta tags are lines of code in an HTML page that describes the content and purpose of the website. Spiders collect the information from the Title and Meta tags and use key words or phrases in the search indexes. It is important that you spend a lot of time developing the content of your Meta tags if you are going to have a successful listing in a search engine. Type in a keyword like "FREE" into a search engine and you will get 76 million hits. Type in a key phrase like "FREE PUPPIES" into the same search engine and you will only get 1510 hits
Hint: Use your primary key words in both your "Title" and "Description" Meta tags to get better placement in search pages.
Other promotion tools
Search engines are not the only promotion tools at your disposal, but they are the most important. For any given topic on the web - someone has a link listing. Link lists are a collection of hyperlinks that a site owner has placed on their site to attract traffic to their site. Usually they will include your listing in exchange for a reciprocal listing on your page. Other type of link lists include award ("top 10") sites and Web Rings. Banner exchange services are another promotion tool that is getting very popular. Banner exchanges work like this. You place a random but topic related banner on your site and the banner exchange provider will place your banner in the queue for all the other sites relating to the same topic. This gives your site focused exposure on other websites.
Use this search engine submission tool to submit your website to several search engines at once!
