Telling Everyone
About Your Web Site
  After you have spent hours creating your site you really want people to come look at it.

 
  ~ Posting Web
          to a Server

   ~ Telling 
          Everyone!

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 following companies 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.

Free:

Pay:

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 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. Here are three examples:

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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