Promoting your Website
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Promoting your website by using directories and search engines.

There are a number of ways to increase the numbers of visitors to a site, attracting more visitors from search engines is one of the cheapest ways.  After registering your site with search engines, try to tweak your site to make your site more palatable to them.

To submit your site to search engines, you enter information about your site into forms on search engine sites. Alternatively you may have to find a place in their directory (e.g. Yahoo.com) suitable for your site and then ask them to add a link to your page there.

I like Brett Tabke's article Successful Site in 12 months with Google Alone as a concise list of what to do to make Google like you (this also works somewhat for other search engines.

• Suggest your site to the major directories

  The directories that count:

  • Dmoz.org - used by Google, AOL, Netscape and others when calculating search results. There is also a forum covering submission, becoming an editor and other issues.

  • Yahoo.com - used by the Yahoo search engine when calculating search results (payment is required for commercial listings).

  Take your time and find the right category(s) for your site. Don't over submit though otherwise you or your site may be blacklisted.

   

• Submit to many search engines at once

  Pages that allow you to submit your site to many search engines at once. The major search engines (see below) are the important ones, others you can safely ignore.

  • Selfpromotion.com - my favourite, though it requires registration. Offers one month trial usage before you have to re-register ($10 buys you 1 year of use).
  • freepint.com/submit/ - includes tips and links.
  • exeat.com/submit/submit.shtml
  • esato.com/submit/

  See also Dmoz.org's list of free submission services(Google version)

   

• Links to the major search engines

  Here are links to the add pages of the major search engines. You should add your site to all of the search engines for best effect.
  • Google.com/addurl.html
  • Yahoo.com/info/suggest/  (find a category and then suggest your site for addition, non-commercial submissions are free)
  • Lycos.com (free submission is available if you can find it, uses the Fast engine that powers alltheweb.com)
  • Altavista.com

  Pay for inclusion, keyword buying:

  • Google.com - allows the purchase of text adverts in relation to specific keywords
  • Ask.ineedhits.com - for submissions that will be listed on Teoma.com and Ask.com.
  • Searchmarketing.yahoo.com (was Overture) - keyword purchases
  • Looksmart.com - paid for directory listings.

  I'd research hard if I were buying significant amounts of traffic, webmasterworld.com has discussions on whether Searchmarketing.yahoo.com is better value than looksmart.com, for example.

  Laisha.com/search.html - contains detailed, useful advice on submission.  She suggests that some pay for inclusion directories may be worth paying for.

   

• Sites about promotion and site creation:

  Resources for promotion and site creation.

  • Dmoz.org's list of comparison and discussions of site promotion (google version, ordered by popularity) and the website promotion category.
  • Yahoo.com's Site Promotion section.
  • Yahoo thinks it knows the best places to tell people about your site - announcement_services
  • Search Engine Watch - hints on promotion and upcoming tips in the webmasterworld forums.
  • Successful Site in 12 months with Google Alone - Brett Tabke's article
  • Jimworld.com - promotion hints and discussions at Search Engine Forums
  • Philip.greenspun.com/panda/publicizing - Philip Greenspun's "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing: Chapter 7: Publicizing Your Site (Without Irritating Everyone on the Net)", how to best attract search engines.
  • One of the more popular search engines is Google, which uses PageRank as part of determining the order of listings it returns for a given search. You may want to find other relevant websites to link to you.

   

• Want to know what words people are searching for (so you can alter your keywords)?

  Alter your site to attract more visitors from the search engines and paid keywords by knowing what words people type into the search engines.

  • Yahoo's meta-tag category.
  • Yahoo.com -> World_Wide_Web -> Searching_the_Web -> Search_Engines - the most popular search words.
  • Tips-tricks.com - how each search engine spiders your site.
  • Scrubtheweb.com - advice for optimising your meta tags (keywords etc.)
  • Keyword density analyser - takes your pages and finds the most-used words and phrases on the page.
  • Dmoz.org's page on meta-tags
  • inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ - Overture UK's keyword suggestion tool (US version) that suggests similar keywords and phrases.
  • Google's Adwords keyword tool that also suggests similar keywords and phrases..

   

• Learning from the server logs

  See how your visitors are using your site.  Until you look at your logs, you really have no idea what your visitors are looking for when they come to your site.  Your logs are a goldmine of information for expanding your site's content and really satisfying your readership.

  • Philip Greenspun's "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing: Chapter 9: User tracking"

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