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You may have a great website. But unless you do some promotion, people won't even know it's there.


 

 Website Promotion

  


How to promote your website

Search engine submission, meta-tags, and pay-for-submission are important ways of promoting your website.  We use these and other methods, to promote your site.  We also know what not to do.

There are many ways to promote your website.  

Submit your site to search engines
Most people will initially find you via search engines.  Submit your site to the big engines, to relevant topic-specific or regional engines, and to websites related to yours. 

There are only a few dozen major search engines, with the vast bulk of your hits coming from the top ten - with the vast bulk majority of that coming from, of course, Google.

Currently Google accounts for 60-80% of referrals that websites get from search engines. That is a huge number. Yahoo is still important, and MSN and everyone else are almost off the map. 

Beware of those who guarantee a "top ranking in all the search engines" as no one, for example, can guarantee a top ranking in Google or Yahoo.  They do not make their ranking algorithms public.  Therefore, no one can guarantee a top ranking in them (unless, obviously, you are paying them, and have the highest bid on a search phrase at a site like Google or Overture).

Have links and be linked to.   
Search engines, especially Google, rank websites by the quality and quantity of incoming links. The best way to get quality incoming links is by having a compelling website. Seriously! And the quality of the incoming links is much more important than the quantity of links. Note that these are incoming links, Google doesn't care how many outgoing links you have.

Advertise.  
Find sites with the same interests as yours, then advertise.  Put your web site URL as the signature on your email.  Start an email newsletter on your site. find sites to link to you.  Most importantly, use pay-per-click advertising.

This site uses pay-per-click advertising on Google quite successfully, especially for our Clipper and Foxpro to Windows page. See our Pay for Placement article for more on how this works.

Provide useful content. A website that presents useful information will get linked to by other websites. And search engines like such websites too. A quality site will rise in the rankings because people use it. Advertising and search engine submissions will get them there the first time, the content is what keeps them coming back. This can not be repeated too often!

 



How NOT to promote your site! 

Cloaking 
Cloaking is a sneaky maneuver some websites use to attempt to trick search engines.

By cloaking, the website tries to detect incoming search engine spiders, then gives them special 'spider bait' pages stuffed with keywords supposed to get them high rankings.

Search engines hate cloaking, they will ban you from their engines if they discover you doing it.  

Doorway pages
Doorway pages are HTML pages generated by specialty software.  They claim to be optimized for one search phrase for one search engine, and point to your home page.

They may have worked several years ago.  They don't anymore.  Search engines consider them to be spam and penalize sites that use them.

Link farms
Some websites, like FFA sites, exist solely to have lists of links.  No one reads them. Search engines ignore them and may actually downgrade you for using them. 

Spam, spam, spam
Don't spam the search engines.  Submit your site once, then wait a few weeks before trying again.  Spam makes them cranky.  This includes position-checking software too.