Tips for free web site promotion

Firstly, what not to do

Please, please don't fill in the 'submit your site' forms that the search engines have and expect that this is all you need to do to get into the search engines results. This is a form of free web site promotion but we know from bitter experience that using this method it can actually take well over a year for your site to be listed.

What you need to do is firstly carry out basic optimisation techniques on your site. These include ensuring every page has meta tags for the title, keywords and description, add an H1 tag to every page that includes your main keyword and ensure you have enough instances of the keyword on the page that you wish to optimise for. You also need to include your main keyword in the alt tags for any images you have on your pages.

Only after doing that should you seek links from other sites and listings in directories. This may seem a long winded approach but you need to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to find your site and index it fully. The better the quality of your site and content, the higher the listing you can expect.

To find out more about optimisation and how you can soar your search engine rankings, download a free 90 page guidebook that will give you all the information you require and start you on the road to the best form of free web site promotion.

Get your web site listed quickly

The quickest way to get listed in Google is to obtain an incoming link to your site from a high PR ranked site.

PR ranking is Google's assessment of a web page in terms of importance. Ranking is measured on a scale of 0 to 10 with 0 having no ranking at all up to 10 being the most important. So far we have only seen one page with a PR of 10 and that is www.google.com!

Google regularly spiders the higher ranked web sites and because they attach a certain amount of importance to these sites, tend to follow new links and list them straight away.

Therefore, get a link from a site with say a PR of 6 or above and you could well find your site listed in 24 hours!

You should note that listed does not mean all pages of your site will be spidered straight away. But you will be well on your way to gaining a full listing by being inside the index and marked for a return visit by the second spider that will go through your site more thoroughly.

Another form of free web site promotion is to obtain a link by contacting owners of high PR sites but bear in mind that they will get lots of similar requests and will probably only choose the best. Relevance of your site to theirs and the quality of your content will be very important to them.

Alternatively you can buy a link and there are several sites that offer this service TextLinkBrokers is an example. Here you can get a link from a site with a PR of 6 for a cost of $300 if it is placed on the home page or $150 for a subsidiary page. Note that you will only need the link for as much time as it takes to get listed so the one month fee should be quite sufficient.

Find out more about Page Rank and learn how to find out the PR of every site you visit by installing the
Google Toolbar into your browser.

Get your site listed in authority directories

There is more to getting your site listed than requesting links from other webmasters.

You should apply to the more popular online web site directories for a listing. This is a free or low cost method of web site promotion you will usually have to pay a small fee for a quick listing as these sites are usually monitored by volunteers. Here is a list for you to try:

Yahoo directory - $299 per listing but an important site
DMOZ - probably the most well known directory
Business.com - for industry specific listings

Others:

Gimpsy
GoGuides
JoeAnt
Web-Beacon
Skaffe

There are many other directories but take care to check their PR and the PR of the page you will be listed on. Also check how many sites they already have listed to see of they are well established.

Write articles and submit them to article directories

Why not start writing some articles around the main theme of your web site? Webmasters are always hungry for fresh content and you could provide this for them in return for a link back to your web site.

An easy way to automate this is to submit your articles to an article directory. The idea is that webmasters review the site and download content as required. Every article has a byline at the bottom where you place a short biography and link to your site and achieve another form of free website promotion.

This is a very effective way of publicising your site. Here is a list of some of the article directories you should visit:

GoArticles
Article City
Ezine Articles
iSnare
NetterWeb
Webmaster Paste
Work at home articles

Pay per click advertising

If you want to get your site to the top of the search engine results pages then there is no better way to do it than with pay per click adverts.

The two most popular examples of these are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

These are not free methods of web site promotion but you can obtain great results. With Google Adwords your advert can be live and in front of millions of users within fifteen minutes!

A word of warning, pay per click is a very effective tool however, you do need to be aware of the best way to organise and present your campaigns. It is very easy to spend a lot of money buying traffic that is never going to say, convert to sales.

For instance, a lot of people search for free information and you either need to provide this or learn how to filter out this traffic from your campaigns.

Talking from experience we can thoroughly recommend Perry Marshall's guides to advertising via pay per click. He has been responsible for reducing our advertising costs by 75% at the same time as doubling the traffic!

Start a blog

The search engines still seem to love blogs and crawl them regularly. It is very easy to start one for free at Blogger.com and you can post to it as many times as you like.

Make use of regular links to the different pages of your web site.

Take part in discussion boards

It is usually possible to find a discussion area relevant to the topic of your site. Although it is not good practice to advertise boldly on discussion boards you can often create a signature file to place at the end of your postings. Add your URL here for some free web site promotion and perhaps carry on discussions outside of the group and maybe pick up some business.

Finally, don't forget the obvious

Just because your web site is online doesn't mean that you should only advertise online.

There are many offline places to obtain web site promotion too, newspaper adverts, local business directories, business cards and stationery, local shop windows, school magazines and sponsorship of local events etc.

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