Promoting Your Site

1. Target Audience

Determine who your target audience is so you will be able to prioritize your promotions

• shopper
• surfer
• self helper

Identify your content and interest level for the user. Know what the user will search for and how they will find your site.

• FAQ- help file
• Humor
• Entertainment
• store
• reference
• genealogy

2. Preparing site for listing

Listing with search engines is a tricky thing. If you do not take the time to prepare your site for the search engines, then you may be wasting valuable energy on trying to get listed. Search robots will visit your site and rate your site based on content found in the meta tags, the title, the words on the body, the links, etc, based on the specific criteria of the search engine. Therefore it is important to make sure you have at least your main pages prepared for crawling.

• see the metatag generator
• robots tag to prevent crawling
• revisit tag
• description tab
• title tag
• keywords tag
• doc type if it is special.

• title of site
• comment tags for missing items such as flash contained links and text
• alt tags on your images so they are indexed

Resources

Search Engine checker

• Host Pulse

Link checker

• Host Pulse
• Apply Tools

You can start with a free multiple listing service.  Below are a few available for free.

• Bravenet

altavista hotbot infomak anzwers

intersearch-au northernlight lycos acoon.de

webwombat voila euroferret altavista.de altavista.au

fireball exactseek google whatyouseek aesop

• ADDME

  Lycos Northern Light Google DirectHit

  HotBot Scrub FAST Search Alexa REX

  National Directory ExactSeek InfoSpace Search It

  Voila NerdWorld Excite Mall Park EntireWeb

• Submitt Express 40 engines for free

  Engines
  Lycos Google Yahoo Web Pages	Wisenut AOL Search ICQ iT HotBot	iWon.com DirectHit Fast Search (AllTheWeb.com)	Northern Light Whatuseek
  Metasearch
  Search.com Metacrawler Dogpile Mamma C4 Canada.com Query Server	Ask Jeeves 800go ByteSearch Debriefing Highway 61 37.com Infogrid	SurfWax qbSearch ProFusion Proteus Go 2 Net MegaGo.com WebInfoSearch	TheBigHub myGO Megacrawler OneSeek MetaSpider Vivisimo ixquick

 

• Submit It free

  Google

  HotBot

  Lycos

  WebCrawler

 

• DMOZ.org
• Yahoo
• Snap
• Look Smart

 

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• Spyder spotting

Webcrawler -  Slurp - Scooter - Sidewinder - Architext - Spyder - T-Rex - Googlebot -

webcrawler Hot Bot Alta Vista Info Seek Excite Lycos Google

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5.  Other Promotionals that often go unnoticed

• Email lists - email announcements of new content and specials

Keep track of your visitors and make them feel welcome to come back. Give them a reson to come back. Announce the new and exciting additions to your site!

• Post your site on Free For All links in a variety of places

Many free for all links get crawled by bots and it offers another way for your site to be crawled.

• Participate in banner exchanges

  Again another way to get crawled by listing your site on another site. Banner exchanges with similar sites can be very productive in that it targets your audience.

• Guest books

  Many guest books get listed in search engines and therefore it is a good place to list your site, site description and so forth. Also, when posting in a guestbook, if they allow html, post your banner and hyperlink it back to your site so that it is easily picked out from the guestbook and will attract users to your page.

• Web rings

  Web rings are used for linking sites with similar interest. This means that someone who hits your site through a web ring will be more likely to be interested in your content.
   

• link exchanges
• Word of mouth
  • Email chains - send it to every one you know and ask them to send it on to those they know.
  • instant messaging - send to all on your lists in icq, paltalk, aim, msn, yahoo, etc.
  • Message Boards
    • Yahoo Groups
    • MSN groups
    • Other boards relevant to the subject