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Updated 8/25/2021

Promoting Your Site

Introduction

After you build your or your client's Web site, you need to promote the site so people find it and use it! You should take the task of promotion very seriously. If you have a great site and nobody visits it, what good is it?

Keywords

The term keywords refers to search words and/or phrases that a user might enter into a search engine's "Search" entry text field.

As explained below, the search engines make a list of the keywords that they find in your site's pages, and then they use those lists of keywords to match a user's search words and/or phrases to your site.

The main places where you want to put relevant keywords in your site's pages are:

Regarding the second item in the above list, you still want your headings to primarily assist your readers in finding and digesting the information in your pages. A secondary consideration for your headings can be to put keywords in them as appropriate, and as long as the keywords don't make the headings confusing.

Search Engines

If your site places high enough in a search engine's listing, it will drive a lot of traffic to your site. You have already learned about how to put effective meta tags, title tags, and image alt attributes into your pages. But there are more considerations, too.

Some search engines rank your site based on how many other sites link to your site, especially other popular sites.

Keyword density is important to some search engines. Keyword density is the ratio of keywords to non-keywords in your page. You can analyze the keyword density of your pages free at http://www.keyworddensity.com/ and other sites.

Here are some tips:

  1. Submit your site to the major search engines manually.
    • Look for wording on the search engine site something like "Add URL" or "Submit".
    • Follow the search engine's instructions.
    • If you're in a directory, such as Yahoo!, you will need to navigate to the section that best suits your site, and look for the "Submit" link there.
  2. Hire a service to submit your site to the smaller directories and search engines.

Let's take a look at some of the tools that Google, as an example, makes available to you as the webmaster of your site, to optimize and submit your site to Google's search indexes:

The other major search engine is Bing, which now also includes the Yahoo! search engine.

You can also build a "Crawler Page" to increase your success with search engines. A Crawler Page is basically a site map that lists all of your links on one page. For one thing, a site map is often an aid for your visitors to find what they want. For another thing, some search engines only look two or three levels deep into the interior links and pages on your site. The site map gives your site a chance of being fully indexed. Just make sure that your site map, or crawler page, is one of the pages that is in the top-level folder of your site.

Beware of Submission Service Hype

Some submission services offer to submit your site on a recurring schedule. They claim that you have to submit your site every so often so the search engines will list your site. Be aware that this is not always the case. Some search engines penalize you for submitting your site too often, especially if you have not made any updates or changes to your site.

Some submission services also offer to submit your site to zillions of search engines. Be aware that there are only a dozen or so vital search engines, and a few dozen other important ones. The other sites that the submission service will be submitting your site to are all minor engines.

Reciprocal Links (Link Trading Tips and Tricks)

You can get traffic to your site by using reciprocal links. A reciprocal link means that you put a link to someone else's site on your site, and the other site puts a link to your site on their site. This approach works best if you can get a reciprocal arrangement with another site that has a large volume of traffic and that has content that complements your content.

You might even want to consider reciprocal links with competing sites. If your site is good on its own merits, what do you have to fear? And if someone links to your site from a competitor, that visitor is probably already "qualified" traffic and is still looking for what they want, which they didn't find at your competitor's site!

Your goal should be to provide quality content on your site, including links to other good (even competing) sites. Your visitors will appreciate the quality and possibly even come back to your site because of it.

Okay, so how do you find a site with which to trade links? Here are some ideas:

You can also offer to swap banners ads with sites that currently have no paid ads. Or you can offer them a few dollars to post your banner.

Signature Files

You can use your e-mail signature to promote your site, too. If your e-mail program doesn't have a signature feature, you can make a signature file and copy/paste the signature into your e-mails.

A signature is a short message that you append to the end of an e-mail.

Here are some tips for your signature:

Here is an example of a signature: 

  Regards,
  
  Jim
  
  Owner and Chief Technical Officer
  Link Logical Solutions
  http://www.linklogicalsolutions.com
  jimlink@linklogicalsolutions.com
  
  Link Logical Solutions is your one-stop solution to
  sensible, user-friendly web sites.

Blogs

One fairly recent addition to your possible site promotion activities is what are commonly known as "Blogs".

You can create a blog for just about any topic. There are many free blog provider sites out there. Some of the ones that I know of are:

You can find many other blog services by searching on "free blog service" in Google or your own favorite search engine!

A word of CAUTION: Make sure your blog service allows self/site promotion. It is up to you to adhere to the blog service's User Agreement.

These points almost go without saying, but I will present them anyway:

Facebook

Facebook has a "Facebook Business" section which is packed with information about using Facebook to promote your site and/or business.

Twitter

Twitter has a "Twitter For Business" section which has guidelines and information on using Twitter to promote your site and/or business.

YouTube

YouTube has resources and ideas which you can use to promote your site online. Their starting page is Start advertising on YouTube.

LinkedIn

If you have a business or professional reason to have a LinkedIn account, you can use your Profile page to promote your site. The purpose of LinkedIn is more professional- and hiring-related, but don't ignore this possible way to tell people about your site.

QR Codes

QR Codes are 2-dimensional barcodes that act as physical hyperlinks. When your smart-phone's QR reader app sees an image of the QR code on your phone's camera, the phone's default browser will jump to the page described by that QR code.

You can use QR codes on business cards, handouts, flyers, invoices, etc.

QR codes can link to any resource which can be typed as a URL. You can use QR codes to link to:

There are a bunch of QR-code generators online. Do a Bing or Google search to find one. One that I like is QR-Code-Generator [http://www.qr-code-generator.com/]

Some QR-code reader apps will also allow you to create QR codes. One iPhone app that generates QR codes is RedLaser.

Offline Promotion

You also need to market your site offline. Whenever and wherever your company name, phone number, address, and other information are printed, make sure you also include your web site address. This list of printed materials includes

Some other ideas of places to include your site's address/URL are: