Free Web Site Promotion Tips

Free Tips On Website Promotion

No matter how great your website looks, it achieves nothing unless people come and view it. Large companies can afford to promote their website addresses on television, on the sides of buses, in newspapers or on billboards, and this no doubt attracts quite a few people to come and view their website who otherwise would not. However, this method is too expensive for many businesses or organisations. What is needed is a cheap and effective way of inducing people to come and visit your website. The purpose of this article is to help you to understand some of the more effective methods and strategies available.

Method 1: Tell your Friends and Acquaintances

I'm often telling people I meet socially about my websites. I have authored hundreds of articles and web pages on many topics, and its something you can talk about with people. Usually people will check out your web site if you ask them to, but it might take several days or weeks before they actually do it. Obviously this is not a way to gain hundreds of visitors to your site every day. But everything helps.

Method 2: Put your URL (website address) on your e-mail messages and your Business Cards

A URL is a website address, something like http://www.adfreewebhosting.com/ . It is simple enough to configure your e-mail program to automatically add something mentioning your website address to everyone you send mail to. The footnote comes at the end of your mail. In Outlook Express it is called a Signature, and you go there by choosing Tools-->Options and then Click on the Signatures tab. You might put something like: "Visit http://www.adfreewebhosting.com/ for best value web hosting, information and services". As well as that, you can put your website address on your business card. It helps if the domain name is not too long.

Warning: never send unsolicited bulk e-mail containing your website address. Apart from annoying a certain percentage of those who hate receiving such unsolicited mail ("spam") you will almost certainly get your website shut down, as almost all webhosting companies have a very strict policy against "spam" e-mail. You may get your domain name permanently banned from important search engines, making it next to useless. Besides all that, the response rate from such e-mails tends to be very low. Your site will probably be disabled before any of your readers get a chance to check it out. Adfree Web Hosting has a strict anti-spam policy. If you try it, you will lose your account without warning and you will never be given another chance by us

Method 3 - Intelligently Submit your Site to Search Engines and Portals

This is by far the most important way of generating ongoing and targeted traffic to your site. Much has been written on this subject, and if you are serious about web marketing, you must learn more and more on this subject, because the rules and strategies keep changing. Strategies that generated high traffic for websites two or three years ago will mostly not work at all today. If you have a viable business and simply want to use the web to increase your exposure in the marketplace its usually best to engage the services of a professional and experienced search engine optimisation expert, rather than attempting to do it all yourself. It depends on how much your time is worth to you, and what kind of results you want to obtain. Obtaining excellent results in search engine promotion can be a very time consuming business, and not everyone who invests time into it succeeds.

I would like to give some tips which will help give you an idea of what is involved in doing this successfully. It is important to do these things in the right order. Just submitting a mediocre site to a number of search engines and portals, especially using automated software or services, may end up being counter productive, and disadvantage your site's chances for many months to come. Do not think that finding some sneaky strategy will build your website traffic for long. Its better to use your intelligence to offer something that will help people more rather than induce them to visit a site of mediocre value or relevance to the reader. So here are some important tips.

1. Offer some Worthwhile Content

People on the internet are looking for valuable information. If you are selling something, don't just have a simple page with a brief product description and an invitation for customers to pay by entering their credit card details. That is unlikely to appeal to many people. You need to include information relevant to your product on different pages on your site. If you've been to Amazon.com, an online bookstore, you'll notice that they encourage those who have read the books to give reviews of them, which are published online. By providing this useful information, site surfers are far more likely to want to stay and read on the site, and return back when they are considering buying a book.

Another reason for including more information on your site, especially in text form, is that the more content your site has, the more keywords and phrases your overall site becomes relevant to. If your website is about music, for example, every group you write about is likely to be relevant to additional searches people make on the web. Once people get to your site, they may indeed start to look at other things besides what initially attracted them.

For this reason, its good to write more content. Show your readers that you know what you are talking about. Offer them some valuable knowledge. Many sites offer more in-depth knowledge to those who sign up for opt-in email from the site owner. In this way, people are exchanging their e-mail address for some free and hopefully valuable information. Its one important way of building up a target list of people interested in your product, service or movement.

The more valuable your information is, the more likely it is that other webmasters will link to your pages. "Link popularity" helps enormously in obtaining high rankings on the search engines, and this is becoming more important all the time, because it is relatively difficult to "fool" this measure of site "importance".

2. Present Your Content Attractively

A poorly designed site will turn away visitors. Not only should you offer worthwhile information on your site, it should also be easy to read. Here are some points to consider:

Sites with a predominantly WHITE background are easier to read than sites with a dark background.

Research indicates that Sans Serif fonts such as Arial and Helvetica fonts are more readable than the standard Times Roman fonts to most people.

Do not try to cram as much content as possible onto the screen. Leave some white space in the site design, some margins, and don't think that everything needs to be in one wide column.

The best traffic comes from obtaining listings on portals such as Yahoo, the Open Director y and .Looksmart (generally in that order of importance). For your site to be included on one of these highly traffic-generating portals, it must be approved by human editors who judge many sites on a regular basis. Even if your site offers some good content, if your site is unattractive or poorly designed, you are unlikely to gain a good listing on these sites. The reviewers can make snap judgments about your site and write you off in seconds. You want your business or organisation to look professional, because it helps convey a spirit of excellence and helps gain the trust of potential customers.

So in my view it is worth spending some money getting a professional web designer to make your main web page, and give you a template to work with. Even if you can design an average-looking site yourself, you may lose more traffic than it is worth by trying to cut costs here. Adfree Web Hosting can offer you the services of some excellent web site designers with graphic design background, as well as an appreciation of search engine promotion strategies. Please contact us if you would like to discuss rates and services offered.

3. Do not Overload your site with Heavy Graphics

Its important to have some graphics on your site, but many websites have failed because they took too long to load. Graphics and javascript code has its place on a website, but there is something called "too much of a good thing". Many people, rather than waiting 30 seconds for a site to load, will simply back out with their mouse and go to the next site of possible interest. Many won't wait to see how you could dazzle them with animated logos that floated around your site's main page and linked to different pages depending on where they were clicked.

There is another reason besides loading time to keep graphics down to a moderate level. Automatic search engines, such as google.com, when spidering your site, cannot interpret the meaning or relevance of graphical files. What they index is text. You can get around this to some extent by using the ALT tag to include some textual reference to the graphic, but this will generally not carry as much weight as actual body text.

Complicated javascript code can clutter up your web-page source and reduce the keyword densities of certain important words you want your site to be found by. Therefore, use javascript in moderation if you are wanting to have a page rank well by search engines. If you must use javascript, put as many functions in a .js include linked to from your header.

4. Submit to Relevant Categories in the Major Portals

One sure way not to get listed in Yahoo! is to submit your site to the wrong category. Before submitting to Yahoo! first do a search there for the keywords you want to rank well on. Take note of the categories the results come up in, and then look around those categories. Do not forget to submit to regional categories, especially if your business or organisation relates especially to a particular city or country. If your site is commercial, use the Express Business Listing service (costs US$200). However, this fee in no way guarantees that your site will be accepted by the editors and surfers at Yahoo. Therefore, do all you can to provide relevant and attractively presented content on your site, and make sure it looks right both on Internet Explorer and using Netscape Browsers - whether javascript is enabled or not.

The Open Directory (www.dmoz.org) is a great source of traffic. By getting listed here, your site eventually gets some prominence on AOL, Compuserve, Netscape and possible other important portals such as Google, Altavista, Lycos and others. However, it usually takes one to three months before these other directories will take the content from the new DMOZ listings. Your site must offer something worthwhile and must fit the guidelines for the category you submit it to, or your submission may be simply ignored or quickly rejected by the volunteer editors at the Open Directory.

Looksmart is another portal of some importance. Rather than submitting directly there, its best to use the paid listing service of Altavista (www.altavista.com) or Excite (www.excite.com) because if it is accepted there it will list on Looksmart also. Again be sure to submit to the right categories. Looksmart listings obtained should generate some traffic for you via MSN.com, Altavista and Excite. The business listing does cost US$200 again, so get your site right first, making sure there are no broken links on it.

5. Get your Title Right

Your page's "title" is the part that shows up at the top of the browser, usually as white text on a blue background title bar. For example, on this page, the title is "Free Web Site Promotion Tips". Choosing the right title is extremely important for correct search engine promotion. Make sure it describes succinctly what your page is about. Include keywords that are relevant to your site in your title, but in a natural way. Don't make the title too long. The title is what usually comes up when a search engine lists your site as a result to someone's search, so it needs to be attractively worded. Search engines usually give heavy weight to the title of a page when deciding how to categorise it. The HTML code for a title comes in the header section, between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags and looks like this

<title>Free Web Site Promotion Tips</head>

6. Use Appropriate Meta Tags

The most important meta tags are the description and the keywords tags. Many sites use the description tag to go next to your title when it comes up on their search engine. Do not make the description too long, but let it describe your site succinctly in one or two sentences. The description meta tag looks like

The keywords meta-tag is important for altavista. Some search engines don't even look at it, so don't place all your hopes on having great meta-tags. In my view, the body content is more important than the meta tags. For this section, pick the key phrases and keywords you think are most popular, yet relevant to your site. Pick words that are in the title and near the top of your page's body text. Most people use phrases of two words when searching, so be sure to use these. Do not repeat a keyword more than once in your meta-tags or you may be penalised for "spamdexing" - trying to gain an unfair advantage on the search engine by repeating certain words or phrases too often. Do things in moderation and you will get better results in most cases. Include synonyms in your keywords meta tag. An example of a keywords meta tag is

It doesn't seem to hurt to put lots of keywords in this section as long as you don't repeat the same word too often.

7. Manually Submit your Site to the Major Search Engines and Indices

It can be quite counter-productive to use some automated submission software and services. The search engines are generally able to tell if a human used their website to make a submission or whether it was done by a program. They favor manual submissions, and often penalise automated submissions, which they feel are most likely cluttering their index with stuff not so relevant to surfers. Bear this in mind. The Commander Pro software however operates just as if the site was being submitted manually, and is a worthwhile investment for those who want to submit their URLs to many search engines on a regular basis, WITHOUT DOING IT TOO OFTEN. If you submit too many pages from a domain on a given day, or submit pages too often to a given search engine, your listings may be penalised and rank lower for your troubles. You could even get your site or domain name BANNED from certain search engines. So be careful, and don't overdo it. Many search engines automatically reindex your site pages every so often, so you can afford to be conservative and not keep flooding their servers with more requests to index your pages or page.

It can take days, weeks or months to get listed on some search engines, so be patient and don't keep submitting your site again and again. Even the best web site promoters cannot generate huge traffic from search engines in a period of less than two months. Because you don't get instant results in this work, its even more important to do things right the first time. If you have a proven skill or business you are probably better off giving search engine promotion work to an expert and concentrating on providing the best services and internet content you possibly can.

There are a number of other significant strategies for internet marketing outside the scope of this article. You are welcome to come back and check out the new information that comes to this site on a regular basis.

Chris Patrick

http://www.adfreewebhosting.com/

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