Promoting Your Website

The chore of promoting your website or building traffic to it will often require more effort than the actual construction. It is an ongoing never ending process.  This is best done by a SEO expert.

The bulk of website traffic will come from search engines and search engine mapping. Ranking or position on search engines will determine how much traffic you receive. It is important that the site is optimized before submitting it to any search engines.

For the more competitive fields of business or for faster positioning, it may be necessary to buy your traffic. The major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN all provide Pay Per Click services that allow you to compete for keyword driven listings that appear on their search page results. You do need deep pockets to get major traffic using PPC.  You can also use opt-in mailing lists for promoting your site, but these are also very expensive.
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Optimization Strategies

The complete optimization of a website involves much more than just submitting pages to search engines.

Submitting to Search Engines

Before a search engine can find your website, an optimizer must go and visit that search engine and tell it that your website exists. When that is done a crawler or spider will be sent to your website. This process can take weeks or months.

A faster way, is to to get a link to your site placed on another website that is already indexed and crawled on a regular basis. If at all possible get your link placed on their home page. It is possible a site can be  indexed in as little as 24 hours using this method.

The spider will look at each page that it can find and place them in a large database of other pages. Your ranking will be determined by how well your pages are optimized targeting your keywords. Ranking is also determined by the number of websites with similar content that link to yours - called backlinks.

Checking Back

Wait about 2 weeks. Go back and type your URL into the search box of each search engine. Most will usually tell you if the site is in their database. First time submissions will take longer, sometimes as long as a month or 2.

Other Ways to Promote:

• Build your own Affiliate Network

• Exchange links with other websites like yours

• Join Forums and Webrings

• Use the Local Media - Many overlook this valuable tool. Place a small classified that displays your URL, in the local newspaper.