Promoting Your Website

For most of us, the reason we have created a website is so that people we don't know will see it. If your website is intended only for friends and family, skip this section.

So, you've got your website up and running, and you want to promote it (for free)? This is my advice:

First, make sure your website is pretty much complete. So, have your first layer of links (for example, the first layer of links in my site are those contained in the drop-down menu) all up and running. Try to make sure they have a decent amount of content on them. No one expects your website to be truly complete, because there are very, very few websites which will ever be truly complete, but its essential to have something there for visitors, otherwise you won't be linked. Once your site is up and ready, you can do the following:

Search Engines

All of the major search engines, to my knowledge, accept free submissions to their directories. However, they don't give a time limit on when they will accept your site. If you are really desperate for your site to be listed now, then you may want to consider paying for them to list your site. Otherwise, you will have to wait a while.

IMPORTANT: in order for your site to be listed in search engines, you must have decent metatags. These are little descriptions of your site, keywords and other information, which you put between the HEAD tags of your HTML. You can use this meta-tag generator to create the code you will need. The reason these are so important is that the programs search engines use to get hold of your site read them, and from them come up with a description and title for your site. If you don't have meta-tags, you greatly reduce the chances of getting listed by a search engine.

Decide what category your website goes under - personal/sports/religion for example. Visit search engines and discover what subcategory your site applies to (eg religion/christianity/apologetics). If you submit your site to the correct category, its more likely to get listed.

Write a short description of your site and write it down so you can type it into search engines, webrings etc. Try to make the title of your website memorable for visitors, and a bit unusual - something like "John's Website" will make it hard for visitors to come back!

Now you are ready to submit your site to search engines!

Auto-Submission

There are several websites with little programs which will submit your site, for free, to several search engines. They do this to persuade you to buy their other versions - which I've never tried, but which do look like quite good value for money, depending on whether you want to spend money advertising your website or not. I probably wouldn't, unless you are a business, or you really, really want people to see your site! I've tried to collect these free program offerers here for you (I get commission if you pay for their services!)

ATAJOS-AUTO-REGISTRALO (not sure what that means) this site will submit your (SPANISH-only) site to search engines free.

Submit Blaster a Javascript program which will submit your site to several different search engines.

Trans-Tech Inc Submits your site to international search engines.

Manual Submission

This is probably the most "sure-fire" way of getting your site listed. Many sites don't allow you to auto-submit, or may have different categories from the ones offered by auto-submitters. I usually try both methods, to be sure!

There are quite a few search engines out there you can submit your site to, the ones I usually use are:

the Open Directory Project. This is the best place to submit your site to. It provides the sites for Google as well as Yahoo! and AskJeeves. In order to submit your site to Dmoz you need to find the correct category and subcategory for your site. Then go to the top of the screen and you'll find a link marked "Add URL", go there, fill in the information they ask for, and wait. Dmoz's sites are all approved by human editors for suitability for their categories, so you may have to wait a while, but being listed in Dmoz will instantly push up your visitors.

The next site to submit your site to is Yahoo!. Many, many people use Yahoo! as their search engine, so you need to go to the appropriate category (and/or subcategory) for your site, then go to the bottom of the screen for a little link marked "Submit your site" or something similar. Fill in the information, and wait. I've never actually had a site listed in their directory, but it only takes seconds, so its worth a try.

Then go to Altavista and submit your site from the link on their fist page, you don't need to bother about categories. You have to type in a series of letters and numbers on their screen before it will let you do this (to prevent auto-submissions), then you can add (or remove) 5 urls. Before you submit search for your site in their engine, as if its already there, you could remove it by resubmitting.

Other search engines to submit to include Google, All The Web as well as many, many others. There is a list of search engines to be found here from Dmoz, or from Yahoo!.

Specialist Sites

Ok, you've submitted your site to general search engines, but your site has a specific audience it wants to reach. Lets say you have a Christian website, or a pagan website, or a gay website, or one only for German-speakers, or something like that. Well, most specialities I cannot help you with, but I do agree you'll need to submit your site to more specialist sites.

I can only offer a few suggestions - for Christian sites try FishTheNet where evangelistic sites can submit their sites to, and which also has a link at an affiliated site to a listing of loads of Christian sites.

GayGlobe has a list of gay search engines.

For, say, German sites, try the Yahoo! category, for pagan search engines try here.

For more specialist search-engines, try Dmoz category on specialist search-engines, or Yahoo!'s listing of search engines, including loads of specialist ones. If all else fails, search for search engines on a search engine!(lol).

Getting Others to link to you

Getting links from other sites is first of all a good way of getting listed in searches, as if their site is listed, then your link may well be listed too. It also means that their visitors may well visit you, too!

Please note that most people aren't going to link to you if they are not interested in your website. For example, if you go to a website about sports and ask them to link to your poetry site, they probably won't. Make sure the site you are asking to link to you is relevant!

Getting links from others is particularly good for specialist sites, as then people who are really interested in whatever your site is about will be able to find it.

Don't just go asking any old site to link to you, though, try to make sure they are good sites. If a site has linked to you, but it is a badly designed, mad or unpleasant site, then people who might like your site may well not stay long enough to visit their links!

Reciprocal Links

This is a very common way of linking to sites, many webmasters feel it is only polite to link to someone who has linked to them, particularly if they email or leave a guestbook message telling them they have done so.

Basically, you link to them, and they'll link to you. They won't link to you if your link derides their site, if you say "so-and-so's site is awful" and include a link, you are not likely to be linked to by that site. And if they do link to you, its likely to be along the lines of "so-and-so's site (and so-and-so) is dreadful".

Some sites like linking to others with banners, and provide a banner to use to link to them, but most sites will link to you even if you haven't got a banner, or don't use their banner.

General Linking

If you have a good site offering something, and want someone to link to you without linking back, then you might well get a link. All of us link to people who don't link back - I link to Bartleby, for example, and have no intention of ever asking them for a link. If your site is good enough, people will link to it.

You can get a link from someone's site by useing Free-For-All links programs. If someone has a FFA link on their site, then you just add your link and you're away! For example, The Radical Theology Website has a free-for-all links program you can just add your site to. If your site is unsuitable, it will probably be removed.

People can (and may well do) link to your site without you linking back, or being aware they have linked to you. This is always good! You can try to encourage links by providing banners and/or buttons for them to link to, for example, Jolly Jehovah, an anti-Christian site, provides banners and buttons for people to link to them with. If you can, if your server allows it and you can afford the bandwidth needed, allow people to link to your site without saving the images to their own server (this does NOT work for Geocities or Angelfire members). Dmoz does this. This encourages people to link because they just have to cut and paste the code and not take up their own space with their image.

Banner Exchanges

Banner exchanges can potentially be a good way of advertising your site on like-minded sites. There are banner exchanges for many different types of sites out there, from Christian to businesses. All you need is a banner of the correct width (and most exchange sites provide links to free banner makers - an example is AdDesigner) and to put their code on your site.

However, I don't personally use banner exchanges. You have to advertise other people's sites on your site, without knowing what sort of site will appear on the banner from one day to the next. It clutters up your pages because you have to put them on pages visitors see otherwise you don't get the right amount of impressions. Also, I have used these before, and never yet have I seen my own banner on anybody else's site.

So, personally I don't like them, even as a means of promotion, but its up to you to decide whether you like or dislike them. Some banner exchanges are free, and some are not, just as some are for specific sites, some are not. You can usually pay to increase the number of banner "impressions" you get. What those mean is that the more impressions you have, the more times your banner gets viewed. So, if you have a big site, then if you put a banner on every page, or on the most visited pages, then you have a high likelihood of people seeing your banner. Maybe thats why banner exchanges have never worked for me! They're probably good value if you have a big site with many people visiting each day. If you want to find banner exchanges, you can look on the Yahoo! category listing.

Awards

You can apply for many awards at places like AwardSites and The Awards Awards. Awards are great fun to collect for their own sakes, and can also attract visitors to your site. If you have won a prestigious award, and are listed in their "winners" page, then people may come and visit your site, if it looks interesting. This applies to specialist sites, or sites with specialist content (what am I saying! All sites have specialist content! Look at mine! I have poetry on here) may attract visitors looking for that particular sort of content.

So, worthwhile doing for any number of reasons!

Note though: any site which asks you to buy anything before receiving an award, their award is worthless.

Signing Guestbooks

If you sign the guestbook on a similar site, the owner of that site may well return the favour and come and visit your site. It also means that anybody reading the guestbook will see your site URL listed there.

Your signing of someone's guestbook can come up on searches, and, of course, gain visitors from their site. Plus, webmasters love to have people sign their guestbooks! (Hint, hint). Basically, don't wear yourself out finding similar sites to your own (or sites with views you oppose) to sign the guestbooks of, but if, when surfing, you see a site similar to your own, or one you like, sign their guestbook. You could start with mine ;)

Thats all I can think of right now to recommend in the way of website promotion, but I hope its been helpful to some of you!

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