 |
|
|
- After Going Live
- Submit your site to Search Engines and Directories.
- Submit the site by hand to the free search engines, the free directories and some paid sites which may have to include Yahoo and Overture.
These below are no longer useful:
- Google - this also gets you into AOL.
- Yahoo Web Results Search Engine (this is different from their Directory). Note: you have to have a Yahoo account in order to submit to Yahoo.
- MSN.
- You will see lists like the one above which include many dead major sites like Go/Infoseek, Magellan, WebCrawler, Excite, HotBot, Northern Light, etc. They may look like they still accept submissions but it is a waste of time since they no longer update their databases.
- Submit by hand to the directories. For them you usually have to find the right category and submit from there.
- Open Directory - Find the right category then hit "add site"
- About - not all the sections allow submissions but some do.
- Yahoo - most business sites require $299 a year but if your site contains useful information, sometimes you can get it through their free submission.
- Check out lists of specialized or localized directories to submit to.
- Search engines you must pay but should consider:
- Overture Minimum deposit of $50 (all of which you spend in viewers, no set-up fee). Decide what keywords you want and how much you are willing to pay for viewers from each (you will have to look up your keywords first and see what others are paying). And you will have to spend a minimum of $20 a month with them which doesn't make it worthwhile for some small local sites --- check with your website designer or hosting company to see if they have a company account that will allow you to spend less than $20 a month. This can be especially useful during those first few months before you get into the free search engines.
- Yahoo is most important but requires $299 a year for many business sites (and that may be too much for some small businesses to afford, but it is always good to go and find the category where your site belongs and see if they might accept your site on its own merits or pay the $299 the first year and see what happens to your traffic when you are dropped).
- And now, of course, Google Ad Words - These are especially useful for the first six months to a year after your site goes live since Google doesn't trust new sites and so doesn't allow them to do well for competitive terms until after what has been called by those who see this effect as "an aging delay".
- Warning: Avoid the programs (more and more are popping up) that tell you they can have your site come up when someone types in your keyword into their address bar! To make this work, people would have to download their program and don't believe their figures that tens of millions of people have downloaded it.
- If you want, a week or so after your original set of submissions, you can do a mass submission to minor "search engines" world wide using a mass submission tool (wait at least a week before and after doing this).
- The purpose of this is not to get visitors from these "minor search engines" so much as to gets links back to your site from sites around the web as the more places the major search engines find your site, the better they will rank you. However, any site that links to you that has nothing to do with your keywords, will help you very, very, very little.
- There are some search engines that are specific to your content or field that will get you more traffic but they can't usually be submitted to by a search engine tool so you must find them and submit to them by hand. Start your search for such with these lists"
- You can also answer questions in newsgroups and bulletin boards although you cannot promote your site there, but if your site's address is in your signature file, that can help.
- Suggestion #10 is now obsolete.
 |
Website Promotion ||| Home |  |