Promoting your website online

The hardest thing about being online is not getting yourself online but getting your website or business noticed online. This is a breaking point for many people who have excellent design skills but fail to draw any attention because they cannot get their site(s) publized. This hub will focus on free promotion as it is the kind of promotion that I mainly use. Free promotion is a great starting point because if it fails, you don't actually lose anything whereas a failed Adword campaign may cost you alot of money. We will go through the methods one by one and explain them and how they could help your website promotion.

Method 1:

Link Exchange:

This is the oldest method and may or may not work. You probably will get approached by many SEO companies wanting you to put a link on your links page in exchange for a link on some obscure directory. Do not respond to these offers or agree to them as these do not benefit you. You are most likely leaking a bit of traffic and PageRank to those sites and getting nothing in return. These web marketers/SEO people have created directories and link pages with little or no traffic just for this purpose. Although some say that three-way link exchanges help SEO, I have not seen any real evidence of this theory and prefer to link to the page that has linked me for a more fair way of traffic trading.

Method 2:

SEO:

This is a tricky method as SEO, especially on google, depends alot on link exchanging. The trick is to pick good anchor text for people to link your site with. I've found that some of the most important things are:

1. Good domain name

2. Good Link anchor text

3. High quality links for high PR pages

4. A descriptive site

Note that I did not list META tags among the important things. That is because META tags are not even taken into consideration by Google and while they were important years ago, they are not very relevant in today's SEO environment. Being included in large directories such as DMOZ or Yahoo will go a bit of a ways to help your ranking. While it is worth the time to submit to DMOZ, it is nothing to obsess over and the prominence of DMOZ is nowhere near what it used to be. Yahoo directory listings are nice but it is not worth paying the money Yahoo is asking solely for SEO purposes. Note that the value of pagerank itself is not as important as the anchor text, the title text, and the content of your site.

You will also get lots of offers from so-called "SEO companies" offering to optimize your site for a high fee. I would not take up any of these offers as results from them seem to range from semi-descent to completely useless. In all honesty, you could do this service yourself and get just as good if not better results. Many of the SEO companies do not even have a high PageRank for their own site and do not rank well on google. If they can't even do it for themselves, why would they be able to do it for you. SEO should be part of what you are learning anyways as a webmaster so its better to do this yourself and get the experience.

Method 3:

Traffic trading:

Some sites(especially arcade sites) are very good at traffic trading where site A sends out X amount of visitors to site B and site B sends the same amount back to site A. There are many scripts that are set up to do this and give 1:1 in terms of traffic exchange. The largest arcade sites make tens of thousands of visitors per day using this method. Once you get the ball rolling on a traffic trade, it has a good chance to snowball into something huge. You will have to link out to other peoples content but its well worth it. If you haven't thought about traffic trading as a means of promotion, I'd seriously give it a look.

Method 4:

Social Bookmarking:

Sites such as Digg, stumbleupon, reddit, etc are great if your site is filled with many pages of content, each representing an article, game or movie. The best of these in my opinion for steady traffic is probably stumbleupon. If you've written a really good article, people will stumble it and it will bring traffic. If you need some stumbles to get started, you can head over to any large internet forum and trade stumbles with other members. Doing this too much is not good because stumble's algorithem puts more importance on some stumbles than others. Digg is another great way to drive massive traffic. However, it is much harder to get traffic from Digg and the traffic is not consistent. Digg's measure for deleting account and suspending sites is also far harsher than Stumbleupon's. For easy constant traffic, I'd just use stumbleupon.

Sites like facebook are also a great way to promote your website if you have the technical savvy to build facebook apps. Take mindjolt.com for instance. Their main site does not get that many hits but their facebook application for games gets millions of players a day to their games. Facebook represents a unique free oppurtunity for those who can take advantage of it.

Method 5:

Write Articles:

This method takes quite a bit of work but can be very rewarding if done correctly. Writing articles and then submitting them to places like Articopia can bring lots of targetted traffic to your site. These places will publicize your articles and allow other webmasters to put your articles on their site. Be sure to include a few links to your site within your articles and make your author profile point directly to your site for the best results. This kind of traffic is better than regular traffic because it will attract visitors that are interested in the subject matter you are writing on rather than just random people from around the web. If you are a good writer, I'd give this a shot.

Method 6: Hubpages/Squidoo

If you are reading this, you may have already taken up this method but posting informative hubs/lens with link to your site within is a great way to drive some extra traffic. This takes time as it takes patience to build up enough hubs and gather enough fans to drive sufficient traffic but if done correctly, this is good both for SEO ranking and for driving direct traffic to your site. If your using Hubpages or Squidoo lens, make sure to link your sites in your profile. Be sure to write useful hubs with lots of content as useless hubs with 0 content will usually not drive any traffic.

Method 7: Word of Mouth

This is the last method I will describe in this hub. This seems to make common sense but so many peope miss it. It actually may be the best tactic there is for long term traffic. Having your friends pass the word on about your site can do wonders for website marketing. Its easy and free, all you have to do is ask for a little bit of help. This is especially true for websites targetted towards teens and college students. Getting the word out across one large campus will draw in thousands of hits per day if the site gets popular. With this method, you have to remember that "content is king" and that without it, this method will fail to keep visitors at your site. Update frequently, write good articles, and post good content and visitors will swarm to your site by this method.

That is all the advice I have in this hub. Remember that these are not the only seven methods to website promotion but these are the ones that I recommend. Good luck on promoting your site!