Website Promotion is a varied enterprise. There are several methods of online promotion, and each website owner has to choose the mix of methods that is best for his or her particular website.
The field of Internet promotion n can be divided into two major categories: free promotion and paid advertising. The first category is similar to what is called public relations in the off-line world, but has its own particular style in the world of the Internet.
Free Internet Website Promotion
The common forms of free Internet Website Promotion includes search engine submission, search engine optimization, reciprocal linking and placing content on other websites. I put the word free in quotation marks because it is common to pay others to do this work for you, and even if you do it yourself, some of it can be time consuming and thus, costly.
Search engine submission is important. Even if you eventually opt for paid forms of promotion, it never hurts to be included in search engines. A little known fact is that you hardly have to do anything to be listed in search engines. Establish some links to your website from a few other websites that are already listed in search engines. When the search engine robots come to visit those sites they will follow the links, find your website and put your website in their respective indices. Of course you should also submit your site to the big search engines just to make sure.
Submission alone doesnt guarantee traffic. If your site is buried on page 25 of search results for a query then you will not get visitors. If you implement search engine optimization on your site it will appear higher in the listings, bringing you traffic, and hopefully business.
Another form of free promotion is to get links to your website from other sites around the Internet. Find directories related to your website and look for an add url button. Add your website information wherever possible. You may be required to offer a reciprocal link in return for your listing. Speaking of reciprocal links, reciprocal linking is now one of the most vigorously applied promotion methods on the Internet.
The practice of reciprocal linking started at the very beginning of the modern Internet, with website owners casually trading links with other cool sites. Now it is no longer casual because link popularity is a huge factor in the algorithms that search engines use to prioritize websites. In theory reciprocal linking is free, but its cost in time is very great, and there are professional companies that handle this function for website owners.
Pay Per Click Advertising
Paid advertising is another area of Internet website Promotion. Banner advertising was the first form of paid advertising that appeared on the early sites, and it is still around. However, click-through-rates for banners are not very high and in recent years there has been a shift to more effective forms of paid promotion.
Pay per click advertising is perhaps the most widely used form of paid advertising. In this model you get a priority text listing on search engines results pages. These are usually labeled as sponsored listings and they appear at the top of the page before the other listings.
In another form of pay per click advertising, such as Google adwords, your add appears as a text box on the side of the search results pages, near the top. What is common to both forms is that you have to pay for every visitor that comes to your website by clicking on the links from these listings. The fee is based on the target keywords that you select. In some programs very competitive keywords cost $12.00 per click-through, but the fees are typically much lower and start from as little as .05 per visit.
Pay Per Click advertising is excellent for a well focused sales oriented site that has a good conversion ratio. If your selling message has been well presented, then your costs for advertising will be compensated by the sales from the steady stream of traffic that will come to your site.
Choose the methods of Website Promotion that are best for your particular website. If you would like some help in choosing your promotion methods, contact a promotion specialist and get a professional opinion.
Copyright 2005
Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. He has beenworking on the Internet since 1995 and is the proprietor of A1-Optimization, , a firm providing search engine optimization,copywriting, reciprocal linking, and other web promotion services. Hepublishes a monthly ezine, A1-Web Promotion Tips, available at
Youve just got a new website and it looks beautiful, but unless you take some active steps to promote it, it will just sit there like a new car without any gas and empty tires.
If you are not sure where to begin, here are seven steps that are free or inexpensive. All of them will help you to get your new website rolling.
1. Tell Your Friends Often we are thinking about reaching the unknown millions of people out there surfing the Internet, but we are forgetting the hundreds of people who we already know. Look at your e-mail address book and get the word out, tell your business contacts, friends, relatives and tel them to tell their friends too. Send an e-mail to all the people who made inquiries or bought products or services from you in the last year.
2. Link to Your Own Site Once again we are often thinking about getting some unknown people to make a link to our websites and we are forgetting possibilities that are nearby. If you already have one website, make sure that this site is linking to your new site. A website without any incoming links to it will have a very low page ranking in the all-important Google search engine and will face an uphill battle to be seen in Google search results, especially if you are in a very competitive category.
Even when your site is in the construction stage you, or even your web designer can link to the new site from another already well-established site, mentioning that the new site is under construction. If you already have several sites, then link them to your infant site. It will help the new site to be seen in competitive search engine listings even in its debut period.
3. Get a paid inclusion in one of the big search engines. It takes 4-6 weeks to get listed in Google, and other search engines are equally slow. However there are a few fairly important search engines that have inexpensive express inclusion programs. If you join these programs, then your site will be listed in 48 hours. Inktomi, which provides results for MSN and 100 other search services, has an inclusion program which costs $39 for the first URL that you submit, and subsequent ones cost $25. The value of the Inktomi submission is that they revisit your URL every 48 hours and if you make changes on the page you can see the results in the MSN listings very quickly. Thus, you can tweak your pages and see how it affects your position.
Similarly there are paid inclusion systems for Teoma (which feeds the popular Ask Jeeves Search Engine), Alta Vista, and Lycos.
4.Add your site to the Open Web Directory and the major search engines. Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to search engine submission. Forget about the sales hype that tells you to add your URL to 300, 000 search engines. Only a few search engines and directories provide the lions share of Internet traffic. If your site is in good shape, no longer under construction, then go to www.dmoz.org. This is the Open Web Directory. Find the category where your site fits, and make a submission. If you are accepted here your site will appear in the many search engines and local directories that use the results from the Open Web Directory. Inclusion in this directory usually takes time but it will help you a lot. Similarly submit your site to Google, Alta Vista and All The Web, these are the remaining giants where you can submit for free.
5. Start a reciprocal links campaign Once you have given yourself a link from your other sites or from your designers page, you can go out and ask other complementary sites for links. As I mentioned, these incoming links will help your page rank in searches but they will also generate traffic. If you can find specialized sites or directories dealing with your particular product or service, then a link on one of these sites can provide a large amount of targeted traffic.
6.Write an article about your product or service If you have a website the chances are that you are an expert in the field that your site is all about. Write an article about your product or service, or write an article related to the subject matter of your site. Submit the article online to various websites and e-mail lists dealing with your topic. The publication of your article in a big e-zine, or on a popular web site can get your new site off to a roaring start.
7. Promote Your Site Off-line Now that you have a site, put the URL on your stationary, on your cars and trucks, in your brochures, business cards, your newspaper and TV advertising, and circulars. You can also put it on hats, t-shirts, mugs and other items. The cafepress.com has a program enabling you to put your URL on these items and even sell them online.
If you follow all or some of these steps your new site will definitely receive visitors and within a short period can become an important asset to you.
Copyright 2003, Donald Nelson, all rights reserved.
Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. He has beenworking on the Internet since 1995 and is the proprietor of A1-Optimization, , a firm providing search engine optimization,copywriting, reciprocal linking, and other web promotion services. Hepublishes a monthly ezine, A1-Web Promotion Tips, available at