Website Promotion

Promoting and marketing a website is highly essential to get customers and traffic as website promotion makes a site more popular. It is seriously recommended that the each phase of promotion should be followed and completed before moving to the next phase.

Promoting a site is not a matter of a day or two; rather it takes a lot of time even months and years to get into certain directories and search engines. The phases below are recommended assuming a site to be entirely new and no website promotion work has been done yet.

Phase I - Submitting website to Directories
It is recommended that the website promotion process should be started with submitting the website to Internet directories as they can provide the website with enough of traffic and can affect the ranking of the website in various search engines. Submitting website to directories is also very easy and doesn't require much effort. The preferable directories to which website can be submitted are ODP & Yahoo directory.

It is recommended to start with Open Directory Project (ODP) as it is free of charge and the editors of ODP review the sites quickly and they usually don?t reject them without a proper reason. The only criteria that your site should have are relevant & unique content. The Yahoo directory is the next to move. This directory might charge a fair amount for a commercial site but non-commercial sites can submit for free. Be patient as it might require several submissions before they are accepted

Phase II - Submitting website to Search engines
After establishing the foundation with directories, the next task is to get into search engines. But before submitting to search engines, your web pages should meet the criteria of search engines. The basic criteria are search engine friendly design of the site and the keywords-optimized pages. This will take some time and effort, but will save you from various future problems. If you want to know more about search engine optimization and its advanced techniques go through the link Search optimization.

Once your website satisfy the criteria of search engines the final process of submitting to search engines can be started but be sure of where, how and what to submit. Submitting pages to all the major search engines will take some time, but it is better option than simply sitting and waiting for the search engines to find your site on their own. Then you need to check regularly to see whether your pages have been included or not

Phase III - More promotion techniques
After being accepted into the directories and the major search engines, the traffic to the site began to grow. But still there are plenty of things that can be done to attract more visitors and increase traffic. Few other promotion techniques that can be fully or partially effective are mentioned belo

Banner Ads:
If your site is related to selling, banner ads can be tried. Usually banner campaigns are expensive and not so effective, but it because advertisers don't know how to design effective banners.

Link Trading:
Link trading and creating reciprocal links can increase the number of visitors to your site which in turn increases the link popularity of your site and help your site to secure a good search engine ranking.

E-mail signatures:
E-mail signatures might not increase your traffic but can promote your site minorly without doing anything

Usenet advertising:
Usenet advertising if done with proper care and consideration can produce substantial traffic to your site.

Articles and Newsletters:
Writing articles and newsletter works well and can send large amounts of visitors in short period of time.

Avoid the techniques:
Every technique doesn't always work well so it is better to avoid the methods that are more trouble than they are worth. Click exchange programs though easier & faster they are not considered as good site promotion tools. The FFA pages proved to be negative. It only increases the flow of spam to your E-mail account.

Patience and hard work are the two keys to success in website promotion; so donot get frustrated and complete all the phases. After all, the secret to have a successful site is hard work for both promoting and creating it.