Promoting Your Website

Website promotion can make or break your entry in
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Website promotion can make or mar your entry in e-business. Key factors in promoting a website are page title, meta, linking strategies and choosing the best search engine for submission of your website.

Your website is now ready. It's now the time to promote your website and spread awareness about your website and get visitors to come and view your web pages. Tips to get your website get going.

1. Page Title. Write a Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title, such as "the," "and," etc. Mention appropriate keywords relevant to your website content. Remember search engines give this a lot of emphasis.

2. Meta Tags. Meta tags always go in the section of the document. META NAME tags include descriptions and keywords. This HTML code helps some search engines classify and rank a web page. META HTTP-EQUIV tags can indicate to the web browser how to display the page.

Write a descriptive META Tags. Many search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title. This sentence should describe the contents of the body text of the webpage, using the main keywords and key phrases used on this page. If you include keywords that aren't used on the webpage content you could hurt the prospect of being listed in the search engine.

3. Linking Strategy. Link popularity is basically the number of links that point to your web site. Besides the optimization of your web pages for meta tags and search engine marketing and readiness, link popularity is considered as being a major factor for your ranking in the search engines. A large number of links that point to your web site will therefore improve your ranking significantly. Besides that, well placed links are an excellent source of consistent traffic to your web site.

Some of the important search Engines that consider link popularity as a factor for relevancy are Google, Excite, Lycos, Webcrawler & Altavista

Linking strategies are an essential type of site promotion. The more links pointing to your site, the more traffic you'll experience (and the greater perceived "popularity" will rank you higher in the search engines). To get someone to link to your site, you need to ask. The simplest way is to find complementary sites, link to them on a linking page, and ask them to link to you. The key, of course, is for your site to have content that so good that it's worth linking to. Ask for links on sites that cover your industry, as well as from associations your business belongs to.

What is to be avoided here is link harvesting or just creating link database on your website of sites that have no relevance to your topic. Search engines have a negative rating for this.

4. Search Engine Submission. Now it's time to submit your website to search engines. It is recommended never use automated tools, your website might end up never being spidered by the search engine. The best way is to manually goto the major search engines listed below and manually submit.

Google.com and Yahoo.com - A definite must. Over 90% of smaller search engines take their fodder from here. Others to submit are Lycos.com, Altavista.com, Excite.com, Askjeeves.com, Wisenut.com, Toema.com & Overture.com.

5. Viral Marketing. Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.
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Amongst the best forms of viral marketing are:

Affiliate Programs. You signup and earn a commission per sale or referral. So you refer your friends and peers. When your peers signup their friends and peers you get an incentive for them too. What an excellent and automated way of publicity at extremely low costs.

Refer your friends. You just finished reading an article and suddenly remembered your friend for whom the article might be a valuable resource, so you simply email the article to them by using the "Refer-a-friend" link. An excellent and automated way of free publicity.

E-mail signature. Don't underestimate the power of a innocuous email signature. You never know who and where it reaches. It doesn't cost you a dime and gives your website free publicity.

6. Ezines. Write articles for others to use in their Newsletters. You can dramatically increase your visibility when you write articles in your area of expertise and distribute them to editors as free content for their e-mail newsletters. Just ask that a link to your website and a one-line description of what you offer be included with the article. This is an effective "viral" approach that can produce hundreds of links to your site over time.

7. URL on Stationery. This is a no-brainer that's sometimes overlooked. Make sure that all reprints of cards, stationery, brochures, and literature contain your company's URL.

BEWARE OF THESE PROMOTION BLUNDERS.

1. Spam. Spam or unsolicited e-mails don't generate customers. They generate bad publicity and legal tangles. No website has ever made it big with Spam. Spam is like the scum in the gutter blocking precious Internet bandwidth, which brings absolutely nothing but abuses for their senders.

2. Abuse e-communities. While the former one is mass abuse, this one is direct abuse. Ecommunities are available on the Internet on probably every topic under the sun and e-marketers feel it's a good place to deliver the promotional message. Right no doubt, but there is a Net etiquette for delivering such a message. Maybe in the form of a signature or participating in that community not sending stupid promotional messages which get nothing but bad publicity for the website.

3. Automated submission. Unless you want your Website to be blacklisted or removed from the database of the search engines don't ever attempt it. Incidentally, the best and the biggest directory is human edited. Dmoz.org is the name; the same directory used by google.com, aol.com and other search engines. Manual submission to major search engines takes not more than a few hours and is fairly sufficient for meeting your e-business goals.

About the Author: Andy Lewis is an expert author on varied topics. For details visit: http://www.serverplex.com/promoting-your-website.html