How to promote a web site by hand for free

1 - Who To Target

Think about who will want to find what you are presenting, and who you want to find what you are presenting, are they the same person? For example if you want to sell Ferrari sports cars, then a site with lots of pictures of cars and good Ferrari information might not be your best bet as you will attract lots of aspirational teenagers who will copy your photos, a review of high interest savings accounts might work better.

'But I have already written my site to suit the wrong people!' Don't worry, here is how you can augment the content of your site if you need to.

• Add extra pages that create textual connections between your real target interests and your existing content, e.g. a Funding For a Ferrari page.
• Change some of your keywords and description meta tags to relate more to your targets. You can do this differently on different pages.

2 - Set Your Goals

Use the keywords related to your target audience to look at what is currently available. Decide where you should realistically end up and try to spot competitors.

Rank your goals in order of importance to you. You are going to go after them one at a time, but be sensible, your first goals should be things like 'Get listed on Google' not 'Get page one on Google'. You can have a whole series of goals staring with a listing on your target search engines or portals and then later to be recommended or appear on the higher pages.

3 - Use the Competition to Get an Edge

Try and find out what keywords bring up your competitor sites. Then look and see if there are any more popular related keywords that they are not targeting. Do not just analyse the competitor sites themselves but look up who links to them and what their keyword bias might be.

Now revist the keywords in your meta tags and pages. Is there an addition you should make? Do you wan't to take out a keyword that you will never succeed with?

4 - Understand The Basics of PageRank

For all the following steps you need to understand why you are doing it. So now is the time to read the following article on Google's PageRank - http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/index.html which does a good job of explaining a ticky concept. Be aware that the way it works is constantly changing.

5 - Your Site Is Ready So Go For It

So you have tweaked your site, identified your audience, and decided what you would like to achieve - now you promote.

I like to use an analogy to describe web site promotion, and that is of building sandcastles on the beach. If you consider the height of your castle to be the height of your listing then the following advice hold true.

• You need a broad base to build on. In other words you need a solid set of long term links to your pages, these in one dimension are the directory listings and in the other are the other sites with related content.
• You need to watch out for waves. If your site is down even for a few days you can start to lose incoming links.
• Keep rebuilding your castle, the sand is constantly drying out and crumbling away. The same is true of any promotional effort, you need to keep it going to maintain a listing.

5.1 - Directory Listings

Start with dmoz.org, find your category and use the add url link at the bottom, fill in the form and submit it. Simple? yes and it puts your promotion into turbo mode once you get listed. Why? because

Next is www.yahoo.com, same method - find the category that suits you, then click on the suggest a site, use the free/standard method. Chances of success here are a bit slim, but it is worth a try at this stage.

5.2 - Notify The Spiders

You should pick 3-4 of your pages to submit to the spiders. Each one should represent a distinct part of your website, and assuming that your pages are crosslinked then the spiders will find the rest of your pages sooner or later. If you use doorway pages then you should submit these according to the rules laid out by each repository.

The first spider on your list should be the www.archive.org spider. Why? because it tells the other spiders when to re-spider you. The internet archive provides both a way to look you up the versions of your site and a service to anyone telling them when your site changes.

Next is the obvious one, www.google.com/addurl.html, and then staying free gets difficult. It used to be that almost every major search engine allowed you to submit a site to their listings, but now (overwhelmed by auto submit tools) they discourage web based submission and try to direct you to charging services.

Then it is back to Yahoo! to get its spider to search you. And yes it does take many weeks for the search spider to even visit your site, let alone get listed.

Then MSN which puts you in the Inktomi search pool.

At this point you can add your pages to other search engines too. I don't list them because they are usually not worth the extra work, and you are better off spending time on the next steps. But if there is an topic specific search engine then you should submit to it.

6 - Talk Up a Storm

If you undertood the principles of PageRank then you will know how important other pages linking to your site are. These links are on other people's sites and so tend to be temporary, but they can push your site up the rankings very quickly.

Always include the URL of your site and for any specifically related content pages. You should try and include your major keywords and site description in every submission. But remember to make the text make sense and look appealing.

6.1 - Create a Press Release or Two

PRWeb provide a free press release service. You should write a press release following their guidelines announcing that your site has been created or updated. Then every now and then if you do really have some news then you can make other press releases to keep yourself in the headlines.

6.2 - Mailing Lists, Wikis, Blogs & Forums

Use your major keywords to search for any mailing lists, wikis, blogs or forums that relate to your site e.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=funding+ferrari+wiki. Then go to each one and post a comment related to each one linking to your site. Remember to make the entry make sense in context and say something useful, making the link look like your email signature is a subtle way to do it. If you make it too obvious then administrators will delete your message.

6.3 - Other People's Links

More people who run simple personal or community sites have a set of links that they keep, just like their favourites or

Be aware that most people will ask for a

7 - It Takes At Least 6 Months

• Keep going with step 6, as every link you can generate to your site is significant.
• Keep your site up to date, resubmit to the spiders when you make major changes.
• Decide what your next goal is.