Web site Promotion | Website Development

How Do I Promote My Website?

If you want people to see your website, then you need to promote it in one way or another.

Actually, that is not really true. You need to promote it in many different ways

No one method is guaranteed to work, but a "suite" of promotional activities, should do the trick.

There are seven main ways to attract visitors to your website:

1) By having a high ranking in one or more search engines for the keyword you are targeting.

Put another way, if the keyword for which you want traffic is "red widgets" then your aim is for your website to appear on the first page of a search engine, when someone types in the phrase "red widgets".

2) Buying Traffic

You can promote your website by buying traffic, from those that already have it.

The main methods are a) Pay Per Click - for example Google Adwords b) Banner Advertising - for example on a news website, and c) text links, on high traffic websites.

3) Obtain Links from other websites

In the old days, and I am talking almost seven years ago here, this was how the web worked. When there was less clutter and rubbish online, website owners linked to other websites that they liked, or that they thought their visitors would find useful.

However, with the advent of rampant commercialism online, and the sheer logarithmic increases in websites available, this practice is no longer so viable.

From my experience, avoid wide scale reciprocal linking - it does not really work anymore. But do, please, link to sites that will be useful to your visitors. They may well link back to you in return.

4) Article Writing

You are looking at an article right now. Perhaps if YOU LIKE THE WAY I WRITE, you will click on a link in the Author Resource Box at the bottom of the page, and find out more about my websites.

Maybe, if I distribute this article to article directories, a webmaster looking or content will publish it on her website, exposing the article to more people.

It also could be, that the website(s) this article is published on have a high rank in Google, or other search engines, helping my website to rank higher via a one way quality link.

5) Press Releases

A specialist topic in itself, as are all traffic generating methods. Put simply, if you can tie in a newsworthy story to a website, then syndicate the story for press use, you can, if you are lucky, get a hugh surge of visitors in short order. Also highly effective for getting one way links. Check out prweb.com for more information

6) Web 2.0

This new breed of promotion activities encompasses sites like youtube, myspace, and squidoo. The similarity between all these types of sites is user generated content. Already, Web 2.0 is being "abused" by Internet Marketers - how much longer will these sites remain an effective method of promotion?

7) Web 3.0

I did not know that web 3.0 existed until yesterday, when I read a comment that said "cut out the middleman" (Web 2.0) and gain a head start on the new web culture. For more information on Web 3.0 - Google it.

8) Blogs

One of my favourite methods of website promotion. Why? because Google loves blogs, and a top ranking in Google is worth more traffic than the rest of the other search engines put together.

The two primary blog systems are "blogger" which is Google's offering, and "Wordpress" which is open source.