Promoting Your Web Site

Done with your website? Now tell others about it!

Promoting your website means informing others of its existence. If it's a site of interest only to local people, then promoting may mean just sending an email to a local group or requesting links be created to your site from existing, familiar pages others already use. But when your website could be of interest to others outside the local circle, you have some work to do to reach them. You must advertise--but not advertise the traditional route, nor the costly route.

The key is with search tools. When search engines like Google or Alta Vista or Yahoo "know" of your website, they then can index it into their databases. Indexing, in a nutshell, means storing relevant words and phrases. Once relevant words and phrases are stored, if a person looking for information happens to enter a keyword search term matching a stored indexed word, web pages (perhaps your web pages) will be listed in search results. But in order for this to happen, search engines must first know of your website. That's where a bit of work on your part now can make the difference between people coming to your site or not coming.

The following two categories of links will take you to two different ways to promote your website:

• Directly to specific search tools.
• Indirectly through free services (at the time of writing) each of which passes onto multiple search tools the information you give about your website.

Using either, be aware that some offer free email offers you can turn off; if you are really protective of your Hanover email address, consider using on the entry forms an email address you might have at Yahoo, Bigfoot, or Hotmail.

Ready? Here are links for website promotion efforts . . .

Submit directly to individual search engines/directories:

Use free search services to submit to several search engines at once: