Less Obvious Ways of Website Promotion
Everyone knows that if you want to promote your website, you need to work on your search engine listings. What is perhaps lesser mentioned is that there are other ways of drawing traffic to your site that is sometimes missed by the newcomer. Some of these can prove to be quite good at drawing traffic.
For those who missed my articles on promoting your site through the search engines, you can find them from Affiliated-Business.com's Website Promotion and Search Engine Optimization index. For example, you can try the following articles for starters:
Keyword Density in Search Engine Ranking
Improve Your Search Engine Ranking with Google
Improve Your Search Engine Ranking on Alta Vista
1. Newsletter Methods
I've mentioned elsewhere how important it is to have a free newsletter that your visitors can sign up on your website. In particular, I've mentioned how it can serve as a link between you and your visitors, benefitting both parties, and drawing return visitors to your site. If you missed that article or you want to refresh your memory, you can read it online at: How to Start Your Own Newsletter article.
What I've failed to mention in that article is that you can actually promote your site and draw *new* visitors by having your own newsletter. How is this done?
a. Newsletter Announcement Lists
If your newsletter has useful content, you can actually promote your newsletter on the numerous newsletter announcement lists on the Internet. Targeted carefully, you can actually bring new visitors who want to check your site out after reading your announcements.
There are probably too many lists for me to exhaustively name in this article. Indeed, some of them are only frequented by webmasters like you and me whose only purpose there is to announce their own list. You will probably find out soon enough which announcement list works best for your newsletter and target group if you stagger your announcements and examine your web logs after each announcement is made.
Here are a couple of announcement lists to get you started:
http://www.egroups.com/group/aannounce
http://new-list.com/
b. Newsletter/Ezine Directories
Besides newsletter announcement lists, there are also numerous ezine directories where you can list your newsletter or ezine. These might draw some traffic to your site too, depending on their popularity and your target group.
Again, here are a few to get you started:
http://catalog.com/
http://liszt.com/
http://tile.net/lists/
http://www.webmonster.net/lists/
2. Free Articles for Republication
If you write your own original articles, you can actually make those articles available to other websites and newsletters for republication. The usual policy is that other sites and newsletters can republish the article only in its entirety without modification, and the author's byline and links to his website (usually at the bottom of the article) must be preserved.
This supposedly results in a mutually beneficial transaction - the other website (or newsletter) gets to use good articles which can draw in visitors to their site. You get free publicity, since your byline will include a link back to your website and brief information about what it offers.
There are, however, downsides to this. Nonetheless, if you wish to allow your articles to be published by others, there are at least a couple of ways you can get this done.
One way is to simply post a note on your site saying that all articles are free for republication and that the person who wants to reprint them need not specifically get your permission to do it. This allows your article to spread fast around the web.
Another way is to require other websites to request permission from you, which you will grant freely. This results in a slower distribution of your articles, but it has the advantage of your being in better control of its distribution.
You can also post your articles on certain sites and mailing lists designed for webmasters who are looking for articles to reprint. Here are a couple such sites/lists:
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
http://www.web-source.net/cgi-bin/articles/add.cgi
3. Free Software
Among the visitors to Affiliated-Business.com (one of my sites) are a large group who go there looking for the free programs that I wrote, namely Logtime and Tofrodos . Some of these visitors, while exploring the site, eventually also make it to the other sections which offer different sorts of free facilities (webmaster resources and programmer resources).
If you are adept at writing your own software, you might consider offering free versions on your site to attract visitors. Offering your own original software allows you to leverage on the free advertising done by the numerous software sites on the Internet which drive traffic to your site.
Note though that if your free software is unrelated to the theme or products offered by your main site, the best you get is untargeted traffic, which may consume your bandwidth without necessarily increasing your revenue.
4. Free Ebooks
In an earlier article, I dealt with the benefits of publishing your own electronic book (ebook) and how you can go about doing this. If you missed that article, you can find it at Affiliated-Business.com/e-books.html
Essentially, having an ebook that is freely available has good promotional potential. You can submit the free ebook to free ebook sites (which will promote and distribute your ebook for you free of charge) and encourage your visitors to pass it to their friends.
An example of a free ebook site where you can submit your Ebook is http://www.free-ebooks.net/ .
You might also want to get it reviewed at http://www.atlanticbridge.net/pubs/ebookjunction.htm .
5. Links from Other Sites
There are webmasters who claim that the main source of their visitors come from links from other sites. While I can't claim that for Affiliated-Business.com as yet (the search engines are still the biggest referrers by far), it is true that a large percentage of her visitors come from links on other sites.
How do you get others to link to you?
- Set up your own Reciprocal Links page where you can put links to other sites.
- Prepare some HTML code which the other sites can use to link to you, and put it in a Link To Us page for the convenience of other webmasters.
- Look out for related websites which have a Reciprocal Links page. Put a link to their site in your Links page, and ask them for one in return. They're more likely to consider your request if you're already linking to them and if you ask politely.
Perhaps by far the most important thing you need to do to get others to link to you is to put up useful content. That is, don't concentrate solely on talking about your products and services. When other webmasters see a useful site, they will link to you without your even having to request that link. This is how Affiliated-Business.com generally acquires links to her: I rarely request people to link to this site (except to submit to the usual directories). Webmasters like to link to useful sites, since it has the effect of increasing the value of their own site (strangely, having good links actually attracts return visitors). Make your site useful, and you will be surprised to find people linking to you without your asking.
The Tools of the Trade
Perhaps I should have named this article "The Tool of the Trade". This is because there is one and only tool that you will need when you are trying to improve the ranking of your web site in the search engines. It's called WebPosition Gold - an award winning software that almost every search engine ranking expert uses.
So, what is WebPosition Gold? Well, I doubt if there can be any software which can be called the "ultimate site promotion tool", but if I were to choose one which comes close to it, I would blindly choose WebPosition Gold. Why? Have a look at what it can do for you:
1) WebPosition Gold's Reporter allows you to find out the search engine ranking of your web site and that of your competitors for different keywords. You can also find out whether any of the pages in your site are listed in the search engines. It also records the position of your site over time so that you can watch out for any downward trend in the search engine ranking of your site.
2) The Page Critic allows you to compare the keyword frequency, the keyword weight and the keyword prominence of your page with the top ranking pages in the search engines. If you can make your page have the same keyword frequency, weight and prominence as the top ranking pages, you could soon find yourself at the top of the search engines. The Page Critic also lists the average keyword frequency, weight and prominence of the top ranking pages for a search engine based on research conducted by FirstPlace Software, the company which makes WebPosition Gold.
3) With the Upload Manager, you can upload the optimized pages that you create to your server.
4) With the Traffic Analyzer, you can analyze the traffic that your web site is getting. This will tell you which of the search engines are sending visitors to your site and the keywords which people are using to access your site from the search engines.
5) The Scheduler allows you to schedule common tasks such as reporting and submitting for after hours, thus saving you hours of valuable time.
However, there are two features of WebPosition Gold that I do not recommend you use. They are the Page Generator and the Submitter.
The Page Generator allows you to automatically generate doorway pages. However, if you use the doorway pages that WebPosition Gold creates for you, you could be penalized by the search engines for spamming.
While FirstPlace Software claims that the latest version of WebPosition Gold will not create doorway pages which can cause you to be penalized, I am not so sure. In my opinion, instead of using the Page Generator, you should manually create the pages which are optimized for the search engines.
The Submitter allows you to automatically submit pages to the search engines. However, the search engines often penalize you for using automatic submission tools.
While FirstPlace Software claims that the Submitter manages to make it appear to the search engines that your site is actually being submitted manually, in my opinion, the top search engines are simply too important for you to run the risk of being penalized for using an automatic submission tool. Submitting a particular page to all the major engines will not take more than 30 minutes of your time. Hence, you are better off submitting your pages manually than using WebPosition Gold's Submitter. Better yet, why not use our Submitter, available at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?1060&submission.htm It allows you to submit your site to many of the search engines manually without having to go to the search engines' Add URL page. And it's absolutely free!
There's also another point that you should note. As I mentioned earlier, the Page Critic not only lists the keyword frequency, weight and prominence of your page and that of the top ranking pages for your target keywords, it also displays the average frequency, weight and prominence of the top ranking pages for a search engine based on research conducted by FirstPlace Software
A common mistake that people make is to try and emulate the average keyword frequency, weight and prominence in their doorway pages. If you do this, however, you are unlikely to get a top ranking. What you should do is to emulate the frequency, weight and prominence of the top ranking pages for your target keywords (as displayed by the Page Critic) - don't emulate the average keyword frequency, weight and prominence that the Page Critic lists, since they are based on keywords which are not applicable for you.
Apart from these issues, however, WebPosition Gold is a top-notch program. The Reporter is by itself well worth the cost of the program. In fact, the product is so good that it received a ZD Net Labs 5 out of 5 star rating. Also, here's what Dr. Ralph Wilson, the editor of the famous Web Marketing Today newsletter had to say about WebPosition Gold.
"After spending several months using the beta version of WebPosition Gold, I am convinced it is the best product of its kind on the market, bar none."
(Web Marketing Today, Issue 54, March 1, 1999)
WebPosition Gold also comes with an unconditional money back guarantee - if you are not satisfied with the software, you can return it within 45 days for a full refund. Furthermore, FirstPlace Software also offers a 200% guarantee - if, within 45 days from the time that you purchase the software, you can find any other product that does everything that WebPosition Gold does for less money, they'll pay you double your money back for your trouble.
You can download an evaluation version of WebPosition Gold from http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?1060&webpositiongold/
Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. To have Sumantra's company place your site at the top of the search engines, go to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?1060 For more advice on how you can take your web site to the top of the search engines, subscribe to his FREE newsletter by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?1060&newsletter.htm
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