Promoting your website involves more than just registering your website with search engines and directories.

Search Engine (e.g. Alta Vista) - a search engine is a database of web pages, you give them your URL, and they read your page, extract relevant information, and store it in their database. Many search engines also run "spiders", "bots", "crawlers", or "robots" that roam around the net looking for new pages.

Directory (e.g. Yahoo, Open Directory) - a directory is a database of websites. A directory is a manual entry database system, your listing in an index depends on what you tell them in your submission, not what is on your pages.

Get Your Website Noticed

You can submit your website to search engines and directories through automatic submissions or manually. You can also pay for placement or hits, use banner ads, or join web-rings and link exchanges that are specific to your type of website.

 

Tips and Things to Avoid

 

Don't Over Pay for Submissions. The top 10 search engines will most likely generate 90 to 95 percent of the hits you receive, so don't waste your time or money on those "submit to 100, 500, or 1,000 sites" advertisements.

 

Be Patient. Hits won't be instantaneous after registering your website. It could take weeks or months for the increased traffic to become noticeable.

 

Don't Use Tricks. Stay away from attempts to trick the search engines to achieve higher rankings. Instead, gear your search engine optimization towards improving your website by making it attractive and useful to visitors.

 

Avoid Submitting Your Website Too Often. Some search engines consider multiple submissions from the same website as "spamming" and this could lead to rejection of your website by those search engines.

 

Don't Annoy Your Visitors. Banner ads can be annoying to visitors, so be cautious about using them.

 

Submit Manually. Some websites such as Yahoo should only be submitted to manually and you will see better results if you submit manually.

 

Link to Similar Websites. Link your website to similar websites to increase your traffic. You can find these websites by performing online searches. Link to the local chamber of commerce, associations that you have a membership with, etc. Many search engines use the number of links (links on your web page to other websites and visa versa) on a page as criteria for determining the value of that particular page/website. Promote Your Website Outside the Web. Once you have your domain name, put it on everything! Put your website address on business cards, stationery, mailers, catalogs, brochures, etc. Send out announcements (see web-cards.com), run specials only available through your website, offer discounts for online orders, etc.

 

Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly

Your website must be search engine friendly. The HTML code behind your website is important, it's where the META TAGS reside with the title, description and keywords for your website.

Avoid The Use of Repetitive Words. The use of too many repetitive words in your META TAGS could also be considered "spamming" and could cause your website to be rejected by some search engines.

Keep Keywords Relevant to Your Website's Content. Don't use unrelated keywords just to get noticed or show up in a search engine search. Ask yourself what type of visitors are you trying to attract? Some websites use words like "sex" in their keywords, unless it's a part of your business, don't use it.

Call us today at: (402) 991-2978

or email us at:

Copyright 2001-2007 WBCS Web Design. All rights reserved.

Web Design and Maintenance by

WBCS Web Design

Last Modified:06/28/07