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Basic things you should know about securing a domain, selecting a server, building and maintaining a web site, and promoting that web site - Pg. 3 - Promoting Your Site
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Site Promotion is a whole study and full-time job unto itself. One member of our small team spends his entire work week at it, then spends even more time at it when he's supposed to be recreating. The best advice we can give you is this:
Add your web site address to all of your outgoing emails.
Include your web site address on all other forms of advertisement, such as business cards, brochures, newspaper ads, Yellow Page ads and radio/tv spots.
Get a link to your site posted on a lot of other people's pages.
Get your page ranked well on the search engines.
THE DON'T-s.
Don't use banner exchange programs. They drive visitors AWAY. (Yes, really.)
Don't use FFA or SPAM EMAIL techniques. It doesn't work, and it can get you banned from your service.
Don't take out expensive ads in magazines and newspapers for the sole purpose of advertising your web site. They are, for the most part, a waste of money UNLESS
- you are offering some VERY unique products, information, or services (such as an on-line catalog) to an audience that will take the time and effort to copy your web address off the printed page and type that URL into their computer browser.
- you are offering something that your market audience will scramble through hoops for, like free concert tickets, or the chance to win a million dollars...or (gasp) something of such strange or unique pornographic content, that every closet voyeur who has access to a computer will trot right over.
The truth is, site promotion is about name recognition, return visitation, and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, getting top ranking on the major search engines -- all of which can be very difficult, expensive and time consuming.
EITHER/AND/OR:
- Have a LOT of money to spend buying top search engine positioning,
- Focus on a NICHE MARKET and plan to spend a lot of time learing the how-to and then promoting your site (which is a lot like playing bumper cars, but not nearly as much fun,)
- Hire a service to do it for you.
Places to start learning are:
http://www.virtualpromote.com/
and:
http://www.searchengineworld.com/
Also visit http://searchenginewatch.com/ but DON'T use their SUBMIT service (or anyone else's) unless you want millions of useless submissions that net you trillions of pieces of spam-mail.
Instead HAND SUBMIT your pages.
You can use this site to help with hand submissions.
http://www.the-vault.com/easy-submit/
How to get listed on zentao.com: Provide a reciprocal link to us, then go here: ADD YOUR LINK
This is something you can do to help your site promotion, our site promotion, and the other listed sites with their site promotion.
A RECIPROCAL LINK is where you add your web address to a list of Links, then post that list on your site and submit the page(s) to the search engines. Every site on the list does the same thing, and pretty soon you have hundreds of links to your site. This tells the search engines that you have a VERY important site and the engines rank your pages accordingly.
WARNING:
There are a LOT of add-link pages out there, but, REMEMBER, only links pages that have .htm or .html tags (actual HTML pages) are registered by Search Engines. If the page where your link winds up is generated dynamically or "on-the-fly" by cgi from a database (it has a question mark in the link), then your link will not be counted by the search engines. Most search engines do NOT register dynamically cgi generated pages.
web site design -- WebArt by Zentao
PAGE BUILD DATE: 09/30/1999
UPDATED: 04/16/2002
