Website Promotion 1
Promoting your website to build traffic
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Website Promotion 1 - Start your engines!
Search Engines - How will they find you?
To build website traffic you need to promote the website.
The first step in website promotion is to make sure that the website can be found by the major search engines, and by any other search engines which may be important to you (for example, country-specific search engines).
If another website is already linking to yours, then the major search engines will find your site automatically. Having found it, they will, in due course, start to index your web pages. (For this to occur, the other website must be regularly crawled by the search engine robots.)
Website Promotion - Search Engine Submission
But if no other websites are linking yet to yours, kick-start your website promotion by submitting your website to Google and Yahoo.
It is not necessary to submit a website to all the search engines. In the end, they will all find the site for themselves. In the meanwhile, those smaller engines would have made only a small contribution, at most, to your traffic.
But for a website which promotes a local business, it is a good idea to submit it to any specialist search engines serving your own country.
Submitting your site to Google is very easy and will take only a few minutes. It is a good idea to open a Google account (free) at the same time. This will give you access to a number of useful products and services including Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Website Optimizer.
Submitting a site to Yahoo is also easy, but involves a registration process.
After you Submit your Site
Website promotion is usually a slow process. Don't expect the earth to move when you submit your site to Google and Yahoo. It may take days or weeks before the search engine robots start to crawl your site. Even then they may index only a few of your web pages. After a few more days, or sometimes weeks, they may index a few more.
So it may take several weeks for them to regularly send you traffic.
With Yahoo you can pay some money to hurry them along. With Google you can only wait.
Website Promotion - Create and Submit a Sitemap
It is a good idea to create a sitemap file in the .xml format accepted by major search engines. This tells the search engines what web pages they should look for in your website, and may help them to start indexing your web pages sooner.
The sitemap.xml file needs to be amended as you add new pages to your website. (This is not the same as a sitemap web page often found on larger websites, which is provided for the benefit of visitors.)
There are several free facilities for creating a sitemap.xml for your website. Having created it, upload it to your website. Then you should submit it to Google, using Webmaster Tools
Website Promotion - Monitor Search Engine Indexing
If you are anxious to see results, it can be very hard to wait for your efforts at website promotion to bear fruit. You can monitor progress, however, with both Google and Yahoo, to see how far they have got with the job of indexing your pages.
Simply go into Google Search or Yahoo Search and search for:
site:www.example.com
substituting your own website URL. The result of this search will include one entry for each of those website pages which have been indexed.
Website Promotion - Monitor Search Engine Ranking
Once your pages have been included in the major search engine indexes, you can then find out how each page is positioned in the search engine results pages for the key phrase you chose for it.
To succeed at website promotion using search engines, you have to be close to the top of the search engine results for a particular page and key phrase. Otherwise, very little traffic will come your way.
Don't expect to jump straight to the top, but monitor your position for each key phrase, at least once a week.
You can do this manually, of course, by making a search request for each key phrase. That's the hard way to do it. For an easier way, choose one of the tools that check a list of key phrases for you. (You set up the list only once. The process runs in the background while you do something else)Don't run them too often. Once a week should be enough.
Website Promotion Progress
Don't expect your progress to be rapid, and don't expect it to be uniform, especially with Google, who may change their algorithm more often than you would believe!
Sometimes you will find your web page doing better in the search engine result pages for your key phrase, sometimes it will do worse. Changes in ranking may be due to changes in your web page, or gained / lost links. But often you may be unable to find any explanation
If you've made no adjustments to your web page for weeks, you may still find frequent and substantial changes in your search engine results page position, either up or down.
So don't get too excited or depressed at short term changes but continue to monitor your positions. It's like the stock market - ignore short term "noise" (fluctuations) and concentrate on longer term trends.
And keep on working at other aspects of website promotion. For example, our next tutorial takes a look at how to build links to your site...
Links / Resources
Glossary of Website Promotion Terms:
Seobook: Search Engine Marketing Glossary
Webmaster World: Glossary
Submit website to major search engines:
Google:Add your URL
Yahoo: Submit your Site
Open an account with Google:
Google: Create an account
To expedite crawling by Yahoo Search robot:
Yahoo: Search Submit Basic
More articles on sitemaps:
Herman Drost: Create a Google Sitemap for your website
How to create a Google site map
How to create a Google sitemap
Free Sitemap Generators:
SML-Sitemaps.com
SiteMapDoc
EWP Tutorials on selection and use of key phrases:
Selecting Key Phrases
Keyword Placement
Using Meta Tags
Key phrase monitoring tools:
Seobook:RankChecker (plug in for Mozilla Firefox)
Free Monitor for Google
Other Website Promotion articles on Search Engine Submission:
A Promotion Guide: Search Engine Submission
Do NOT submit your website to Google
Build Traffic: Website Promotion Top Prev Next: Link Swaps
Copyright © 2009 - 2011 EasyWebsitePrimer.com Last updated: September 2011
Website promotion - How to get started with search engines.