How to properly promote your site
Site promotion is really not that difficult. It just takes a little bit of effort, a little bit of thought, and a fair amount of patience. It is crucial to understand that site promotion is a long-term, low-intensity effort. You can get into the search engines in days to weeks these days, but it can take years to develop a site that gets top rankings. So don't be overwhelmed by all the tutorials and tips on this site; you don't have to do all of this overnight. The #1 mistake people make is rushing! Take your time, slow down, read the articles, think about how they apply to your website, and then proceed. Many people have told me that they print out my pages and keep them in the bathroom, of all places!
Here's a summary of my "12 step" program:
1.
If you're selling something, make sure you're selling the right thing. The internet is a great tool for selling things, but there's a big gotcha. If you're trying to sell something that lots of other people are also trying to sell, you're facing competition two ways; first, it's going to be a lot harder to get noticed on the search engines, and second, the competition is going to eat away at the profits.
The real secret to making money on the net is to sell something that nobody else is selling. Even if the market is tiny and obscure, if you're the only maker, the net will bring you and your customers together. If you sell cowboy boots, you might have problems getting noticed, but if you specialize in cowboy boots for people with six toes, you'll make money. My favorite joke example of a niche is “hand tools for left-handed lesbians”. If you
google for that, many of the pages are blog articles referring to my article that used this as an example (the rest are spam; even spammers think it's a funny phrase).
Furthermore, if you're trying to make money with an affiliate program, in particular those that automatically generate a "virtual" website for you, you should know that in almost all cases, they are a waste of time and money. I've written an article,
Virtual Vexation, that explains why. I get emails all the time from people who have wasted hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the schemes. Please do not be one of them. Google considers most of these pages to be spam, but I think in a lot of cases, that's a spelling error; the correct spelling is scam.
2.
Get your site working properly. It doesn't matter how many people you attract to your website if, once they get there, they immediately get turned off by an unattractive presentation or a half-built website. I assume you're already happy with how your site looks, but you may want to read my article on
how to (not) win awards which contains a list of website mistakes you should try to avoid. At the same time, you don't have to get too fancy; simple, straightforward sites work fine, you don't need to pay a web-designer to develop a site that's incredibly fancy (and whose main value is that it's a monument to his skills).rds,
3.
Choose keywords and tweak your site for the search engines. Once your site looks good to humans, the next step is to try to make it look good to the search engines, so you get the coveted high ranking. This involves choosing the right keywords and adjusting your page title, meta tags and first paragraph to showcase them. This is where most webmasters screw up. They choose the wrong keywords because they don't spend enough time thinking about how people are going to try to find them. My article on
search engine optimization takes you step-by-step through this process.
4.
Submit to the major search engines. Now that your site is all ready, you next submit to all the major search engines. One of the key components of SelfPromotion.com is an extremely powerful and comprehensive automated submission tool that can properly promote your site to all the major search engines and indexes -- it'll only take you about 30 minutes to create an account and promote to the search engines. Then you just have to wait to be listed -- and start the long-term process of improving your rankings.
In the old days, it would often take weeks or even months to get listed by a search engine, and new sites would often get penalized as a spam-prevention technique. Today, it's often the opposite; sites can sometimes get listed in days, and may get a temporary "freshness" bonus. But in both cases, the lesson is the same: don't worry about short-term changes in your rankings; concentrate on long-term improvements to your site to make it more useful to your visitors -- in the long-run, the search engines will notice and reward you for being helpful.
To learn how to create an account and use the promotion tool, please read the
site submission tutorial, also known as "A Boy and his Website".
5.
Submit to the major indexes. While SelfPromotion.com can automatically submit your site to a lot of places, it does not autosubmit to the major indexes such as Yahoo and Open Directory. The reason is that listings in these indexes are sufficiently valuable that a hand-done, optimized submission is worth taking the time to craft.
Next to Google, Yahoo is the most important place to have your site listed on the Internet, yet most Yahoo listings are awful. Once you understand how to craft a proper submission to Yahoo, you'll not only greatly increase your chances of getting in, but you'll get many more hits than you would otherwise. If you are already in Yahoo, don't despair; my initial listing in Yahoo was awful, but I managed to double the number of clickthroughs I get from them by successfully requesting a change to my listing. You can learn how to make these all-important submissions by reading
How to get listed in Yahoo (and the other major indexes). You'll also learn whether or not you even should submit to Yahoo; since it costs $300 a year to get listed in their index, for most people, it's not a cost-effective use of money.
Writing the site description you submit to Yahoo is the single most important step you will ever take during site promotion, so spending some extra time on this step is highly recommended. If you follow my advice, and your site is decent, you'll almost always get in without any problems. I get emails all the time saying things like "I've been trying to get into Yahoo for 6 months, but after following your instructions, I got listed in less than a week." It's great ego massage, so I want to get one from you too!
Curiously, even if you decide you shouldn't submit to Yahoo, thinking about what you'd do if you did submit is time well spent, because it will help you refine and boil down a good description of your site. You'll end up using that description over and over, in other submissions, in your meta tags, and in your page copy!
6.
Submit to the general indexes. There are many "2nd-tier" indexes that are worth submitting to, though not worth crafting a specially optimized listing for (although the advice in the previous step is still valid). I've broken these down into a variety of categories (including general indexes, british and canadian-specific indexes and search engines, international indexes, indexes that accept adult sites, and special-purpose indexes) so that you can submit to them in small chunks as time permits. SelfPromotion.com can autosubmit to many of these, and provides manual links to hundreds more (mostly the special-purpose and international/foreign- language ones). Once you've read the
search engine submission tool tutorial you'll understand how to do this. You can also look at the
list of search engines if you so desire.
7.
Send me money! This is the step my wife likes the best. SelfPromotion.com works like shareware. If you like what the site does, you can contribute what you think it's worth. That's right, you set the price. It took me about a year to realize that I had reinvented the concept of
tipping.
If you contribute, then I keep your data around for a year (making future promotions easier, since most of the typing gets done for you) and you also get access to some cool tools (see below for more details).
If you don't contribute, then after 4 weeks, your account gets deleted to make room for the next person. But I do keep backups (as every computer user should), so if you later change your mind, I can recover your data.
8.
Consider paying for hits. The good news about listing in the search engines and indexes is that it's free. The bad news is that you don't have much control. While it is certainly worthwhile to tweak your pages in search of high rankings, it's not always possible to get the ones you want. There are, however, several places that can provide you with well-targeted traffic for pennies a visitor. My favorites are Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords, and I have a page dedicated to using
pay-per-click cost-effectively.
9.
Learn more about sales and promotion. In the almost three years I've been running this site, I've written a number of articles that you may find of interest. You'll find the links on the right-hand side of the page under Tutorials and Articles. I've also found some good
Web Marketing Courses that will help you plan how to
handle the traffic you get. After all, if you're selling on the web, it's not how many hits you get, it's how many sales you make. If your wonderful widget website doesn't do a good job of selling widgets, then all the search engine traffic in the world isn't going to do you much good -- and it's much easier to double your site's effectiveness than it is to double its traffic (even better, of course, is to do both!). Next, since knowing who is visiting your site and how they got there is very useful, you should consider tracking your visitors. If you have access to your webserver logs, consider using the free
Analog web-analysis software (available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and more). If not, consider a web-based service like
Web-Stat. Finally, I have a well-stocked
Links of Interest page that contains listings of other great promotion and webmaster resource sites.
10.
Do your research before hiring anyone to do promotion for you. While my site is aimed at do-it-yourselfers, some people may be more comfortable hiring a consultant to do site tweaking and search engine registration. Even so, it's important to understand the basics before doing so; there are a lot of snake-oil salesmen out there, and a little knowledge is an effective "bull$h1t detector". For example, if someone promises to put you on page 1 of the search engines, run away as fast as you can! Getting on page 1 for relevant keywords takes hard work and patience, and is not something that any reputable consultant will ever promise (a common scam is promising you page 1 results and delivering them -- for irrelevant or hyper-specific phrases that will never generate any meaningful traffic).
It's important to understand what you're buying, so take your time, read around the site, and get an education before you hire someone (and before you ask, I don't do this kind of consulting, I simply don't have the time!)
11.
Go get some links! An important component of your search engine ranking is determined by what sites link to you; when an important site gives you a link, it's like a vote of confidence in your site. In the early days, Google rankings were almost entirely based on your “link popularity”, and a link from Yahoo was the most coveted commodity in website promotion. Even today,
Some people devote their lives to getting links. I assume you have better things to do, so my link building advice is very simple:
1) If you come across a website that you think would be useful to your visitors, add a link to them. I have a
links of interest page where I do this. You are making the web more useful to your visitors, and the good karma can't hurt.
2) If you really, honestly think that the site you just linked to would similarly be improved if it had a link to your site, then email the site owner and suggest it. Tell him that you have linked to his site, and that regardless of what he decides, you will continue to do so, because you think his site is useful. The cute thing here is that by explicitly saying this, he'll give your request extra consideration. Isn't it great how being virtuous can be so evil?
3) If you happen to find a site that would be improved by a link to your site, even though a reciprocal link would not be appropriate, email and suggest it.
4) Make all your emails personal, and make sure they demonstrate that you've clearly spent time on their site.
5) The key to successful link building is always, above all, put other people's interests (your users, and the other site owners) above your own. That helps ensure you get good links (and bad links are worse than no links!)
12.
Read the rest of this page! Assuming I haven't completely turned your brain to mush with all of the above verbiage, read on. The rest of this page explains in more detail what the site does, and how it does it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did you build this site?
This site was originally created because I got repeatedly spammed by some scam artists who promised they'd "register my URL at the top 500 search engines." The truth is that there aren't anywhere near 500 search engines, and never were. There are in fact about a half-dozen english-language search engines that are of any value in generating hits for your site. There are also about 200 general and special-purpose indexes that can be useful. The vast majority of the "search engines" the hype-artists will "promote" your site to are Free-For-All links pages that are at best worthless for generating site traffic, and at worst will get your email address on multiple spam lists. Not the kind of promotion you had in mind, eh?
So, having been quite annoyed, and given that there is nothing more dangerous than an annoyed hacker (in the original, honorable meaning of the word), I decided to build a site that would let everyone properly register their URL to all the important search engines and indexes.
What's the difference between a search engine and an index?
A search engine (eg: Altavista) is a database of webpages. You give them your URL, and they read your page, extract relevant information from it, and store it in their database. Many search engines also run "spiders" that roam around the net looking for new pages.
An index (eg: Yahoo) is a database of web sites. Your listing in an index depends on what you tell them in your submission, not what is on your page. Some sites are mixtures; Yahoo has both a search engine and an index, for example. These days, most people use the word “directory” instead of index, which gives you some idea of how long this site has been around!
What does the SelfPromotion.com submission tool do?
Each index and search engine has an "
url submission" page that lets you enter information about your site into their database. The problem is, of course, that if it takes 10 minutes to find and fill out the information on one of these pages, and you need to register with 90 sites, that's 15 hours -- 15 very boring hours -- of typing! And since most of the sites want the same information (name, email address,
URL of your site, etc), you'll spend those 15 hours typing the same things over and over again!
SelfPromotion.com automates this process. You decide what sites you want to register with, and the site will generate a custom form that asks for exactly the information needed to register with those sites. You fill out this single form.
Then "Tooter," the tireless submission
daemon goes around the net and does all the typing for you. Tooter also saves all the information you entered -- when you return to promote to some more sites, it can fill out most of the form for you -- saving you a huge amount of time!
This automatic data entry is one of SelfPromotion,com's most powerful and subtle features. There are many minor indexes out there that might only generate 5 or 10 hits a year for you. It isn't worth spending 5-10 minutes at each of these sites to register by hand, but because the extra information you have to enter to promote to one more site using SelfPromotion.com usually takes you less than a minute to enter, it makes it possible for you to register at more sites than you otherwise would if you were doing it by hand.
It wouldn't be cost-effective for you to spend an extra hour or two of your time doing registrations that might get you an extra 100 visitors a year (and maybe 1 or 2 sales). But if it only took you 10 minutes, it's a different story. Which is the real power of this site. It saves you time
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