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Promoting Your Website

Even though your website may not be exactly the way you want it to be when you're finished, it's not too early to start doing some promotion since it often takes a long time for search engines and other automated promotional tools to look at your website.

The basic reason for promoting your website is quite simple. It does you no good to have a website and no visitors. That's what website promotion is all about - helping you get people to visit your website. Below are some important points about successfully marketing your website, but to start with, there is no subsitute for common sense. It simply stands to reason that the more people you make aware of your website, the more people who will drop in for a visit.

Each of these promotional ingredients is quite simple, but each one has also been the subject of books and countless "do it my way" approaches. We have attempted to provide you with tools for everything that you need to accomplish the basics. We also have some added help that will guide you on the path to more advanced forms of website promotion and we're always continuing to enhance and add to these offerings.

Advertise Your Website Constantly By Word-of-Mouth!

The first and simplest way to get someone to come visit your site is to invite them personally. Be sure to put your website's address and your email address on EVERYTHING! Always put your URL (your website's unique address such as http://www.inetusa.com) in any newspaper advertisements, house signs, roadside signs, business cards, letterhead, greeting cards, other stationery on your email messages and any other publications of any kind that you create. Never miss a chance to promote your website in person or in print, radio, televison or any other media you may be using.

Search Engines

Major search engines and directories provide an important source of regular visitors to any website and quite often this traffic is free. Submitting your website address to search engines and directories is by far the quickest and easiest method of announcing your site to the world.

Keywords and metatags are used to attract traffic from search engines. Meta tags and Keywords are used by the search engines to index your site. This is done by providing the keywords and description most relevant to each page to the search engines in the special language they understand. Be aware that this is more "art" than "science" and that the search engines change their patterns and serach algorithms very frequently so no one monopolizes the top of the listings all the time without hard work. If you expect to be successful, you must be extremely diligent when using this approach to promote your site.

In working with search engines, you need to remember that they fall into two basic categories - directory engines and indexed engines. An example of a directory is YAHOO. If you click on one of the main links on YAHOO such as "Arts & Humanities" it will take you to another subdirectory. This process continues until you find the exact directory you were looking for. YAHOO recently began charging for submissions to their directory. In order to be listed in the directory if you are a business you must pay $200.00. For many people this is out of reach. However, there are many other "indexed engines" that are free.

GOOGLE is an example of an indexed engine. You submit your website to GOOGLE and they will send a robot to your site. This robot is nothing more than a program that looks at your page. Specifically it looks at your META keywords, META description and other content on your website pages. It puts this information into it's database for searching purposes. In it's simplest form when someone goes to Google and searches on a particular keyword that matches your site's keywords you should come up. This isn't the case at all though.

Here's the bad news, it can take approximately 4 - 6 weeks (and increasing) before GOOGLE or most indexed engines will send their robot to your site because of the backlog of sites currently waiting to be indexed (i.e. visited by the robot). Then, once they do send the robot and the robot returns the information to google it will run a calculation on the results based on their own carefully guarded "secret" formula. Most Search Engines formulas are figured out through trial and error by web development firms. It is usually possible to order expedited service from indexed engine sites for an additional fee.

Here is a break down of the general items GOOGLE looks for in the data they collect from the robot's visit to your site. They are in no particular order...

  • A domain with your keywords in it - http://www.ISellHouses.com would be good if your keywords are "I Sell Houses".

  • Word order is very important. Research the searches that produce the best results for you. Example search: "low cost investment housing" Make your keywords in the same order as the search phrase.

  • Repeat your keywords in the first 1/3 of the body of your home page's text.

  • Use synonyms of your keywords throughout the body of your text. Example: Keywords are "find investment property", so use the following throughout the body... investment properties, find investments, investing in property, etc...

OK, So What Exactly Are META Tags?

Meta tags are special tags found in the HTML source document of your website. These tags are hidden, meaning the tags will not show up in the text of your final product. These will however be available for search engines and anyone who wants to view your source document. Meta tags are used for tasks such as helping search engines index your site by providing the keywords and description most relevant to your website.


The three meta tags most often discussed are the "META DESCRIPTION" tag; the "META KEYWORD" tag and the "META TITLE" tags. These are the tags used to summarize what your site is about (description); what keywords are relevant to search queries and what is shown in the end user's browser window. Some search engines will let you design your own summary description through these description tags.

How To Post Your META Tags

  1. Select "Site Promotion" from the Marketing menu to display the Coaching page.
  2. Click on "Edit Your Meta Tags" to display the Meta Tag edit screen.
  3. Enter your information for each of the meta tag fields shown below


    • Title - The information you place here will be shown in the title bar of your visitor's browser when they visit your site (see example).
    • Status - This is the tag which displays data in the bottom-left area of the browser window (in the status bar)
    • Description - This is the description search engines will use when they list your site. Make this informative and try to repeat some of your keywords here. Remember that real people read this so don't just put keywords here.
    • Keywords - These are the words people type into the search engines to find your site. Separate multiple words with commas. e.g. Real Estate, Houses For Sale, single family
    • Comments - Some search engines will index your entire page, even text that is hidden. The text you type here will be hidden from your users but not from the search engines. Use this section to repeat some of your keywords and add a longer more detailed description of your site and services.

  4. Click "Update Meta Tags" to save your changes


Submitting Your Website to Search Engines Automatically

  1. Make sure that your Meta Tag information is complete (using the instructions above)
  2. Select "Site Promotion" from the Marketing menu to display the Coaching page.
  3. Click on "Search Engine Submission" to display the Search Engine Submission page.
  4. Verify your website URL and Email address to be submitted. Please note that you can submit additional domain names (or individual pages) by changing the contents of the URL field here. If you are using multiple domain names with your website, be sure to submit all of your domain names (one at a time!).
  5. Click the "Submit My Site" button to automatically submit your website to the listed search engines
  6. Check the Status of each submission. If any of the submissions failed, you can manually submit them using the links provided
  7. You can submit your website to additional search engines by clicking on the links provided. We highly recommend that you do submit your website to several of these search engines.

Reciprocal Linking
Reciprocal linking is another name for swapping links. Reciprocal Linking is a very effective way to bring visitors to your website. Creating reciprocal link directories manually can be quite time consuming, but the payoff is worth the effort. Basic reciprocal linking is simple. Find websites that are complimentary to your website (for example if you sell carpeting on your website, a good complimentary websites would be home decorating and remodeling websites). Simply send a brief email inviting them to trade links with your website - be sure to provide your link information and website description in your invitation.

Pay-per-click search engines

Pay-per-click search engines offer cost-effective, highly targeted website traffic. Pay per click search engines, pay for placement or pay for ranking search engines are a highly effective way to attract cheap, targeted traffic to your website. With cost-per-click (CPC) pricing, you pay only when a customer clicks on your ad, regardless of how many times it's shown.


Google AdWords Select offers a very effective Pay-Per-Click program.

Publish your own opt-in e-zine or newsletter

Publish a newsletter and get people to subscribe! Sending a newsletter is one of the best ways to stay in touch with your site visitors and existing customers. At the very least you can remind your past & future visitors about your website on a regular basis. But, even better, you get a chance to develop trust between you & your virtual visitors.