Free website promotion tutorial

Free website promotion tutorial
Welcome to A Promotion Guide. If this is your first visit, you might want to take the time to read through this page. It contains a free step-by-step website promotion tutorial
that also serves as a "User's Guide" to the site. Reading it will give you a good idea on what you need to do, when you need to do it and how the articles on this site will help you.
This tutorial is split into three phases that each have two, three or four steps. It is highly recommended that you start from the first phase and move forwards only after you have completed all of the steps in it.
We'll begin with the assumption that your site is brand new and that you haven't done any website promotion work yet. However, that doesn't mean that you can't use the tutorial if you have submitted to a few search engines or registered your site with a couple of directories. If you notice that there are some things you have already done, feel free to simply skip over them.
Promoting your site takes a lot of time and may involve waiting several weeks or even months to get into certain directories and search engines. Thus, it might be wise to bookmark this page so that you can return to it later and continue the tutorial from where you left off.
Website promotion, phase one - Directories
You should start your website promotion efforts by listing your site at the most popular Internet directories. Because they can send you substantial amounts of traffic and affect your ranking in various search engines, it is wise to make sure that your site is present in all of the major directories before doing anything else.
Step one - General information
Submitting to directories is easy and doesn't require much effort. It's ensuring that your submission will be accepted that makes this task a hard one. Start with the Open Directory Project. While your site has to offer good, unique content to be accepted to the ODP, its editors usually review sites quickly and won't reject them without a good reason for doing so. This, along with the fact that submitting to the ODP is free of charge, makes it a perfect starting point. Completing this step successfully will also provide you with experience that will prove to be very valuable later on.
Read my thoughts on how Google's ranking algorithm works and notice how an ODP listing seems to affect your ranking at Google. Keep this information in mind when you submit.
Take a look at the advice on submitting your website to the ODP.
Finally, submit your site to the ODP.
If your submission isn't successful, consider becoming an editor at the Open Directory and listing your own site.
Step three - Yahoo
After securing a listing at ODP, your next task is to get the folks at Yahoo to notice that your site exists and is worth a place in their directory. This might cost you a fair amount of money if you are running a commercial site, but is usually worth it. Non-commercial sites can get in for free, but might require several submissions and a lot of patience before they are accepted.
Check out the Yahoo-specific guidelines and hints and the article about how Yahoo's search feature ranks sites.
Bite the bullet and submit your site to Yahoo.
Website promotion, phase two - Search engines
Now that your site has been included in ODP and Yahoo, you should already be receiving clearly more traffic than before. The next task is to get to know search engines and use them to bring even more people to your pages. Because you have completed phase one, you have established a good foundation for making your site perform well in the search engines.
Step one - Search engine optimization, basics
In order to gain good rankings, you'll need to learn the basics of search engine algorithms (ranking systems) and adjust your pages to meet their criteria as well as possible. This will take some time and effort, but doing some work now will save you from a lot of trouble in the future.
First, try to make the design of your site as search engine friendly as possible. To read more about the subject, take a look at my article about website optimization.
Next, you'll need to do some keyword optimization. Sounds frightening, but in plain English it simply means choosing the correct keywords for your pages. Using the wrong words is perhaps the most common reason why people don't get satisfying results from their search engine optimization work.
Continue by reading these search engine optimization tips.
Read the article about META tags and add them to all of your pages. The META keywords tag isn't absolutely necessary, but the META description tag is very important.
Learn what link popularity is and how search engines use it to rank your pages.
Unless you have already done so, read about Google's algorithm. Google is among the most popular search services of today, so it is wise to take its requirements into account.
Use all of this information to optimize your pages for the search engines.
Step two - Search engine optimization, advanced
Your site is now adequately prepared to really start bringing in traffic from search engines. But if you want to widen your knowledge about them and increase your chances of success, you still have some work to do. On the other hand, if you're totally exhausted and just want to get this thing over with, you'll be delighted to know that this step isn't absolutely necessary.
Study some of the more advanced things related to search engine optimization. Among them are cloaking, css tricks, doorway pages, themes and how to improve your search engine ranking with click popularity.
Read about the things you should avoid doing from this article that outlines common web site promotion mistakes.
Step three - Submitting to search engines?
Now is the time to make sure that your site has a presence in the indexes of major search engines. Fortunately, they are quite good at finding your site on their own. There are things you can do to help them, though..
Get to know how search engine submission works and how the search engines determine which sites to list.
Read the article "Targeting your search engine marketing" to see which engines are the most popular ones.
If you are running a commercial site, you might also want to consider paying for search engine placement. Take a look at how you can use PPC search engine advertising to buy your way to the top.
Website promotion, phase three - More techniques
After being accepted into the largest directories and having pages of your site come up in answer to searches done at the major search engines, the long hours that you've spent on website promotion have begun to pay off and your daily visitor count is starting to look good. But there is still plenty you can do to help your site attract even more traffic.
In phase three, we'll examine different promotion methods that you might want to try. However, in order to prevent you from wasting your time on things that don't work, we'll also go over a few techniques that have proven to be less than spectacular when I experimented with them.
Step one - Keep these in mind
First, let's take a look at the good stuff. The articles introduced in this step are about the website promotion methods that are at least partially effective. Some of them work better than others, but if used correctly, all of them can produce results that will be worth your while. Of course, most of the articles include advice on what you need to do to obtain the best possible results with the method discussed.
If you sell something on your site, you might want to try banner ads. Usually banner campaigns are seen as expensive and ineffective, but it is partially because advertisers don't know how to design good banners.
Read the article on how to increase traffic with return visitors. Getting people to come back is the secret to why some sites get amazingly many hits per day.
Learn what reciprocal links are and how to get them, then put that knowledge into use. In addition to sending you visitors, reciprocal links will also increase your link popularity and help your site rank higher in the search engines.
Start using E-mail signatures. They might not produce thousands of visitors, but are a great way to promote your site a bit without having to actually do anything.
Evaluate whether your site could benefit from joining a topsite list. These lists have their good and bad sides, but might be at least worth a try.
Consider trying to build traffic with Usenet advertising. It can give you a nice traffic boost and help spread the word about your site, but only if done properly. Read the article to learn why Usenet promotion should only be done with great care.
Writing newsletter articles often works well and can send you large amounts of targeted traffic in a short period of time, for free.
Step two - Forget these
As said, everything just doesn't always work the way it should in the world of promotion. In step two, our attention is focused on website promotion methods that are more trouble than they are worth. They might not be entirely useless, but your time would be better spent on improving your site or spreading the word about your site in other ways.
Click exchange programs are easy, fast, free and will get you a lot of visitors. That's why it might be a surprise to hear that they really aren't good website promotion tools.
A lot has been written about FFA pages and for the past few years, most of it has been negative. The only thing they are good for is increasing the flow of spam to your E-mail address.
Winning website awards can occasionally be useful, especially if the awards are well-known. However, sometimes the winner of the award is not the real winner.
Final words
Congratulate yourself for being persistent, bright and hard-working. Most get frustrated and quit before this point, which is why most sites never become anything. After all, the secret to having a successful site is working hard in both promoting
and creating it. You just might have what it takes. After going through those three phases, you've read just about everything this site has to offer. While there is more to website promotion than what we have discussed here, you now know quite a lot about the subject. If you still desire more information, don't forget to come back to this site every now and then. This tutorial is always incomplete, because I continuously notice things that I want to write about.
I hope that A Promotion Guide has been able to help you to make your site more popular and thus given you the chance to spread your ideas and thoughts to a larger audience. And remember, if you have achieved good results, it's not because I showed you how to do it - it's because you did it.

Answers to your referrals retirement questions

Since our announcement about retiring AdSense Referrals during the last week of August, we've noticed a number of questions in your blog comments and in our Help Forum. In this post, we'll address some of the most frequently asked questions.
When you say 'AdSense Referrals' are being retired, does this only mean the program where I refer publishers to AdSense?No, all referrals will be retired. This applies to referrals for AdWords advertisers, as well as for Google products.What's the deadline for generating referral conversions once the program has been retired?In order for you to be credited for a conversion, the referred user must complete the required action by the last week of September 2008. However, please keep in mind that your referral units will no longer display after the last week of August.I have referral earnings in my account, but they haven't been included in a payment yet. Will I lose all past referral earnings?No. If you've had successful referral conversions in the past, they'll still be included in your earnings and future payments. As mentioned above, any additional conversions must occur by the last week of September 2008 in order to generate earnings for your account.Can I sign in to the Google Affiliate Network with my AdSense login information? At this time, no. You'll need to create a new login and password on the Google Affiliate Network site at http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/ .Will my ad units and search boxes be affected by this Referrals change?No, AdSense for content and AdSense for search will still be available to publishers in our supported languages, and you can continue to generate ad and search code by visiting your AdSense Setup tab.Thanks for your feedback, and we hope this helps provide clarification. Feel free to visit our Help Center for additional details about the AdSense Referrals retirement.

A peek into recent AdWords developments

If you're an avid Inside AdSense reader, you know that we frequently post about the latest developments in AdSense and new features you can take advantage of. However, we've heard from some publishers that they want to know more about what's happening in AdWords, and what we're doing to bring more relevant, targeted ads to AdSense sites like yours. With that, we'd like to take a moment to give you insight into a few recent AdWords developments, and what they mean for you as an AdSense publisher. One of the main changes is the ability for advertisers to be more specific with their ad targeting through a combination of contextual targeting and placement targeting. As you may know, contextually targeted ads will appear on your pages if an advertiser's keywords match your content, while placement-targeted ads will appear if an advertiser has specifically selected your ad placement or site. Now, advertisers can target your site or placements, but can also specify keywords for them so that their ads only appear in the most relevant pages. These ads will still need to compete with the available inventory of ads for a particular placement, and so only the highest-paying, most relevant ads will appear on your pages. At the same time, you'll still be able to use your Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from specific URLs from appearing.What does this mean for you, as an AdSense publisher? Your users may see more relevant ads on your pages, and advertisers who become more confident that their ads are reaching the right audience may increase their ad spend -- both of these can result in higher monetization for you. In addition, while advertisers previously could only change their bids for all ads running across multiple sites, they can now adjust their bids for individual sites. This means that advertisers can spend more of their budgets on the specific AdSense sites which perform well and generate high-quality leads for the advertiser.With these recent improvements, we're looking forward to expanding the number of advertisers who use the AdSense content network and increasing the relevance of their ads on your sites. Not only will this increase your earnings potential through the AdSense program, but it will also strengthen the ads ecosystem that benefits publishers, advertisers, and users.

Search Engine Optimisation

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?
SEO is the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. Most of the web site visitors come through search engines, so if a website ranks well in search engines, the chance for getting more website visitors is greater. Also, it is very common that Internet user will not click through pages and pages of search results, hence it is essential for a site to rank well in search engines to drive more traffic towards the site.In crisp, SEO ensures accessibility of a site to a search engine and improves its traffic rate.

Why you need SEO?
The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines- Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL, Altavista, Alexa, AskJeeves etc. In order to search a product or service, people search not deeper than 4-5 pages. The website won’t get more traffic if it is embedded deep in search results. SEO facilitates to improve the visibility of the website by making the website ranks higher in search results.

Why you need SEO Impact?
SEO Impact will generate high quality traffic to your website through Search Engine Ranking and Directory Placement which will enhance your leads and sales. SEO Impact optimization packages include:

Website Analysis
Suggestion for structural and navigational improvement
Extensive key phrase research
Search Engine Optimization Process
Manual submission of optimized website to search engines
Monthly ranking reports to monitor website ranking in top ten search engines (including Google, Yahoo, AOL etc.)

Paid inclusion/pay-for-inclusion
Paid inclusion program guarantees inclusion of any web pages that a search engine robot or spider might have missed but it does not maximize search engine rankings. Yahoo Inclusion Program will get you listed in Yahoo Search Engine, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Overture and other Yahoo Search Partners.