PROMOTE YOUR WEB SITE ON THE INTERNET FOR

PROMOTE YOUR WEB SITE ON THE INTERNET FOR

FREE OR VERY LITTLE COST- HERE'S HOW!-PART1

by S. Hunter

A home page on the Internet is a great way to promote your business, products or income opportunity, but it won't bring you any results if nobody knows your site exists. With an estimated 30 million+ home pages on the Internet you must make your site known and visible if you are going to get any kind of payback. In short you need to broadcast the existence of your home page or web site wherever and whenever possible. Fortunately there are ways to do this for free or for a very low cost, right on the Internet - so let's look at how you can do this.

There are six major ways to promote your home page within the Internet.

1) Search engines

2) Newgroups

3) E-mail lists (your own, not spam lists)

4) Classified ads

5) Banner Advertising

6) Leverage

1) Search Engine Registration

Search engines allow Internet users to effectively sift through the millions of pages available and look for a particular subject anywhere on the web by typing in key search words. The search computers are really huge databases of indexed web sites. When a search is initiated these computers churn out site addresses that are related to the search parameters used.

Registering with search engines is by far the simplest way to promote a home page or web site. Currently there are well over 5,000 places to register a home page with the number increasing on a daily basis. In reality only about 25 of these search engines will produce 90% of your traffic generated from search engines. Large search engines like Yahoo, Lycos, InfoSeek, Excite and about 8 more, are visited millions of times a week and offer the most comprehensive types of search to Internet surfers. The new and smaller search engines are plentiful and registration can add to your cumulative total of places where you are "known" on the web and have the potential to glean traffic.

Our recommendation is that you register your site with as many of the major search engines as you can. This will allow someone looking for what you have to offer the ability to find your site quickly and easily. Some services will register your site and charge you for the labour but it really is easy to do it yourself and you save some money too.

Here are Internet addresses of some of the search computers you will want to register your home page or web site address with:

Yahoo http://www.yahoo.com

Excite http://www.excite.com

Web Crawler http://webcrawler.com

Lycos http://www.lycos.com

Open Text http://www.opentext.com

Alta Vista http://altavista.digital.com

InfoSeek Guide http://guide.infoseek.com

Hot Bot http://www.hotbot.com

You can also visit a site at: http://www.submit-it.com At this site you can fill out one registration form and submit it to several search engines, including most of those above. This is a very convenient "one stop registration shop" provided by Scott Banister. Some of the search computers listed at this site are free and some charge, so make sure you only submit to those that are free if you aren't prepared to pay.

Another one stop registration site is called "Submit-All" here you can register your site free of charge with 33 of the major search engines. The address is: http://www.hometeam.com/addurl/

Follow the instructions provided at the site. Most of those listed there as are we said, free. However some offer a basic free listing and a more advanced listing at cost. Take the free one, the more advanced service is in most cases not worth the money.

There is also a site where you are reported to be able to register for free with over 1,000 sites. The address is: http://www.strutyourstuff.com Entity also offers free web site promotion and registration with 100 sites by filling out only one form. http://www.henge.com/superpage/entity

And check out Web Step's Top 100 for free site registration at: http://www.mmgco.com/top100.html You can also nominate your site for an award with some search engines if you really want to, but the practice is becoming passé. Really what they want is for you to put a link to their site on your page and in exchange you get a token graphic that can be placed at your site. An example is the "Top 5% Award" that just about everyone and their dog has on their home page. In reality this "award" deal is that the company gets you to promote their site for free by giving you the award, and you get a good feeling.

Another idea to find free promotion sites is to do a search at Yahoo with the key words "free site promotion" or "site registration" or " free classifieds" or "announcement services". Try a number of the search engines and a number of key words and you will find hundreds of free promotion sites; some better than others.

Cruising around the Internet you may also see reference on some sites to "The Internet Link Exchange."(http://www.linkexchange.com) This is a program where sites, usually related in some way, mutually agree to exchange banner links at no cost. If you find a site that is related to your site and has the "Link Exchange" logo present on their site, you may want to inquire if they will exchange a banner link with you. If you find a site related in topic to yours you can always inquire even if the Link Exchange logo doesn't appear.

They may be willing to consider it so give it a shot. What's involved in registering your home page or web site? Each of the search engines vary slightly in how they accept your registration, how they index it, and what information they need to take your registration. If you are using the one stop registration sites (Submit-it or Submit-all, addresses above) you only have to enter your information into a form once then just click on each search engine you want to submit to. If you choose to go to each of the search computer sites individually, you will have to reinput the data each time.

The actual indexing of your site by these search engines takes anywhere from 3 hours to 6 weeks so be patient. Some of the computers send out a "spider" to visit your site and then index it, some actually have a human index your page, others use just the words in your document title, some the text within your page, etc. The method and manner is which this is done varies so this is one more reason to register with as many of the major search engines as possible.

In general when you get to each search site look for the following words or links where you can click with your mouse to start the process of registering your home page.

"Add URL"

"Suggest Site"

"Register URL"

"Add Site"

Once you have clicked on the appropriate link, each search engine will tell you what is required to proceed. Usually you will be instructed to give your URL, and some or all of the items below.

To register your home page you will need the following:

1) The exact URL (address) of your web site. For example: http://www.worldprofit.com

2) Some key words so that when someone does a search for a particular topic, title, or subject, the search computers can zero in on your page. Use specific words not general terms.

3) A brief description of your home page no more than about 25 words that summarizes what is contained in your site.

4) Your exact e-mail address (if you have one)

5) A title for your home page.

6) Contact name and address.

Tips for getting better rankings with the various search engines. A number of the major search engines, such as Alta Vista have online information to help you increase the search result rankings when a search is initiated. To learn more about this visit the various search sites and review their help files. The following will help to improve your results, they won't work in all cases but in general these tips will help.

1) Make sure your web site page(s) includes a title and "meta tags" (your web page developer will know about this) that include site title, key words and a web page description. This will help to control what information the search engine robots retrieve when they visit your page to index it.

2) Try to weave within your page the main words related to the topic of your page that people may use when searching for that information. For example if your web site is a about a home business opportunity, integrate those words and related words within the text content of your site. Some experts suggest making sure that your main key words appear a minimum of three times within the text of your pages.

3) When submitting a title for your web site URL use something explanatory. ABC Accounting Services: Income Tax Specialists will yield better results then, ABC Inc.

4) Whenever you can title your site with a letter early in the alphabet (this will only help at sites that offer long list search results).

5) Use critical words as key words or integrate them into your site description. For example "Kates' Pet World offers pet supplies, pet food and a selection of gerbils, spiders, cats, dogs, ferrets and snakes. Also pet boarding and pet grooming in the Toronto area." This is better than "Visit Kate's Pet World web site to find out about our large line of great pet supplies."

6) Pluralize key words when possible. For example someone is more likely to do a search with the words "legal services" then legal

7) If you have more than one page in your web site. Register each URL separately. So in essence, you register your web site address (example www.yourname.com) and then register each of your pages linked off your home page. (example www.yourname.com/otherfilenames.htm)

If after reading this you aren't convinced you want to do the registration yourself, Incor Enterprises provides an advanced search registration service with 250 - 1,000 search engines. You pay only for the labour required for doing your registrations for you. Email sandi@incor.com .

That concludes Part 1 of our series, "Promote Your Web Site On the Internet for FREE or very little cost - Here's How! Get part 2 here.

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Sandi Hunter is Co-Founder of Worldprofit at http://www.worldprofit.com For all your on and offline design needs, go to World Design Services at http://www.worlddesignservices.com. To get your FREE Banner on 200,000 websites worldwide, go to http://www.worldbannerexchange.com. To get your own Banner Exchange, go to http://www.trafficcenter.com. For unlimited FREE promotion for your website, register it in the World Search Center Search Engine at http://www.worldsearchcenter.com. For a FREE subscription to Worldprofit's Weekly Business and Traffic Building Worldgram e-zine, subscribe here.