5 Ways to Promote your Website for FreeWritten by: Haily, Fox, Scarlett | Learn how you can advertise your website without spending a dime on paid advertisements.

1) Effectively Using Google and other Search Engines

Probably the most effective way, is to make use of Google and other search engines to make your website known. Many, many people use these search engines everyday, and just adding your site to the list of the sites they "crawl" upon could bring in visitors. How? It's easy!

Use keywords when adding. You can do this by noting what your website is about, eg. if you had a site about web design you would type in something like "A brilliant web design site!" . The tags can also be used to your advantage, as can the title of your site as most crawlers use the title of your website as the main thing when adding your website to search results. More information on that in our Increasing Traffic to your Website article.

You also need to know what Google uses to bring up the most relevant search results when you do a search: The page title, the description meta tag (and also the content on the page), and matches in the URL. You need to place key keywords in all of these fields for optimal results. This website is a perfect example. I have spent countless hours of work optimizing IC for Google and other search engines. As you browse the site, you see that the title of each page changes. The description meta tag also changes with each page. The short description in the meta tag is also the short italicized description under the page titles on each page.

A good example of the power of search engines is IceCaves.net itself. At the time of this writing IC received an average of approximately 400-500 unique visits per day. About 25% of those visitors were returning visitors, 25% were visitors from other websites, and 50% of our visitors were visitors coming from search engine (primarily Google). That's approximately 200-250 unique visitors per day solely from search engines. Remember that search engines are the single most effective way of attracting new visitors to your website.

2) Utilizing Social Networking Sites

One of the best ways to become popular on the internet is through social networking or "word of mouth." Something becomes viral when a page in your site or a video you made booms into popularity from one person recommending it to others who in turn continue to spread the word. But a good amount of web content that has gone viral has been completely accidental or unintentional. So how can you intentionally pursue to make something on or about your site become viral?

To facilitate and encourage members to spread the word of your site, make it easy for your visitors to share content. Give them the option to email the page to a friend or post a link to it on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and various other websites.

But in the end, you need to be unique! People are attracted by things that are new. And they are more likely to spread the word of something if that something is new or different.

3) Link Back Buttons and Banners

Take the time to design several buttons, badges, banners, etc. for your website. And then offer them all on an easy-to-find page. This will allow your visitors and other webmasters to easily find a means of linking to and promoting your website. Try to make them attractive, but flamboyant isn't necessarily. Just produce something that reflects your website. And if you can't design anything yourself or don't know how, then you can easily request one of an IC member to make you some in our Community Forums.

4) Using Different Forms of Media

You don't have to limit your website to any single form of media, i.e. text on a page. You should utitlize different forms of media such as images and videos not only in your website, but when you or your visitors are spreading the word of your site. The purpose of utilizing various forms of media is that it greatly improves communication with the future visitors of your website. Communication is essential, and each media has it's benefits over the other. Different forms of media will also facilitate and encourage your visitors to use social networking sites and other things to spread the word of your site. It works like Link Back buttons (above), but instead of a button or banner, your content is being used to promote your site. This can be pretty effective, especially with media sharing and social networking websites.

     Text Media - Articles, blogs, anything that is primarily text are examples of text media. Text media has the significant advantage of being perceived best by search engines like Google. As you will read in the next section of this article, having text media on your site will greatly help your site climb higher on search results and having high search results will help your website grow with new visitors.

     Image Media - The advantage to using image media is how easy it is to share images. They not only make your site look better when used right, but they facilitate in the visitor's understanding of the content. When a first-time visitor views your site, you can use images to direct their attention to a specific part of the page. Not only can images be used to advertise your site effectively, but they can also increase the likelihood that a new visitor will stay.

     Video Media - Like, images, videos are advantageous in that they are surprisingly easy for your visitors to share them and, thus, spread the word of your site. Video media is also a very effective way of communicating to your visitors. If you have video media on your site, don't be afraid to use YouTube (and other video-sharing communities). The great benefits of YouTube are the free hosting (as video files can take up a lot of space) and the promotion. YouTube (and Google, which owns YouTube) is one of the most visited websites in the world. You can utilize the vast audience of users which YouTube offers as an asset to promoting you website. And any video added to YouTube is also added to Google's web search and video search. But don't think that you can make a video of anything. A video will only become popular (like your website) if it serves some use to it's viewers or is something viewers would want.

5) Affiliates / Link Exchanges / Free Advertisement Offers

Make connections! Affiliates and free site advertising are a great way to direct traffic. For affiliates, it is a win-win situation. Your website has a small advertisement their site, and their site has a small advertisement on yours. However, affiliation comes with responsibility. It's like being friends! You have to keep in contact and treat each other like friends would. Some sites offer free advertising, which is very easy to apply for, and will get you some of traffic. You could perhaps offer free advertising as well, which may lure people to your site.

Getting some affiliates or link exchanges with other sites is a great way to promote your website and show people that it's out there. Thus, you can easily acquire a base of visitors that you can build on to improve your website. And although free advertisements are usually only offered by small sites, I say it's worth it. Advertisement when it's free is definitely worth it even if you get one visitor from it. You can only benefit from such offers.

   

| Written by: Haily, Fox, Scarlett | Added: Dec 4 2009 | Last Modified: Jan 10 2010 | Views: 805 | (Log in to rate) |

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