Advertise Your Website

This article discusses ways that you can advertise your website. See part 2 for even more ways to advertise.

Getting traffic to your website and making money online involves much more than creating good quality content and lots of it. That's only half of the story. The other part is advertising your website.

Advertise Your Website

Advertising your website is probably AS important as creating good unique content because if you don't advertise it, humans and the search engines won't know it's there and if they don't know it's there they won't be able to visit your site.

So that begs the question: How should I advertise my website? The answer is to advertise it to two different audiences. First you have to advertise your website to the search engines to they know to visit or spider it, in search engine lingo, so they can add your pages to their database and show them to users who are searching for the information you're providing. Second, you need to advertise it to your human visitors so they know you exist and can go looking for your site. The more important of the two, however, is to advertise it for the search engines so we'll address that audience first.

Advertising Your Website to the Search Engines

So how do you advertise your site to the search engines? First you have to let them know you're here!. You can do that with most search engines by submitting the URL or web address for your websites so they can send out one of their robot spiders to search through your site and see what all the pages are about.

You can do that for Google by going to the Google Webmaster Tools and “Adding a Site" to your Google account.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google will then ask you to verify that you are the site owner. They offer several ways of doing this. As you can see in the screenshot below, you can verify with a meta tag in the header section of your home page, with and html file in the root directory on your website, with DNS, or with Google Analytics.

Advertise Your Website to Google

Once Google know that you're the owner of the site, you'll be able to use Google's webmaster tools for your website. Then one of the first things you'll do is to submit a sitemap for your website.

A sitemap helps Google to know how your website is structured and what pages and links it should follow when the spiders visit your site. You want to make this as easy as possible for Google so it can find all of your web pages and index them (add them to the Google database).  

Your sitemap also lets all of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask) when you update any pages or add new pages to your site.

 

 

 

If you want to find out how many of your pages Google has indexed, you can go to a Google search page and type: site:yoursitedomainname. Google will return a list of all of the web pages from your site that it has in the Google database.

Submitting your website to Google and submitting a sitemap is one of the best ways to begin to advertise your website to the search engines.

You should also visit the other major search engines, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask and submit your sitemap to them also. The process at Yahoo is very similar to that at Google. For Bing you need to ping their site with the URL of your sitemap. Ask doesn't allow you to submit your sitemap directly.

 

Write a Description in the META Tag

When a user searches in Google the results that are returned include the title of your website and the description. This information comes from the description META tag in the header of your document. The description should include a sentence or two that describes the content of your webpage. Be sure to include the keyword for the page in the description. It should look something like this:

<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Advertise your website by submitting URLS to the search engines, adding meta tags to your web pages, and using press releases, print marketing, link building strategies and other methods to promote your website.">

Include Keyword in Your Headers

Including keywords in the headings on your webpage will help to advertise your site to the search engines. Search engines pay attention to the words you use in your headings. Headings help to organize your page and divide it into main topics. Google and the other search engines examine the words in your headings to determine what your page is about so it will know whether or not to include it in the results for certain search terms that visitors to your site will use.

Advertising Your Website To Humans

Advertise Your Website to Key Directories

Getting your website listed in a directory of websites will help advertise your site to both the search engines and to humans.

A link to your website in a directory will help your ranking in the search engines and get you listed in a directory where humans look for websites.  A directory is not a search engine. It is a listing of sites that is sorted into various categories depending on the content of your site.

For the purposes of advertising your website to your human and to your search engine audiences, you want to be sure to submit your website to the free Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com). Dmoz is overseen by volunteer editors who personally visit each website that is submitted to the directory and make a determination as to the quality of the site and whether or not is should be included in the directory.

Because this is all done by humans, it can take a very long time for them to get to your site. If you don't get listed the first time, resubmit your site again. A link from DMOZ will really help your traffic, plus you'll be listed in the directory for all to see.

Yahoo Directory

The Yahoo Directory is another important directory to be listed in, but unlike DMOZ, Yahoo isn't free. Yahoo charges $299 per year to have your site considered for inclusion in the directory. After submitting your site and paying the fee, there is still no guarantee that your site will be listed. Like DMOZ, real humans review the submissions and decide whether or not to include your site in the directory.

Submit Your Site to Niche Sites and Specialized Directories

Some website directories focus on very small parts of the web and serve as a good place to get your site listed if it's content is related to the niche directory. For example, if your website is about a particular kind of craft, submitting your site to a directory such as www.coolest-handmade-crafts is a good idea and will help to increase your traffic. Unfortunately, specialized directories don't get near the traffic that the major search engines get, but it's still good to get listed and to get an inbound link to your site.

Advertise Your Website in Print Marketing Materials

There are a number of traditional marketing strategies that you're probably already using to advertise your business. Leveraging these strategies to advertise your website is simply a matter of tweaking some of the literature you produce and so it includes your website name and your address.

Include your URL on all letterhead, business cards, and stationary. Make sure that all of the print materials you use in your business or that you send to your customer base and use in your advertising, contains your website name and URL. Use in any print advertising that you do. If you have an ad in the Yellow Pages or other phone directories, include your website name and address. Include it in any newspaper or other print advertising that you do for your business.

See Part 2 on Marketing Your Website.

 

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