Website promotion tutorial

This tutorial is split into three phases that each have one, two or three 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 the major directories before doing anything else.

Step one - The Open Directory Project

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.

1. First, read the article about directories to get a basic idea on what directories are and how to submit to them.

2. (Optional) Examine the Design & Content article to get some tips on how to improve your site and reduce the chances of it being rejected.

3. Read my thoughts on how Google ranks pages and notice how an ODP listing seems to affect your ranking at Google. Keep this information in mind when you submit.

4. Take a look at the ODP-specific advice.

5. Finally, submit your site to the ODP.

Step two - 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.

1. If you skipped over the first step, read the article about directories now.

2. (Optional) As in step one, consider reading the Design & Content article.

3. Don't forget to check out the Yahoo-specific guidelines and hints.

4. Bite the bullet and submit your site to Yahoo.

Step three - Looksmart

You're done with ODP and Yahoo, so it is time to move on. Looksmart is the third of the big website directories and is also the final target of our submission campaign. A good listing in it can send a lot of visitors your way, but obtaining one sometimes requires you to open your wallet a bit.

1. By now, you should be familiar with the instructions given in the article about directories. However, if you are not, now is about time you read them.

2. (Optional) While the Design & Content article probably doesn't offer nothing new to you at this point, I still have to mention it just in case.

3. Here is an article about the directory named Looksmart, complete with submission instructions. It also has some detail on why Looksmart is important, what exactly is the "secret" back door to this directory and how to use it.

4. Try to submit for free, if possible. If not, evaluate whether a Looksmart listing would be worth its price and submit if you see it as a wise move.

Website promotion, phase two - Search engines

Now that your site has been included in ODP, Yahoo and Looksmart, 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 positioning, basics

Before you even submit to search engines, learn the basics of their 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.

1. Read how to choose the correct keywords for your pages and then do so. Using the wrong words is perhaps the most common reason why people don't get satisfying results from their search engine positioning work.

2. Continue by reading these search engine positioning tips.

3. 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.

4. Learn what link popularity is and how search engines use it to rank your pages.

5. 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.

6. Use all of this information to make your pages as search engine friendly as possible.

Step two - Search engine positioning, advanced

Your site is now adequately prepared to be submitted into 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.

1. Study some of the more advanced things related to search engine positioning. Among them are click popularity, cloaking, css tricks, doorway pages and themes.

2. Read about the things you should avoid doing from this article that outlines common search engine positioning and website promotion mistakes.

Step three - Submitting to search engines

Finally, the time has come to start the process of submitting to search engines. Before you begin, you will need to know where to submit, how to submit and what to submit. Registering your pages with all the major search engines is going to take some time, but these days you simply can't sit around and wait for them to find your site on their own.

1. Learn how to properly submit your site to the search engines. Doing it incorrectly might result in your pages being left out of the database.

2. Read the Top Engines article to see which engines are the most popular ones.

3. Submit to them, then move on. Check back next month or so to see whether your pages have been included or not.

4. If you are running a commercial site, you might also want to consider paying for search engine placement. Take a look at this article on how money can get you to the top of the result list.

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.

1. If you sell something on your site, you might want to try banner advertising. Usually banner campaigns are seen as expensive and ineffective, but it is partially because advertisers don't know how to design good banners.

2. Read the article on how to get people to come back to your pages. Return traffic is the secret why some sites get amazingly many hits per day.

3. 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.

4. Create a signature file and then use it when you send E-mails or post to discussion forums. This might not produce thousands of visitors, but it is a great way to promote your site a bit without having to actually do anything.

5. 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.

6. Announce your site in the Usenet or other discussion forums, if possible. 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.

7. 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.

1. Click exchanges are easy, fast and will get you a lot of visitors. That's why it might be a surprise to hear that it isn't a good idea to participate in them.

2. 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.

3. Winning a website award can sometimes be a good thing, especially if it is a well-known award. 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.

- Lauri Harpf

Site last updated:

17th of November, 2001 - A new article, or actually two articles, "Increase website traffic with articles" and "Writing newsletter articles". The first one discusses the usefulness of writing newsletter articles from the promotion point of view, the latter has some instructions on how to start writing your own articles. Comments, suggestions and rants to the author can be sent here.