Site Promotion and Traffic

[morrison-art]

I will be officially launching my website on the 1st of November and it is for my freelance graphic design company. I was wondering if anyone would be able to tell me some places to go that will ensure me traffic on my site at no cost. I've tried addme.com in the past, but with no real results. If anyone could help with some links or html code to insert that would be most appreciated, thank you.

Morrison Art

[lionheart8]

Hi
I think among the things you do, submit to all major search engines, yahoo, MSN, of course Google, using their submission forms. Scripts like Addme submit to some few Major ones, like Google, but mostly to small search engines. For Yahoo as much as I know, at least for free submission, one needs to log in to a Yahoo account first & so it cannot be done using Addme like scripts.

Submitting to www.dmoz.org is ALWAYS a plus, as search engines like Google, yahoo, etc consider them, though it may be loosing its influence with time. Since it's manually edited it may take many weeks before a site gets approved. Their editors are also very fussy and one needs to exactly follow their rules.

You also need to bear in mind it may take weeks or MONTHS (except for Google) for free submissions before they apear anywhere in the first few results, of course assuming you have done your UTMOST to make your site search engine friendly (lots of tutorials on this). There are many thousands of sites competing for front places on search engine search result pages ... To be on the first few pages, you may need to do a lot or at least not take things for granted.

There's an interesting & powerful tool Web CEO from http://www.webceo.com/ that submits to over 200 search engines ... I dont know any like it ... Needs downloading/registration ... They have paid & free versions.. I have used the free version many times. Requires a few minutes to configure it. Other similar tools offer much less than this one.

[satbir]

As lionheart pointed out submit to the search engine however do not overdue as sometime overdoing is penalized.

Second one is start using your site address in your signature. Post in the forum related to your site subject.

Third - Friends and other circles are best to promote the site. Let them know and ask them to review your site. This way you will get review and views.

Fourth - Make it interesting and good so that people come back

Last but not least Keep it simple and be patient as it always take time to get started.

Good Luck.

[morrison-art]

Thank you both for the help, every little bit helps as I always say. And as usual, I believe it is best to start small and work your way up the ladder, which of course I always do. And patience is a key I always use daily, as I know it does take a bit of time for the submission to start panning out results. Again, thank you for the help.

Shawn - Morrison Art

[cointoss]

I run a free banner exchange. The exchange ratio is 10:9, which is about the best you are going to find (aside from 1:1 of course). There is much speculation about the effectiveness of banner exchanges, however, it is one of the best ways I know of to get your banner on other websites free of charge. You can signup free at http://cointoss.x10hosting.com, or simply by clicking the link in my signature.

You can also try click exchanges (just be sure they are manual.) I personally do not find click exchanges to be very helpful. They are supposed to work well if your website is targeted towards webmasters (since is is 99% webmasters who actually use the programs...), but I can neither deny nor support such findings (and my website is geared toward webmasters.)

You may want to try some of the ones I like. These are listed without referral codes, as I'm offering them as something you may want to try, not suggesting that you do so.

http://www.clickthru.com
http://www.webmasters4traffic.com
http://www.iloveclicks.com

Obviously, your best option is to get listed in the search engines. Although again I cannot attest to this information, it is rumored that getting on dmoz.org should always be your first step since Google and Yahoo (and other search engines) use information from dmoz to propogate their own results. Translation: if you get listed on dmoz.org, you can be picked up by Yahoo, Google, and others just in case you can't get listed otherwise.

[Sohail]

A nice way to promote your site is by advertising it, you can set this up at :-

http://www.google.com/adsense/