Publicize Your Site

Friends

The first thing you do is get all your friends with web pages to add a link to your site from their site. Of course, they'll expect you to do the same. Assuming you haven't spent your whole life on the computer building your pages this might pay off. Some of us have been a little obssessed with craft and we have to resort to other means.

E-Mail and Newsgroups

Now here's a little trick that might work. If you e-mail with a lot of different people then add your site address in your e-mail signature. Provide a little tag line to entice people to click on the link. Using the same signature when you participate in newsgroups works well also. A side note about newsgroup participation - people on these groups tend to be serious. Watch the conversations and only get involved if you can add something constructive. There is one drawback, some people monitor the participants and save the e-mail addresses. Before you know it you'll be getting all kinds of interesting information from off-the-wall places. Oh well, it's what makes the world go round.

Not exactly e-mail or newsgroup but a very effective tool is to generate press releases. These can create a large number of sites or links to your site that help rankings in search engines. One that I'm familiar with is PRWeb. You can submit your own press releases or have them write one for you for a nominal fee. It is an excellent way to drive traffic to your site.

Search Engines

One of the most popular ways to get noticed is to get in the search engine databases. When someone picks a word or phrase that's on your site then you get a chance of them coming to see you. What you've got to do is visit some of the sites like Yahoo or Alta Vista and submit your site for inclusion in their database. Once you've submitted your URL the search site sends out a program to get all the index information from your pages. Over time, a number of other search engines will "crawl" through your site and index your pages. If you're not trying to strike it rich quick then patience will work.

If you want to see a lot of search engines at one place then you can go to All-in-One Search Page or search.com.

Submitting Services

If you're just a non-commercial, personal page and all you want is to get your site address known there are a couple of places that'll help for free. Try Add Me to get some help in hitting all the search engines. These sites collect all the information from you to feed all the submission forms for the various search engines. Then they crank through the process, filling in all the blanks from the info you gave them. Some sites require that you supply some information interactively so it's not completely work-free. Some of the engines refuse to take stuff submitted by a third party, also. But it works well enough for us personal page people.

If you want to hurry the process up and are willing to pay some money then try AddURL. They used to be free but it looks like Microsoft is hooked up with them somehow. Now they want money for working. What a concept!

Line Around the World and Rings

One of the first things I did when I started out was join the Line Around the World. I've gotten a lot of visitors from this link. It was a fun way to get involved.

As you surf around, you might see where folks have set up "rings" on their pages. These work off databases of links maintained by the link owner. You submit your site to the owner and they establish you in their list. They provide the code and images which you add to your page. Then you get visitors from them and surfers on your site can go to sites in the ring. Generally, the rings are dedicated to a certain area of interest of site content. You'll have to find those that appeal to you.

Advertising

Some commercialization I added was through LinkShare. I actually liked the interesting graphics and being a partner with such companies as PriceLine.com, Barnes and Nobles, Network Solutions and others. Never got a nickel from it but I thought it added a current interest theme to the pages. I recently (early 2001) cleaned all of that stuff off my site as well.

I currently use a partnership with Advertising.com in association with another site to generate impressions of ads through various search engines. You can also sign up for a similar service through Google directly or another service called Overture. You pay per click to get your site to appear on search engines. Only do these if you really have a need to drive visitors to your site to buy something or you have more money than you need.

This just scratches the surface on ways to generate traffic to your site. As you look around I'm sure you'll come up with lots of ways to get yourself noticed. Let me know if you find something really unique that I can try!

Michael T. Rusk
Comments to author: mike@ruskfamily.com

All contents copyright © 1996-2005 Michael T. Rusk
All rights reserved.

Revised: Sunday, December 30, 2007 11:05 -05:00
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