Step 10: Website Promotion & Search Engine Submission
|
Website Promotion is very crucial to the success of your website. The Internet is very large. Thousand of new sites are created each day. If no one knows your website is out there how will they come?
How will they purchase the products and services that you have worked hard to assemble on your website? As soon as your web site is presentable, meaning it has enough content where a surfer would be able to look around and see what your site is about, you should start promoting your website.
Before you submit your website, take care that you have added the appropriate meta tags on each of your pages. You want the search engines to be able to easily index your web pages. Although free website submission services are popular it is recommended that you pay to have your site listed in directories and search engines.
You may ask why? Besides the fact that it frees up your time, you don't have to worry whether you did it right or play the waiting game. Besides Google (which is free) you will want to be listed in Yahoo, DMOZ and other engines. It's up to you to decide if you want to be listed in the smaller engines.
Following are websites that you can submit your website for free:
| 192 Directory | Altavista | Arbor Search | Acoon | Aewi | All Small Biz | Alltheweb | Buyers USA | Entireweb | Exact Seek | Excite | Femina (Women) | Fireball | Galaxy | Galaxy Hit | Google | GOeureka | GoGuides.Org | Handilinks | Hotbot | Home Business | Info Probe | InfoSpace | Inktomi/MSN | Internet Times | Iwon | Infomak | Infotiger | Jayde | JobLand | Link Center | Link Engine | Lycos | Martin FFA | Mastersite | Mixcat | Mirago | Nationaldirectory | NorthernLight | Office Links | One Search | Online Cities | Open Directory Project | Patron World | Scrubtheweb | Searchit | Splatsearch | SuperSnooper | Surfgopher | Search Hippo | Search Who | Snoop | Subjex | Sun Brain | Truesearch | UKMax | US Counties | Voila | Webcrawler | Webtop | WhatUseek | Worldlight | WWWMost Wanted | Yeehaa | Yahoo | Zircanet search |
You might also check out the following links for more places to submit your website:
Extend your reach with Search 123., Free Website Submission, Spam Free FFA Links, Spherica Directories
The sooner your promote your site the better because it may take several months for your web site to be included in the popular search engines. You might also send out your url on all of your email messages. If you post to messageboards or discussion groups you might also attach your url. You also might get some traffic from joining web rings. A web ring is a ring of sites who are all joined together by the same subject. For example there could be a guestbook web ring that includes all sites that have a guestbook. If a surfer just wanted to sign guestbooks he'd just navigate through the web ring and sign all the guestbooks that he wanted to. Try it out for yourself and see if it works for you.
In Conclusion
Well, that's the end of Webmajestic's Website Design tutorial. You learned how to create a basic business website using Macromedia Fireworks and Macromedia Dreamweaver. We hope that you enjoyed the Website Design tutorial and that it was useful for you. We'd love to see the site that you created. We invite you to apply for our Official Webmaster Award.
Your learning about website design should not stop here. We urge you to further your website design skills by checking out our Tutorials page, buying books and interacting with others who are also learning to design websites on our webmaster forums.
 |
 |