There are many reasons we built a website. Regardless the reason, one thing for sure as a webmaster or the owner, we want our site to be visited by as many viewer as possible. Either this visitor will generate money, popularity or any other intention that a second issue to be discuss. We can categorize website promotion into two main categories, free and paid advertisement.



This article will describe how to promote our website and received considerably good number of visitor without pay any single cent.

The very first step, as website owner we have to submit our website URL to website directories and search. It sorts like unofficial registration to let world wide internet user know the existing of our website. Submission to search engine like google.com, yahoo.com, baidu.com is a must. But, most search engine has it own system to crawl internet and find newly created web page. So, our search engine submission actually just as a method to fasten the process. Instead of let them found us, we go and meet them. Site promotion is an ongoing process. Once you've made your submissions, check back a month later, and you'll find that some of them didn't take. Resubmit as necessary, but don't overdo it.

Beside search engine, there are also website directories that accept newly created web page. Not like search engine site, website directories will not found our site unless we register with them. We must cleverly choose website directories to submit our URL, do not use automatic submission software or online automatic submission service. We do not want everybody (search engine, website directories and internet user) to know our website as a junk page that will resulting banning or blacklisted. Just choose few good website directories and submit our website URL manually. For beginners, we should submit our site to craiglist.org and dmoz.com since these two ranks highly by search engine and trusted by many internet users.

After those two basic steps, few other free advertisements are link exchange and press release or article directories submission. Link exchange, press release and article directories submission are mostly our effort to gain as much link to our site as possible. World Wide Web actually works as a very huge polling system, each link to our site acts as one vote for us. More so back links to our site means our site rated high by others and this will slowly increase the number of visitor. Link exchange just simply the method of asking other webmaster to change link with us. We will link to his/her website and vice versa we will get one link to our site. Most probably we should choose site that related to our niche so, besides getting one ?vote? we also sharing same group of visitor. . Always be on the lookout for new sites that might be willing to give you a link, and for new (but legitimate and preferably free) promotion opportunities.

Press release or article directories submissions are almost equal to each other. We have to write any article or summary of story and submit to their website. They will publish the article at their directories. Inside our writing we should include our website URL. Again, do not use any automatic submission service. This service will submit our article to few hundreds of directories at one time. As I mentioned earlier, search engine will constantly scan the entire Internet world looking for new site. If their system detects sudden increase of link to any website in short period of time, they will treat that site again as a junk site. This scenario knows as ?sand box?.

Traditional method of website promotion that should not be neglect is email marketing. Don't neglect e-mail as an important way to bring people to your website. Just don't spam. That is, don't send bulk unsolicited e-mails without permission to people with whom you have no relationship. Most polite way to do email marketing is to include our website URL in all our outgoing email or offer something in return to get anonymous email address.

Several other methods to promote our site can be figured out common sensibly. It just likes normal offline promotion. We must mingle around with our potential customer (online user) to be familiarly known to them. Actively involve in forum, social bookmaking site, reply to question at Yahoo! Answer, leave quality comment at blog site and some other methods that we can simply figure it out by surf the Net, watch and learn.

All the best?