How to promote your website - Part 2 - Directories

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When you have a site online

If you have a site already online then you are ready to begin your promotional efforts. Website promotion is not instant it takes time. Simply doing all the work that I recommend in this page will not bring you great traffic tomorrow. You will not see any noticeable change for at least 2 months. Note the words "at least" Website promotion is also not a one off event. You need to be prepared to stick at it. If you do everything right once you may see an increase in site traffic only to see it drop off again. You need to work at it.

Simple website promotion can be outsourced but to be honest is not difficult, although it can be time consuming.

Before you continue please check the following.

I have a website
My website is online
I do not have any dead links on my site (a dead link is a link on your page that has an error)
I do not intend to change my domain name in the near future.


If you agree with all four statement above then you are ready to continue. If you do not agree with all or any of the statements that you really should wait until you have made the changes and then start from then. Website promotion is all about constants. If something is likely to change then make the change before you start your promotion.


Your first active promotional efforts


Now you have a website set up and running it is time to start on actively promoting your website. The first stage in this promotional effort is web directory submissions. This can take time but will get links pointing to your site. The reason I suggest you do directories before search engines is because of this. If you list your site with directories , search engines will find you through these directories. Search engines love web directories because they give them access to loads of other websites from a central location. To be honest I think you would be faster getting into search engines using this method as opposed to submitting directly to them. Here is a list of places I would highly recommend you try to get listed.


www.dmoz.org this is the home of the open directory project. The ODP is the largest human edited directory and supplies directory results to hundreds if not thousands of other directory sites. In effect one ODP link will lead to loads of other links from sites that are using ODP data.


www.yahoo.com Yahoo is another directory site. They claim to be the first large scale directory of the www. If your site is commercial (you sell products or services) you will have to pay Yahoo to be listed in their directory. Non commercial sites are still entitled to free listings although yahoo are very selective when it comes to editors and free listings. From my experience yahoo directory listings are not great providers of traffic because yahoo usually defaults their web search to search the entire web.


www.goguides.org Go-guides is a relatively new directory. They offer some free listings in certain categories. Others will need to pay a one-off listing fee.


www.joeant.com Joe ant is another new up and coming directory.


Here is a page from the ODP that lists web directories http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/S...g/Directories/


Work your way through this list and you should build up quite a large number of links. Print of the page from the open directory and score out the sites that you get a link from. This will help you when you next go to submit because you will only need to re-submit where your submission failed on your previous attempt.


You have now submitted to the top directories. What I will now do is try to explain the rather complicated relationship between web directories and search engines.


Currently the top search engine in terms of market share is www.google.com they provide web search results for a large number of other websites such as Yahoo!, AOL, Myway and many many more. For this reason is is very very important to rank high on Google. Google is a very unique search engine due to the technology it uses to rank sites.

Google use a technology called "Rage rank" This is a method of giving a numerical value to any given web page. Page rank is in effect the score given to a page as a result of it's importance on the internet. Before you go any further I would highly recommend you download and install the Google tool bar from http://toolbar.google.com . Be sure to install it with advanced features. This is an option on the download page from the toolbar web page.


Now that you have The toolbar installed and working take a look around some websites and you will see the little green bar on the toolbar goes up and down. If you move your mouse over the green bar it will give you a read out. A good example is to go to the yahoo homepage where you will see a full green bar page rank 10-10 this is an excellent page rank and something most of us can only dream about. Now visit some other sites and you will see how page rank varies from site to site and also from page to page.