Promotion Tips and Resources
- To see what your site looks like to search engines, use the Lynx viewer. Lynx is a text-only viewer which is basically all a search engine sees when it crawls your site. This has the added bonus of letting you know how people on PDAs and audio browsers see your site as well.
- Don't forget word-of-mouth, putting your URL on your business literature, putting it in your email signature file, and adding it to your yellow pages listing.
- Find newsgroups and discussion lists to contribute to, and reference your webpage in your tag line. If you have information-only pages on your site, you can reference them in your message as well, but be careful and DON'T SPAM. Many newsgroups do not allow advertising at all and will get very mad at you if you try it, especially if you thinly disguise it as something useful but it isn't. I am not recommending newsgroups for advertising, I'm recommending newsgroups as a way to be involved in the online community relating to your website topic and thus to gain respect from people interested in your topic. If you have a good page and something to offer people will visit it and link to it. There are also certain newsgroups made just for advertising, which people looking for deals read regularly.
- Webmaster World also has a lot of great information about search engines and promotion, especially the Google News and the Search Engine World section.