"Promoting Your Web Site
Entire web sites are dedicated to this difficult task - promotion of your web site. You built it, but not many people are coming, now what? First thing I'm going to say - resist those SPAM messages in your e-mail box that say that they will get you to the top of the search engines. Never buy any goods or services from companies that spam. Second thing I'm going to say is that in my five years of web experience, I've learned that site promotion can be a full-time business. Sites that get over 10,000 hits a month have either put a lot of work into getting those visitors, or they are selling something that is able to generate wonderful "word of mouth" advertising.
Do you know what kind of traffic you are currently getting?
You must have a baseline for this project. Please don't tell me that "my counter says 895 people have visited my site". Counters are for personal home pages, not corporate web sites. Get your site hosted with a firm that provides REAL statistics (number of hits/ sites/ files/ days of week/ hourly/ page views/ geographic regions/ browser types/ etc.) If you need a new web host, find a woman owned one in our search engine. Search Now.
Is your web site product (what it looks like, what it does) impressive? If not, work on updating the site or hire someone who can (again, see the link above).
Next, learn what you can about search engines and META tags. Visit some great sites such as http://www.searchenginewatch.com and http://www.virtualpromote.com for data. Also check out this great up to the minute resource http://www.gethighforums.com . Once you have a handle on how the engines index your pages, go back to your pages and make the changes you need to get better placement.
Submit your site to the 10 major search engines. You can try to get into Yahoo!, but my experience is that they like to index informational based sites (like this one) not commercial sites (like yours). Use a submission service if you want (see the banner below), or do it yourself.
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