Doin’ it for Free

By Eric Coons
Posted Monday, August 9, 2004

Can you promote your website effectively for free? Do the linking strategies and banner exchanges out there really work? I’m here to tell you that the answers to both of those questions are yes. It may take a little longer to get the results you are expecting and the traffic you desire, but it can be done. All you need is some time and persistence. Here are 5 tips that will help.

Get Listed in The Open Directory (ODP)
This is the best piece of advice I could possibly give to webmasters trying to make their presence on the internet known. A lot of search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and countless others pull results from the ODP when listing websites. It is 100% free to submit a site to the ODP. Yahoo charges a recurring annual fee of $299 to be listed in their directory. The last time I checked, free is a lot less money than $299 and you still get listed. The ODP is human run, so it may take a little longer because your site is actually being looked at with 2 eyes rather than a formula, but it’s still better than paying if you are on a budget.

Start Building Links
Search engines use formulas to determine your placement within their databases. One of the largest key factors in many engines is link popularity. The reasoning is, if other relevant sites are linking to your site, the better your site must be. Note the word relevant. If your site is about the dangers of migration farming in the Sahara , do not request links from Star Trek Fan sites. Also, watch how far you are going to get relevant sites. Because your site is about the Sahara , and the Sahara is hot, and hot is temperature related, you link to a refrigerator manufacturer because refrigerators are cold and cold is a temperature related term. This is stretching. Try to stick to other sites about the plague of Saharan migration farmers. Schedule a time every day or week to build your links. My rule is to send 5 link requests per day. It usually only takes about half an hour per day, and the benefits are huge when it comes to rankings.

Start a submit campaign
Submit your site to search engines on a regular basis. How regular? Submit your site about once per month. Don ’t just submit your home page; submit every page in your site. Set a schedule to submit 1 page per day for a week, or month, or how ever long it takes you to submit every page in your site. Put together a notepad list with the URLs of your pages and your email address so it is an easy copy and paste operation, or use a service like the one found here. It is also a good idea to submit the URL of your link partner sites as well. A link on a site that isn’t ranked doesn’t do you any good.

Track your progress
Tracking of your progress is vital to your success in website promotion. Take Link building for example. If you don’t keep track of the links you are requesting, you may ask for end up requesting a link from the same site several times. Just like yourself, your fellow webmasters are very busy building their sites; they don’t have the time to be bothered with numerous requests to add a link to their site that they added 3 weeks ago. Tracking visitors to your site is also important. If you don’t know how many people are coming to your site, or how they are getting there, or how long they are staying, how do you know that what you are doing to promote your website is the right thing? Most web hosts include some sort of tracking program. Learn how to use it. That way, you will be able to view trends in your visitors, and make the necessary changes if something begins to go wrong.

Never be Satisfied
I equate building a website to getting into shape. Most of us would not be able to wake up in the morning and say “I think I’ll go run a marathon today”. You must start out slowly by walking and starting to use the muscles that you will need to run that marathon. Everything you do today builds on what you did yesterday. You must always be working at it. If you stop…you will never get off the starting line. The same is true for promoting your site. You can’t just say, “I think I’m going to be in the top ten of Google for migrant farming today” You have to work at it, and keep working at it, because if you stop, someone else will get that spot and your site will never get off the starting line.

I hope these tips have helped you. You can get it in the top ten of the big engines; you can get ten thousand hits per month; you can be the leading site on migrant farming in the Sahara and it doesn’t have to cost you a dime as long as you are willing to be persistent and patient. Keep promoting!

About the Author
Eric Coons has been involved with computers and has been designing websites since the early 1990’s. He is the webmaster of Winkingpig Webmaster Resources. This Article may be copied in its entirety only, and must contain this author block.