Seven Ways to Jump Start Your New WebsiteWritten by Donald Nelson
You've just got a new website and it looks beautiful, but unless you take some active steps to promote it, it will just sit there like a new car without any gas and empty tires.If you are not sure where to begin, here are seven steps that are free or inexpensive. All of them will help you to get your new website rolling. 1. Tell Your Friends - Often we are thinking about reaching unknown millions of people out there surfing Internet, but we are forgetting hundreds of people who we already know. Look at your e-mail address book and get word out, tell your business contacts, friends, relatives and tel them to tell their friends too. Send an e-mail to all people who made inquiries or bought products or services from you in last year. 2. Link to Your Own Site - Once again we are often thinking about getting some unknown people to make a link to our websites and we are forgetting possibilities that are nearby. If you already have one website, make sure that this site is linking to your new site. A website without any incoming links to it will have a very low page ranking in all-important Google search engine and will face an uphill battle to be seen in Google search results, especially if you are in a very competitive category Even when your site is in construction stage you, or even your web designer can link to new site from another already well-established site, mentioning that new site is under construction. If you already have several sites, then link them to your infant site. It will help new site to be seen in competitive search engine listings even in its debut period. 3. Get a paid inclusion in one of big search engines. It takes 4-6 weeks to get listed in Google, and other search engines are equally slow. However there are a few fairly important search engines that have inexpensive express inclusion programs. If you join these programs, then your site will be listed in 48 hours. Inktomi, which provides results for MSN and 100 other search services, has an inclusion program which costs $39 for first URL that you submit, and subsequent ones cost $25. The value of Inktomi submission is that they revisit your URL every 48 hours and if you make changes on page you can see results in MSN listings very quickly. Thus, you can tweak your pages and see how it affects your position. Similarly there are paid inclusion systems for Teoma (which feeds popular Ask Jeeves Search Engine), Alta Vista, and Lycos.
| | Improving your site's link popularity, and search engine rankingWritten by Donald Nelson
Have you ever wondered why one web site (maybe yours) is buried deep in search rankings for a particular keyword, while another site (your competitor's) is at top? Both sites may have similar content and even similar metatags, but one is number one and other is number 131.The answer to this disparity may lie in a factor known as link popularity. When search engines determine rankings, many things are taken into consideration and one of them is how many sites are linked to your site. The quantity and quality of these incoming links is weighed heavily by some search engines, such as Google. If many sites are linked to yours, your site is considered to be an important resource in that particular field and that is why search engines would like to give such a site a high ranking. Also if links to your site are coming from "important" or high ranked sites, then your web site is considered still more important. In this factor of link popularity, new sites are somewhat at a disadvantage as older sites have been around a while and have acquired more links over years. However, with a bit of "elbow grease" (sustained effort) it is possible to boost your site's link popularity and position in search engine results. One of first things that should be done is to submit your site to Open Web Directory (www.dmoz.org). By doing this you will get one link! But a listing in Open Web Directory is considered to be an important link, because it comes from a very high-ranking source. It takes a while to be listed in this directory because directory gets thousands of inclusion requests, and it uses volunteer editors to process them, but sites with good content and design generally get included. Similarly, a single listing in Yahoo directory will also boosts your site's ranking, but this will cost you $299. So if you have a big advertising budget, a paid listing in Yahoo is an option worth considering.
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