Many companies after spending a substantial amount of money on development of their websites assume that once website is published on Internet, people will flock onto it and, therefore, do not take website promotion as seriously as development part of it. Today, with millions of websites around, no matter how great your website is, if you don’t promote it effectively, you will not get visibility that your site deserves.

Effective promotion of a website starts with submission of site to various search tools available on Internet. There are two different types of search tools – search engines and directories. Search engines index their listings based on information retrieved by their spiders that crawl through Internet following links constantly looking for new websites. The directory listings are compiled by human editors from URLs submitted to directory. If your website is listed in directories you can be sure that spiders of different search engines sooner or later will index your site. That’s why you should start submitting your website first from search directories.

Search Directories

Among all search directories available on Internet, Yahoo! and DMOZ are most important ones.

Open Directory Project or DMOZ

DMOZ is second largest human compiled search directory on Internet after Yahoo! Open Directory Project is a huge web directory of Internet resources. All submission to directory is evaluated by volunteer editors. There is no fee to be paid to get an inclusion in directory. As a human edited directory it might take more than a month to get your site evaluated. Once you are listed in DMOZ, within two weeks to two months your website will start appearing on search engines like AOL Search, Teoma, HotBot, Google, Lycos, AllTheWeb, Excite, Go2Net and a number of regional search engines. At present around 354 different search engines and portals use data from Open Directory Project. This is one of main reasons why you must consider submitting your website to DMOZ.

Submitting your site to directories is a bit trickier then submitting to search engines.

Following rules are common for almost all directories:

* Check to see if your website is already in directory * Write an objective description of your website * Search out specific subcategory from directory hierarchy * Follow rules of submission as specified

Make sure you follow these rules while adding your website in DMOZ. This will improve your chance to get your website accepted and reduce processing time. Yahoo!

Yahoo! is by far number one destination for Internet surfers. Although search results for Yahoo! is provided by Google, many people still prefer to browse through Yahoo! directory to find whatever they are looking for. This makes an inclusion to Yahoo! directory quite valuable for ecommerce sites. Yahoo! presently charges yearly fee of US $299 for each web site submitted. The fee is nonrefundable, which means if for some reasons Yahoo! declines to add your website in its directory you will not get your money back! The only thing Yahoo! guarantees is that editors will look at your submission within seven days and send you an answer.

Should you consider submitting your site to Yahoo!? It all depends on kind of business you are in. Some sites receive an overwhelming number of traffic from Yahoo!, others hardly receive anybody. My suggestion: list your website in Yahoo! directory for a year and see outcome. If you feel comfortable with result you are receiving – continue. If result is not satisfactory you can always cancel their service after one year. LookSmart

Although it is third largest directory on Internet as a search portal LookSmart is not that popular. However, it provides directory listings to MSN search, About.com, Infospace, Inktomi and others. It is probably still best way to get high ranking in MSN search. LookSmart is a fee based service. You pay US $49 submission fee for site review by their editors and 15 Cents for each click through. Pay per click minimum monthly payment is US $15.

The quantity of links in different websites pointing to your sites is called link popularity of your website. The more popular is your site more links you get from other websites and vice versa.

Why is it so important?

Links from high traffic websites furnish you with constant stream of visitors. Other website marketing efforts i.e. email marketing, might give good influx of visitors while campaign lasts but quantity diminishes once campaign is over. Links are a different story! Once a link is installed, it might start bringing a steady flow of visitors all time, depending on website where link was placed.

Link popularity is also crucial to search engine ranking of your website. Search engines, especially Google, claim that link popularity is one of key factors that they consider in their search algorithm while indexing a website. What would be rank of a website in a search result depend on its link popularity in a very big way.

So, how can you conduct an effective link popularity development campaign and build traffic for your website?

Content is king

Prior to start a link popularity campaign, you should seriously question yourself, what would be reason for other sites to post a link pointing to your website? Most high traffic sites are quite picky about putting links, and won’t do it without any apparent reason.

If your site boasts quality content that visitors of other sites might find valuable, chances are there that those sites would be interested in posting a link of your site on their relevant web pages. High quality content that gets updated regularly will definitely help you getting more links and subsequently more visitors. If even you are just a web store, you can still add much sought-after content to your site, such as, detail product information, articles related to specific products, comparison tables, etc.

If it is really difficult to get relevant content for your website, try getting a valuable tool that might be interesting for visitors and incorporate it to your website. You must have noticed that free search engine submission forms are common on Search Engine Optimization sites. Giveaways like e-books, white papers, articles and other freebies are also good for creating interest to a website.

Submit website to various directories

When your new website is up and running, first thing you should do is to submit your site to many search directories such as, Yahoo!, DMOZ etc. available on Internet. Not only, this will help you get quality backward links to your site, this is also fastest method for your site to get crawled by search engines spiders and get indexed by them.

Don’t underestimate value of many regional and industry specific directories. Try submitting your site as many as possible relevant local directories. Examples of these directories are municipal business directory, local chamber of commerce directory etc.

If you are a seller of, for example, metal related products; get your site enlisted in as many metal industry associated directories as you can manage.

Get reciprocal links

Since backward links are so important, building link popularity by exchanging links with other websites should be a priority in your online marketing effort.

Which are websites that you should consider to get backward links to your website? Your objective should be – not just having any backward link from any site, sites that you are getting reciprocal link has to be relevant to content of your website as well. First of all, if you get a link from a website which has nothing in common with your site, you, most probably, will not receive any traffic from that site. The second and most important issue is – search engines, while calculating your website’s rank in a specific keyword search result, consider, mainly, backward links which are relevant to your site.

Search engine Google uses a unique Page rank system to determine how relevant your website is. Your site's Page Rank depends on backward links to your site. However, if page from where your website gets backward link has more outbound links then incoming ones, value of this link gets reduced. A link to your site will have biggest impact on your Page rank: