Promoting Your Web Site
As you have spent time and money creating a web site to promote your business it is now important to advertise in order to attract visitors. Several simple steps that can be taken are detailed below:-
1) Get your URL everywhere. Any chance you get you should be advertising your URL (web site address) - company stationery, business cards, your email signature, posts on internet message boards, on all advertising and promotional material you distribute and so on. If you contribute to any publications or other web sites try to get your URL included in the credits.
2) Get other web sites to link to yours. This is important in driving traffic to your site for two reasons. Firstly, people visiting related sites will be able to find your site and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the more sites you having linking to you the higher your search engine ranking (eg. your placing in Google search results). Ask your clients and suppliers if they can link to you from their web sites, try and get links in online business directories specific to your industry or location (avoid however paying for premium listings - these rarely deliver).
3) Submit your URL to the search engines. In order to be included in the search engine listings as quickly as possible you should submit the URL of your web site to them directly. The current dominating forces in the search engine world are Google, Yahoo! and MSNSearch and I have provided direct links to the URL submission pages on these sites below. Avoid services that claim to submit your URL to many tens or hundreds of search engines - since the 3 mentioned above currently have about 90% of the search market covered these minor search engines are of little concern. Also the major search engines do not allow automatic submission by other web sites so use of these services could very well end up being counter-productive.