There's Life Beyond Google

A little submissiveness goes a long way, especially when you're talking about website promotion. Once you've finished all the on-page optimization of your site, by doing keyword research, keyword placement and creating a sitemap, it's time to get the word out to Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. Haven has a tip on search engine submission, which has the submission addresses for Google, Yahoo and MSN. As Haven points out, you only need to submit the main - or index - page of your site; if you've got a good sitemap, the search engines will do the rest - eventually.

Beyond Google, Yahoo and MSN

It can take a while for your site to show up on the 'Big 3' (Google is a particularly tough nut to crack), so there are a few strategies you can use to improve your chances. Google, Yahoo and MSN also crawl other search engines, so submitting to some of the lesser known ones (which are likely to list you faster) will help to get you on their list. A resource I found really useful was WebCEO, free software that automates website management and tracking. It includes keyword and page optimisation tools and a very good submission tool. (See Gracepub's review)

What else can I do to promote my website?

Glad you asked. You can also submit your website to relevant directories, and I know of another free resource that will help you to do it. The SEO friendly directory list catalogues directories by interest and country and includes PageRank information for each directory listed. That means you can decide which directories are worth bothering with. I started with the 9s and 8s and worked my way down to the 3s and subnmitted my site to so many directories that I've forgotten which ones they are. Be warned, this will take time, as in many cases you'll have to submit your site manually. But if you're listed by external websites, Google, Yahoo and MSN will start to like you.

How can I make the most of this site promotion strategy?

Resubmit your site every six months to keep the listing fresh and practice deep submission - submitting links to individual pages that you think are important. (Samishra has a good post on this.) This works for blogs, too. I have submitted the URLs for most of my posts and they show up on Google (if you click on 'show omitted results').

One final tip: you might want to set up a disposable email address just for site submission, because you will get a LOT of email. You'll also find that you've been subscribed to lots of site promotion newsletters, most of which are a waste of time, IMHO. I set up a new one on my domain and once I've confirmed my directory listing, I can then ignore everything else that comes to that address.

Related posts:
How I Put My Site On Steroids
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Research
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Placement
SEO: What's Under The Hood?

How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Research

Search engine optimization (SEO) costs money. There are lots of people out there who will charge you lots of money to make sure that Google, Yahoo and MSN will find your website. But when I wanted to increase my search engine ranking a few months ago, I didn't have the budget to pay anyone to do it for me. What I needed was a do-it-yourself approach to website promotion. I did some reading, tried a few things and realised that it was easy to promote my site myself if I could devote a couple of hours a week to doing it properly. This is how I started:

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of making it easy for Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines to find and index your pages. The easier it is for search engines to find your pages, the more likely it is that someone will come to your website and offer you work or buy a product you've offered for sale. SEO increases traffic to your site or blog and, in the case of WritingUp, makes it more likely that someone will click on your ads and rack up those Adsense earnings.

How do I optimize my website?

If you're launching a site from scratch, you start with keyword research. If you're updating an old site, start with keyword research. If you want to bring traffic to your blog (and can write about anything), start with ... (you get the idea). You need to think about what keywords best describe your website, business or blog and what similar keywords people are looking for on Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.

What will keyword research cost me?

Zilch. Zip. Nada. Bupkes. You can pay if you want to, but there are a few free tools you can use that will work well if you're on a tight budget. They are:

Overture
Wordtracker/Overture
Adwords analyzer

These tools are simple to use. You type the keywords you want into the form, enter and you get back a list of related keywords or the number of times those keywords have been searched in the past month. Once you've identified the keywords that are best for you, you need to put them into your page content. This is covered in Part 2 of the series.