So, you've designed a compelling website that you're eager to show the world. Every day you add fresh content and tweak your pages to make them prettier, more informative and faster to download. It's gonna pay off, you tell yourself, as you upload several new pages to your web server.

Midway in the afternoon, you stop what you're doing to check your traffic reports… You're excited and eager to confirm just how successful your website is. Waiting for your site statistics to finish downloading, your glee turns to dread when you learn that only two people visited your website all day.

What's a disillusioned Webmaster to do?

Submit Your URL To the Search Engines. Search engines are by far the most popular way to find information on the Internet. Getting your site listed, however, is a chore, and it is oftentimes frustrating because results are not quick to see.

Although there are automated services that promise to get you listed on thousands of web directories and free-for-all (FFA) links pages, it is recommended that you manually submit your site to the top search engines.

Be forewarned that it takes weeks (sometimes even months!) to get listed.

Set up a tickler file to do site submissions on a monthly basis. Resist the temptation to submit more often, because your hard work will go up in a puff of smoke if your URL gets banned for spamming.

Swap Links With Other Websites. With more than 100 billion web pages competing against yours, you can't rely solely on search engines for website promotion. In my experience, the second most important web marketing strategy is reciprocal links. When I come across an excellent online resource, I add it to my “related links” page, and, if it's appropriate, I contact the Webmaster to see whether they might be interested in swapping links with me. More times than not, the response is positive. Since relevant, high-quality links from other sites is increasingly important in getting good search engine rankings, I recommend that you put establishing linking partnerships high on your marketing to do list.

Submit Articles. If you are a writer, an excellent way to quickly build your link popularity is by submitting articles for free reprint. In my opinion, there is no easier way to build one-way links to your website!

Like building a website, promoting it to the world is hard work, but I guarantee your sense of accomplishment will be well worth the effort when you start to see results. More importantly, visitors!

Copyright © 2000 Joanne Glasspoole. All rights reserved.