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Web Developer Resource Index: Site Promotion

The goal of Site Promotion is to drive quality traffic to your Web site. Included are a list of tools and resources for SEO (search engine optimization), getting your site listed with Web directories and spidered by search engines, your page rank and links, promoting RSS feeds, and many others.

But be warned, if you are new to the Web, it’s easy to be deceived by so-called “experts” who will claim to be able to get huge amounts of traffic for a fee, which is often hype and a rip-off. That's not to say that payment doesn’t work, if you have the budget often times a paid placement on Google or other search engines will return tremendous value. It really depends on what you want to accomplish. Setting clear goals for your site, and doing your homework first, pays the greatest dividends. Tenacity helps a great deal too. Don't expect too much at first, or you will quickly become frustrated.

I consider the following to be the greatest assets your site can have in order to get, and more importantly keep, your visitors coming:

  1. Content—

    Unless you have high quality content no one is going to visit, or ever come back. Update often, keep it fresh, make it relevent to your target audience.

  2. Speed and reliability—

    A slow site, or one that is frequently offline, will kill your Web presence faster than anything else. Consider your own surfing habits: How many sites that you've visited for the first time which either loaded slowly, or not at all, did you ever return to? Answer: not very damn many. Shop for a hosting company carefully. There are many good ones, but there are also a lot of really bad ones.

  3. Design and usability—

    A site that is poorly designed or difficult or confusing to navigate will not be much of an invitation to come back.

You might have noticed a trend here. I personally consider repeat visitors to be the key to the whole thing. You will, everyone does, get plenty of visitors that stop by and never return. The ones that do return are gold. They trust you, they have a high opinion of your site and its content and they are more likely to visit a sponsor or take your recommendation on a product, be it yours or an affiliate’s. They are also more likely to link to your site (also very important) or recommend you to someone else. Word of mouth (or email or IM) is very powerful.

Remember, I am not a salesman, not by any stretch of the imagination. But these are points that make perfect common sense to me: provide value, establish trust. And if you are patient, it will pay off sooner or later.

Good luck!

Updated: Monday, November 17th, 2008 @ 11:03 AM EST

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Last updated: Monday, November 17th, 2008 @ 11:03 AM EST [2008-11-17T16:03:42Z]   home

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