Website promotion tips wanted

sumeet

Uploaded my first website.

Any tips how to cheaply but effectively get listed on search engines and in general to promote traffic to the site. Also, any recommended websites for search engine submission/optimisation? Any do's/don'ts, etc?

A_Nice_Englishman

First of all make sure you have the appropriate Meta tags.For example this page has the following

<meta name="keywords" content="vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft,bulletin board,money saving,martin lewis,shopping,save money,insurance,holiday,flight,flight checker,call checker" />
<meta name="description" content="Cut bills without cutting back" />

Choose the keywords by putting yourself in the shoes of someone searching for your site. What words would they search on? Try to make some of these unique so your target audience will find YOUR site and not any of the thousands of similar ones.

Then submit your site to the major search engines. For example Google's submisson page is

http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?hl=en&continue=/addurl

Then wait a week or two and search for your site in Google. Hopefully it will be among the first results. If not rethink your keywords and try again.

DrBenway

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

cwoodham

Not directly related to promotion but important anyway. Be careful if you have an email address on your website. This will be picked up by spammers and sooner or later you and others will be receiving spam email apparently from your own website. This problem has been discussed on this forum. See here for example. The spammers will forge your email address in the From field of their spam.
There are a couple of ways round this. Use an email cloaker which codes your email in a form which the spammers cant read automatically. See here for one version.
Alternatively, use a contact form on your website rather than showing your email address. HTH

martindow

If you are selling from your site I would be sure that your address and phone number is prominent on every page to give customers confidence in your site. Many people prefer to phone and speak to a human. We find that about 30% of our orders are phoned in and nearly all of those people found us after a web search. A lot of people are wary of ordering on line.

It is a good idea to try to think of search strings that people will be using and then make pages based around these. Further to Nice Englishman's post, meta tags should be there but title and keywords in the content are also very important. A snippet of the meta description is often picked up by Google to display in search results. The key words need to be used naturally but fairly frequently on the page. I tend to make the meta description be a slightly longer than the title. I also make the title and the h1 tag the same. You also want to aim for simple coding so that the page content is high up when you look at the source code.

Getting other (good) sites to link to you is also considered important though I get the feeling that this is much less important than it was. Like meta tags, which were spammed, some sites started getting thousands of useless links to their sites. A few good sites linking to you is certainly useful and try to get into DMOZ (but don't hold your breath as this can take a long time).

Now people are saying that if you write naturally and try to make pages useful for the reader you are going to tend to get pages that will rank well in the listings. Doing things to an extreme for search engines rather than people is not the way to go.

Matt Cutt of Google has a blog
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-writing-useful-articles-that-readers-will-love/
with some interesting posts - and he should know!