How to Promote Your Site: A Beginner's Guide

So far, this is what I've learned after spending hours and hours lurking in forums and reading tips written by the industry's experts. Here, I will provide you with tools, tips and resources. You can correct me if I'm wrong and teach me the right way to do it... Be kind to a novice...

The goal here is for your new site is to be indexed by Google and other search engines out there. Here’s a list of steps you should follow so that your site will be recognized by major search engines.

1. Before anything else, you need to know what key phrases to optimize your site for. One of the best tools for researching the search engine landscape is WordTracker and Google’s Adwords Selection Tool.

I will illustrate how to find the keywords for your site using the mentioned tools. Here, we will use Prosper.com, an online lending marketplace as our example. Since Prosper.com is a lending site, we’ll use “personal loans” to begin our keyword search.

• Type “personal loans” here in Google’s Keyword Tool You can get the keyword of a site using the above tool. Notice that Google suggested quite a variety of related keywords. The best keywords for you to pick is the one that’s closely related to your site and are getting a lot of searches but don’t have many competition. I’ll pick “personal credit loans” You can pick a dozen or more.

• Just follow the simple steps required of you by WordTracker. Basically, you should pick the keyword that has a rating of 10 or up.

2. Before any search engines arrive at your front door you want to ensure that your content is going to be indexed favorably. Meta Tags are very important for your website's visibility. Many search engines read them from your site when you submit it to them.

Important note: You can only do this if you have access to the site and if there’s no meta tag in it yet.

Use AddMe! to generate meta tags for your site.. Just supply the information needed, copy the meta tag generated and paste it in the meta section of your page.

3. Submit your site to URL directories. Here’s a great compilation of directories from Info Vilesilencer. You can download it in excel file.

Also, submit your site to Google so that it can easily locate your site.

http://www.google.com/addurl/
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview

Once your site and most of its web pages have been indexed there is no point in further website submissions. This is an early task only and shouldn’t be necessary for a site older than about 6 months.

4. Write press releases about your site or a section of your site and submit them to press release distribution services.
Here are few sites which you may find good enough.

(note: some of these sites are not free)
http://www.clickpress.com
http://www.webwire.com/
http://www.emediawire.com
http://www.businesswire.com
http://www.prwebdirect.com -
http://www.theopenpress.com
http://www.free-press-release.com
http://www.pressbox.co.uk
http://www.i-newswire.com/
http://www.pr9.net
http://www.pr-inside.com
http://www.newswire.ca/
http://www.pressreleasenetwork.com
http://www.marketwire.com
http://www.urlwire.com/
http://www.prweb.com (small contribution)
http://www.prurgent.com
http://www.prleap.com -
http://www.prnewswire.com
http://www.prfree.com/
http://www.openpress.com/
http://www.softpressrelease.com

5. Link Building (watch out for the next post on how to build links)