how to promote my site?

[PitBull]

hello to everyone. I have a brand new site and i was wandering how can i promote it in Google or yahoo (how can i gain PR)? Also i wanted to ask about a offer i received yesterday by one of my link partners. He mentioned something about a link exchange site rank1.info ?has anyone heard of it, is it good, and will it help me in some way? I'm new to these things and i hope I'll get your advice.

Thanks in advance

[A.N.Onym]

First of all, you should focus on providing value to your visitors. Everything you do should be passed through this filter.

With that in mind, here are a couple of moments:
- you don't need PR - you need quality content
- build business relationships with website owners, not link exchanges

In more detail:
To get more visitors, you'll need to create a lot of unique, valuable content for your visitors. Find out who your customers are, find out their needs and reasons why they would use your service or product, then do keyword research on those topics (customer's needs) and write about them honestly.

When writing content, focus on your customer's needs, not on your product. Your product will creep in when it will be needed.

Obviously, just content won't get you far without promotion. You'll need to submit your site to directories, write articles and offer to for publication in established, trusted online industry journals, participate in topical forums and blogs, issue newsworthy press releases, etc.

As for link exchanges, right now Google discounts any links that come from sites, irrelevant to the topic (industry, theme) of yours. So you won't get much from link exchanges. However, linking to a site, engaged in unethical practices, may harm your site (get some penalty).

That's why you need only link to sites that you want your visitors to visit to gain something you don't provide.

[winningratings]

First of all you need to think through what the theme of your site is going to be
Then I would say DONT use a clever format for your website - it might look great but will it actually achieve anything with the search engines

I have struggled with this one myself, so I have some experience here
I managed to get my site listed in the top 10 on Google for my main keyword, so I must be doing something right!!

I would start by looking at the main theme of your website
Then go to the keyword tool on overture and do a copy of the keywords/phrases and the number of times they say they have been searched for
Once you have this info I would put it in a spreadsheet as Keyword - Searched - Google
Under the Google column - go to Google and type in each keyword/phrase and find out how many sites they say are in the database

This procedure should help you work out which keyword/phrases are going to be easier to get a good listing for

However - dont waste too much time bothering with search engines
You wont get as much traffic as you think from them

The best ways to promote your website are:
Forums - like this one
Articles directories
Building Your Email List

Dont believe the hype people tell you that 80% of their traffic comes from Search Engines - this really is a load of hogwash

[alpalino]

I get around 60 visitors from forums and groups alone. Don't under estimate the traffic from forums. If you use descriptive sig. you can get targeted visitors. Also, always aim for targeted visitors. 50 visitors, who is interested with what you offering is always better than 500 visitors, who just comes and stay in your site for couple of seconds and go.

[Adam Fletcher]

Hi,
Google is very hard to get at the top for, however Yahoo and MSN are a lot easier
The key to getting to the top is finding a keyword that is not used all the time (e.g Internet marketing Is used a lot so don't use it ). Everyone will be targeting these big pharses but if you use one of the tools (I have always used http://tools.seobook.com/ and many people use this tool)

If you write in the keyword tool interent marketing it will give you a massive list of keywords you will need to target the keywords with less than 6-7,000 searches a month.

Write some articles on these keywords and use the keywords and this will help you get to the top if Yahoo and MSN. Once you are #1 on these that is then the time that you should try to get on google

Hope that lot helps you a bit
Adam Fletcher

[CanzDesign]

Hi there.

I agree with the others, forget page rank, you can take years to gain it, and lose it next time google changes the rules. And google changes the rules so often it's impossible to keep up.

Work on offering good helpful content, and google will index your website and find you for searches.

I have one website in particular that I made for someone else, that I keep a decent ranking on, and use it JUST for putting links to new websites I build, I usually have google cruise thru for the first time within a couple of days. But buildup is slow.

Lynn of canzdesign