How Do I Promote My Website Free?

This is how I promote my website free with the search engines.

Are you thinking, "how do I get visitors to my web site?"

90% of visitors to a web site come from the search engines and most of those come from a handful of major search engines.

I suggest starting with altavista.com to list your site.

The first step is to design your web pages to focus on keywords and phrases that people are searching for. The most important page is your main page called index.html

A good site will contain many inter-linked pages of useful content. Each page will be focussed on key words and phrases on a particular topic relevant to the overall theme of the site.

When you search for a word or phrase, altavista tells you how many web sites it found and offers suggestions for other search words and phrases. These other web sites are competing with you to get the click through. There are sometimes millions of them! The good news is that most of them are not well designed for search engines (search engine friendly). The bad news is that only about ten sites are displayed on the first page of search results. This is where you want your site listed.

Choosing Keywords and Phrases.

My suggestion is to search on a keyword and drill down through the suggested phrases until you get to one that doesn't have too many sites found and is highly relevant to the content of your web site. Goto.com have a useful search term suggestion tool.

So now you have a "key phrase" for this page on your web site. Now you need to design your page to be highly relevant to this key phrase.

Here's what to do:
Search engines only care about text so focus on this. They send out spiders to crawl the text of your site looking for words and phrases to add to their indexes. The images and colours, guest books, banners etc. only get in the way of the spider. The search engines use a set of rules (algorithm) to determine how relevant your site is to search terms. These rules are frequently changed but Altavista provide some useful guidelines. How Altavista works.

The most important text area is the page title, so the key phrase must be in the title. Next there's the headings that show relevant key words. Then there's the text on the page. The description, if included should also contain the key phrase. With altavista it may be risky to add a keywords meta tag since these may not reflect the keywords that are actually in your main content (body text).

Bear in mind that the search result will display your web site title followed by the description. So the wording should be crafted to persuade the person to click through to your site rather than the other nine sites. After searching on your chosen phrase, study the titles and descriptions of the top ten sites and figure out how yours could stand out from the crowd.

Other search engines ignore the meta tags and take the first paragraph from your page as the description. When I first submitted this site to Lycos it listed my navigation links which were in the left column as the description of this site!

Another idea is to check the top ten sites are still active and their titles and descriptions match the search result. If you find one that has no relevance, jumps to another web site or gives an error you should submit it to the search engine as I'll describe later. This will take the site out of the top ten when the index is regenerated. Then it's easier for you to get a top ten spot and you've helped improve the search results.

It is important not to repeat the key phrase too often. This will be interpreted by the search engine as an attempt to manipulate the search results using tricks that will not benefit people that come to your site to read the useful information related to the key words. At the other extreme, you don't want to dilute the keyword relevancy either. Another approach is to ignore the keyword issue and simply create lots of text content and let the search engines decide what are the key words and phrases.

Relevant links to other sites and pages are good too. To be relevant the new page should rank well for a keyword contained in the link text or be related to the keywords of the original page.

To find the most relevant external web sites, perform a search on the key word or phrase and pick out the top sites and link to them. Check that they haven't changed their site to less relevant content though since they were listed.

A more powerful factor is the number of relevant sites linking to your site. Click here to see an example of who links to this web site.

If you have pictures, include an alt tag containing key words.

Use the tools at freeservers to check your site for search engine friendliness and tweak it as suggested.

Once you are happy with the design of your web page (it doesn't have to look good!). It's time to submit it to the search engines.

I suggest submitting to altavista and google since these two search engines are easiest to get listed in and bring you many visitors.

Before submitting your site, go to the freeservers members area and activate site stats. This will allow you to check that the search engine spiders visited your site.

With stats activated, wait a while and then visit your web site to check everythings ok. Next go to the altavista "add a url page" and submit your site for indexing. You enter the address of the index page like carparts.4mg.com Double-check that you entered the correct details and hit the submit button. Then you should get a message that your site was submitted for indexing. Now go to the google submit site page and do the same thing. Now you just have to wait for your site to show up. This seems to take from days to weeks, you just have to wait.

For now you can go to the freeservers members area and check your stats. Look at the "raw logs". This shows all the visits to your site since stats was enabled. Most of them will relate to you. A visit by the altavista spider will look like this:
"GET /index.html HTTP/1.0" 200 6860 "Scooter/1.0" "-" with the date and time.
You should see this entry within 24 hours if you had stats working at the time of submitting your url. If not, you may need to try again. However, you need to avoid repeated submissions of the same information because it will be detected as spamming and your web address will be black listed and not listed.

The spider from Google takes longer to visit like days. Look out for "googlebot" in your raw log file in the stats.

Having submitted your first version of your web site you can carry on improving the appearance and content and add more pages etc. Then re-submit your site using an auto-submitter like that available at freeservers. This will submit it to several more search engines and tell altavista and google that you have made some changes to your site. Some say it is best to manually submit your site, hence the initial manual submission process.

Eventually, you will start to see visitors to your web site from the search engines. You can find out how many, where they came from, what they looked at and when in the stats area. You can replicate the search someone did to reach your site by copying the url from the raw stats to your web browser. Then you can see how your web site appears in the search listing.

Example Search Results For This Website

Lycos ( how to make free websites )

Lycos ( how to get free web space )

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