Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 12. Website Promotion

The best website in the world won’t do you much good if it’s sitting out there all by its lonesome self. For your site to flourish, you need to attract new visitors, and then keep them flocking back for more.

In the previous chapter, you started out on this path. You learned how to get your site noticed in a web search, and how to keep track of the number of visitors that stop by. But a search listing, on its own, isn’t enough to grow a brand-new site into a thriving web destination. For that, you need a range of promotional tactics, from sharing links to buying ad space. Contrary to what you might expect, this sort of ground-roots promotion might bring more traffic to your site than high-powered search engines like Google do.

In this chapter, you’ll learn some of the best techniques for website promotion. You’ll also see how to build a sticky site—one that not only attracts new faces, but encourages repeat visitors. To pull this off, you need to transform your website into a web community. Your visitors will need a way to interact with your content and talk to you and each other, and you can use Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and groups to make this happen.

Note

The tasks you perform in most of this book—crafting web pages, formatting them with style sheets, uploading your finished site—are relatively straightforward. They might take some time and effort, but when you’re done, you know you’re done. The tasks you’ll tackle in this chapter—promoting your website ...