Web Sites Do-It-Yourself for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16. Ten Ways to Promote Your Site

• Optimizing your site for search engines

• Paying for keywords on search engines

• Building contacts on social networking sites

• Ranking on social bookmarking sites

• Attracting return visitors with regular updates

• Finding useful ideas on other Web sites

• Getting mentioned in traditional media

• Spreading the word with viral marketing

• Blogging

• Reaching out to your personal contacts

What if you build a Web site, and nobody comes? Unfortunately, that's an all-too-common problem on the Internet. And, that's why I can't end this book without at least pointing you to a few places where you can promote your Web site. Driving significant traffic to the pages of a site requires a significant amount of time or money or an incredibly compelling message. If you can manage all three, you should do very well indeed. In this chapter, you find tips and online resources to help bring people to your Web site.

Scoring High in Search Engines

The buzzword here is search engine optimization, or SEO, a highly complicated science that involves getting search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to list your Web site higher on the page than your competitors.

Warning

Thousands of companies and services promise to "get you in the top 10 matches" on search engines for as little as $19.99. Be wary of these services. The truly good ones charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month ...