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Web Site Promotion

© Bert Markgraf

Once you have put up the world's greatest web site, the world will generally still not beat a path to your door. To get traffic, you have to promote your site. Such promotion can take many forms and the more different ways you promote, the more traffic you'll see.

Web sites are a bit different from brick and mortar stores in that, generally, you don't have to worry about too much traffic. Where a real store would have to try to attract customers who are actually going to buy merchandise and generate profits because it has limited retail space, most web sites don't reach traffic levels for which their host levels additional charges, let alone levels where the host can no longer cope. As a result, your web site promotion does not have to be as carefully targeted as your other, more costly promotions.

For starters, add your web site address to everything you publish. It should be on your business cards, your ads, your letterhead and your e-mails. See if you can get into Internet directories or if newspapers who run articles on the Internet will mention your site. Next, get other sites who share your interests to link with yours. But the big traffic generators remain the search engines.

You have probably received any number of junk e-mails offering to register your site with hundreds of search engines. This is mostly a waste of time and money since almost all web site traffic is generated by the top dozen or so search engines. If you only have to register with a dozen sites, you may as well do it yourself.

Such registration is more successful if you have appropriate meta tags for your web site. Many search engines read these tags and classify your site accordingly. A very useful, free service is offered by Submit Corner. This site will not only help you register effectively with many search engines but will also define and help you with meta tags right down to providing you with the html code.

First you need traffic. Then you can start selling and analyzing how to sell more, better and how to serve your growing numbers of customers best.

The copyright of the article Web Site Promotion in Small Business is owned by Bert Markgraf. Permission to republish Web Site Promotion in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.