How to promote your site
Your site is ready: you’ve included beautiful contents, you’ve positioned it on research engines, you’ve improved the pages, you’ve installed statistics. The moment has come to make it known. Start showing it to the people around you by using daily channels.
Use e-mailing: your e-mail program or your webmail most certainly contain an automatic signature function. Add the site link to your signature and use but a few words to explain what the site is all about.
Should you choose to use Facebook, Myspace or other social networks, please don’t forget to evidence your link in your profile: if using MSN for chatting you can evidence your website in the message board you find next to your nickname.
The people you know, your friend, will most certainly visit your website, and can give you their opinions or suggestions. These will be extremely useful to determine possible changes before launching the website promotion.
Have people link your website
Promoting your website in the best of ways means linking your site to many others, especially those similar or related to yours.
Pay extreme attention to key words used in links (when you link and when you are linked): for example, we would like to be linked with words such as “ethical banner exchanges” rather than “strada alternativa”, thus enhancing the association of these words and our website.
Rather than an isolated link, it would be preferable to create links within complete texts: a perfect example is the review. To be reviewed by another website results in major advantages because the context in which the link itself is placed has influence on the actual value it effectively has.
Exchange links and reviews with friendly sites
If you’re developing a website which deals with specific subjects. You will most probably know the existence of other sites that deal the same or similar themes. Look for these sites and try to put yourself in contact with the editors (usually you can find an e-mail address or a module for contacts). Propose a link exchange or, even better, an exchange of reviews. Besides allowing the users of that specific website to know yours and vice versa, the exchange will benefit your positioning on research engines.
You don’t know whom you should contact for link or review exchanges? Take a look at our Strada Alternativa homepage to see it there are sites similar to yours. You can also research them on Google through the use of keywords which define your own site. Take a look at the sites placed within the first 10/20 positions. See if they have dedicated space to links, and contact website managers once you’ve found linking opportunities.
Banner exchange
The banner exchange is a way of promoting websites which puts you into contact with sites similar to yours thus creating an automatic link exchange. This is how it works: before participating to a banner exchange you should create/develop an image.
With which you will advertise your site. This image will be visualized on other participants sites with a link to yours and you will give other participants the possibility of linking to your site where they will be automatically displayed. In this manner you will advertise your website within a circuit.
Stradaalternativa is a circuit where banner exchanges are possible, but it has an ethical basis upon which it stands; sites dealing ecology, organic products, fair trade and solidarity, arts in general, culture, and information. By participating you will automatically promote your website as well as giving other interesting projects equal visibility. If you’ve not yet subscribed, enter to be part of this circuit!
Blog
Actively participate to blog discussions evidencing your site should it relate to what the blog is discussing. It could be useful to refer to research engines which promote Technorat blogs. From there you will succeed in finding thematic blogs, blogs which are recently dealing subjects you’ve included in your site; this is an excellent way to discover interesting websites, readable websites, and updated information concerning specific themes.
On this page you can find all those Italian blogs which recently discussed the subject you’re interested in
Find blogs that interest you and leave bloggers comments without forgetting to post your link as well. Read the blog carefully before leaving personal comments, avoid out of theme discussions. Should you own a blog then create a blogroll which is a list of thematic blogs which most interest you, correlated links and place them on all your pages.
If your website has a blog, this will allow you to have information circulating in a faster way; your site will be visited by more people and you will be linked more frequently. Every blogs automatically creates a list of news, your news, in a special format; the feed RSS , which can be used to re-edit news automatically. Should you wish to publish your news on Strada Alternativa and be linked to our homepage. Subscribe to the banner exchange circuit and insert your rss feed by clicking here. You don’t know the link to the feed RSS? Usually it is published directly on every blog page, it’s the link which you find on the orange rectangle with waves, or the “RSS” with an orange background.
Theme Forums
You could advertise your sites on forums where people are interested in the same things. To find them you just need turn to Google.
Forums usually request a subscription and many of them respect internal rules. Whilst subscribing to a forum you’ll find a section dedicated to presentations where new subscribers introduce themselves. You can use to explain the reasons that brought you to the forum, you can metion your site and explain what it’s all about and why you feel other forum participants could be interested in it.
Should the forum interest you, you can continue visiting it as well as personalizing your signature and including the link to your site.
Directories: Yahoo and DMOZ
A few portals such as Yahoo contain directories organized by categories. Usually not many visitors come through directories but a link to these theme pages can improve your positioning within research engines.
Whilst the Italian Yahoo directory is free, international directories request a contribution/subscription. To be included in the directory please go to Yahoo Directory and look for the category closest to what you’ve included in your site. Pages related to each category have a “propose your site” link in the upper right hand side. Click on it and follow the instructions.
Google does not have it’s own directory but gives major importance to sites listed on DMOZ.org. To evidence your site in these directories please visit DMOZ, find a category in which you would like to position your website and click on “suggest URL”. Please note that the effective weight DMOZ has on research results has been remarkably downsized in these last few years and a current link from this directory has the same weight a link has on a big site, in any case we advise you send a linking request.
There are also directories tied to specific arguments. Try a research on Google to see if anything comes up in your area.
