How to promote your website in the right ways
While most of the links to your site will be gained gradually, as people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google understands that you’d like to let others know about the hard work you’ve put into your content. Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject. As with most points covered in this document, taking these recommendations to an extreme could actually harm the reputation of your site.
Good practices for promoting your website
• Blog about new content or services – A blog post on your own site letting your visitor base know that you added something new is a great way to get the word out about new content or services. Other webmasters who follow your site or RSS feed could pick the story up as well.
• Don’t forget about offline promotion – Putting effort into the offline promotion of your company or site can also be rewarding. For example, if you have a business site, make sure its URL is listed on your business cards, letterhead, posters, etc. You could also send out recurring newsletters to clients through the mail letting them know about new content on the company’s website.
• Know about social media sites – Sites built around user interaction and sharing have made it easier to match interested groups of people up with relevant content.
Avoid:
• attempting to promote each new, small piece of content you create; go for big, interesting items
• involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services
• Add your business to Google’s Local Business Center – If you run a local business, adding its information to Google’s Local Business Center will help you reach customers on Google Maps and web search. The Webmaster Help Center has more tips on promoting your local business.
• Reach out to those in your site’s related community – Chances are, there are a number of sites that cover topic areas similar to yours. Opening up communication with these sites is usually beneficial. Hot topics in your niche or community could spark additional ideas for content or building a good community resource.
Avoid:
• spamming link requests out to all sites related to your topic area
• purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting PageRank instead of traffic
Make use of free webmaster tools
Major search engines, including Google, provide free tools for webmasters. Google’s Webmaster Tools help webmasters better control how Google interacts with their websites and get useful information from Google about their site. Using Webmaster Tools won’t help your site get preferential treatment; however, it can help you identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform better in search results. With the service, webmasters can:
• see which parts of a site Googlebot had problems crawling
• upload an XML Sitemap file
• analyze and generate robots.txt files
• remove URLs already crawled by Googlebot
• specify the preferred domain
• identify issues with title and description meta tags
• understand the top searches used to reach a site
• get a glimpse at how Googlebot sees pages
• remove unwanted sitelinks that Google may use in results
• receive notification of quality guideline violations and file for a site reconsideration
Yahoo! (Yahoo! Site Explorer) and Microsoft (Live Search Webmaster Tools) also offer free tools for webmasters.
More details on www.generateuk.co.uk/seo.htm