When you first launch a website or blog, it might seem like an uphill battle to promote and get your website up in the rankings, but if you do these 5 things I guarantee you within the next one to five weeks your website will have more visitors and will be ranking higher in search engines than ever before. 1. Visit and contribute to websites and blogs that host similar content as you have. By visiting an leaving feedback (including your URL) you WILL get noticed by both users that are interested in your subject area, and search engines that crawl this website. I found this to be my number one promotion method when first starting out. You are not only limited to websites, you can leave your URL on email signatures, and posts to newsgroups, be creative the rewards are worth it. 2. Update your blog or site regularly; firstly this keeps your readers happy, along with the search engines. Search engines rank pages from sites that are regularly updated higher than sites that are not as regularly updated. Additionally adding content makes your site bigger more quickly and guess what most Search engines like bigger rather than smaller sites. For a blog I would recommend adding new posts at least 4+ times per week. You would be able to get away with less frequent updates on a technical article based website or blog, only because of the amount of time it takes to write a technical article. 3. Make sure you are listed in as many search engines as possible and check your entry with them to see if there is any tweaking you can do to improve your results. Simple things like changing the length and the words in the title of both your website and posts to better match the key word/s that you are targeting, can improve your search order ranking a lot. 4. Use websites like Google Analytics and/or web log statistics analysers to look at the trends of your website or blog and change your site to improve these results. For instance I wrote an article titled The top 5 tools an Exchange Administrator should not be without in June 2005 after seeing how popular the article was, I decided to write five follow up articles, one for each of the tools I wrote about in my original article. Microsoft later went on to link to my original article from their Exchange 2003 Tools webpage; you can imagine how this improved my search engine ranking and popularity. 5. If you are using a free blog like BlogSpot, etc, and you are serious about blogging for money I recommend moving away this free solution and getting your own domain and hosting provider, and do it now rather than later before your blog becomes popular. The first reason being Google seems to crawl these free generic websites slower than a private domain name, I suppose it is like looking for needle in a haystack, the site might be big but there are lots of others in there with you. If you have your own domain name and submit this to a search engine, your content is found straight away. Now the second reason does not really fit under this title but because I am mentioning free generic sites Vs a private site I will mention this. If you ever in the future purchase a domain name and want to move your website chances are you will lose A LOT of traffic and web ranking the reason being many search engines put new domain names into what is termed a "sandbox", and limit the page and site rank that can be achieved, generally once a domain name has existed in a search engines database for around six months the domain name is taken out and allowed to play with the older children, now there are obvious ways to get out of or around this sandbox rule, but I will go into that in a future post. As with all of my posts I welcome and encourage all comments, constructive criticisms, feeling and views, please add them below and add your URL so you can promote your website, I will most likely drop past myself and see what you are up to. Till next time bye Read More...