How to promote your website for free

the rules of the web

Introduction

So, you want to promote your website.

The things that you might want are:

  1. a lot of visitors
  2. visitors that enjoy your website, bookmark it and come back again
  3. visitors that put a link to your website in theirs, and so attrack other, new visitors
basic idea
If you want to know about the basic idea behind this text, read this. You may find it boring, so I did not put it in the main text.
The conclusions of the basic idea are that it is important to get links to your page, and that links on similar pages are more valuable.

things to do
Generally, you have 4 things to do.

  1. make a web site and put it on the net
  2. let the world know that your site is there
  3. check if your site is worthwhile and if your title/description is attractive enough
  4. find out to which clusters your site belongs and get your site listed in those clusters
It is much easier to promote your website when it is has a clear subject, and when that subject is new or when it is better presented than other websites. Be creative and learn HTML. When you have that clear, make:
  1. An attractive title for your page
  2. A short, catchy description covering its contents
  3. A list of keywords
When you have a site covering different subjects with a "main page" pointing to all of them, it is better to promote each of your pages seperately. Of course you should link back to your main page and your other pages.

If you need a place for your website, check this out: free web pages

Get Feedback

visitors
It is essential to get feedback, to know how succesful you are in promoting. If you want people to take a look at your website, get a counter that tells you how many visitors you have.
The question is how many visitors you can expect. I did some calculations on the figures that Nedstat mentioned (November 1996), it just gives an impression, it is not meant to be exact. A total of 10,000 websites gave a total amount of visitors of 150,000/day. So the average number of visitors for each website was 15 visitors/day. Looking at the Nedstat top 100, the top10 (=0,1%) gets almost 20% of all the visitors, and the top100 (=1%) more than 40% of all the visitors. A top 5% website would get about 25 visitors/day and a top 10% website about 10 visitors/day. If your website gets 5 visitors/day, you are still in the upper half of all websites.

On this page you'll see a number of free counters "in action"

do people enjoy your site
If you want to know what people think of your website, offer visitors the possibility to write their comments, add a "mailto" on your website or make a respons form. Another possibility is to keep a guestbook.
another section of this document is dedicated to checking if people like your site.

free guestbooks

links to your site
There are several ways to find out which sites have a link to your site. Some search engines offer the possibiliy of backward surfing.

Some other ways to find links to your site are described in "find out to which clusters your site belongs and get your site listed there"