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Website Promotion: Once you have built, learnt how to make visitors come back and published your site you'll need to get visitors to come to it in the first place. There are many different ways to promote your site, each with its own good and bad points. This article will take you trough some of the ways in which you can do this. The Open Directory Project This is the largest human edited directory on the web. It contains hundreds of categories and sub-categories in which you could submit your site. One thing about the Open Directory is that in order for your site to get listed it has to be viewed and rated by a real-life person if it's good enough it will get in. Or, if your site is not up to scratch it won't get in. If your site doesn't get in don't panic! There are plenty of other ways in which you can promote your site, but it is worth thinking about re-designing your site. If you want to submit your site to the ODP you should view their how to get listed page. Then go to the right sub-category where you think your site should be listed and click the add link at the top-right of the page. Look Smart/Zeal Look Smart is another directory like The ODP. However, it is more open to business sites and submissions are charged at $299 for the Express Submit (review within two days) and $149 for the Basic Submit (review within eight weeks) $299 is a lot of money to pay to get into a Directory, so is there another way in? If you're site is purely commercial you'll have to pay money but if you're site has unique content then there is a backdoor. Zeal: Zeal is sort of a back door into Look Smart. Because Look Smart wanted to have some useful content and not turn into simply a directory of Commercial Sites it acquired Zeal. Zeal is rather similar to the open Directory project, because it uses volunteers to review sites. Another bonus of Zeal is that if your site is non-commercial you can submit to it for free. Zeal does not accept Adult Sites. To suggest an addition of a site into Zeal's directory you first have to become a member. Once you have registered you should go to the relevant category for your site and click manage near to the Preview and Profile Links towards the top of the page. Then, opposite the sort by box, click on Add a site Profile. After this you will have to have to enter your newly acquired User Name and Password. You can now suggest a site for addition, you'll have to fill out the Title, Description boxes ect. and then click submit. If you want to see the end result you can take a look at this screen shot of my site listed in Zeal. FFA pages In my opinion FFA pages are the worst source of website promotion. It takes a lot of time to submit to them, any people that do click your link tend to be low-quality traffic and don't look around your site and they will send you hundreds of Spam E-mails if you give them your address. Search Engines Search Engines are one of the best ways to promote your site as around 80% of people use them to find what they are looking for. There is a catch though, to get your entry listed within a couple of days normally costs around $300 which I think is too much for the personal user. They do normally offer a free submission but most sites get rejected and it could take up to 6 months or more to get listed. Top site Lists These are similar to FFA pages but in my opinion are much better. They are focused around a similar topic and are ranked by number of votes. the site with the most votes in gets ranked 1st the site with second most votes gets ranked 2nd and so on. The voting system is easy, each member puts a link on his/her page that links back to the top site, for each click-thru this produces the members site gets +1 vote and so moves up in the ranking ladder. The site with the most votes naturally gets most hits but some of the lower sites also get their fair share. The problem is that in order to get votes you have to have a click-thru link. If this link is too small their is the chance that you're visitors might miss it, if the link is too big then it make your page slow to load or mess up your style. If you fancy joining a top site list The top Site Directory has loads listed and you can search for one that has a similar topic to your own site. Useful Links: This will help you a lot with website promotion, with guides on how to get listed on the main directories and other methods of promotion. HOT As this page takes quite a long time to load, I decided to put links to directories and other pages where you can submit your URL on a separate page. Please note that this page is still in the Easy WebPage Website.
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