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Site Complete? Now Promote!
Primarily, to start promoting your website you need to submit your site to search engines and directories. The quickest way to go about doing this is to use a service such as Submit It. Simply fill in the appropriate form and they will do the rest for you, submitting your site to 20 search engines. Before even doing this much, you should decide on about 10 - 15 keywords that you would like you site to be found for on the search engines. Then use this keywords to optimise your site, if you are unsure how to do this read my article "SEO - Easy When Your in the Know!" or take advantage of the services of a company such as JKomp.com
NB some directories, such as Yahoo, categorise your listing. Therefore, it is vital that you choose the category that best represents your site, do this before you submit your site. Sometimes listings are place alphabetically so a trick often used is to insert your company name with the letter A at the start, e.g. AAA JKomp.com I would advise against this.
Altavista provides searches based on the content of your site - actually scanning your source code for keywords. It is, therefore, imperative that your website is fully optimised with your desired keywords. A pure flash or graphics site is really no good, perhaps try inserting text the same as your background color?!
To obtain the highest possible ranking, a link exchange campaign is necessary. To learn more about Link Exchange, read my article "The Quest for Links". Lastly, and perhaps the least effective form of promotion, is that which your part with your money for. You can pay to have adverts placed on websites. Before parting with your cash, make sure the site receives many quality and relevant hits. This type of promotion needs to be very targeted to provide worth while ROI.
BONUS ARTICLE:
Copying Web Site Content: Human Nature?
I am sure that there are many website owners out there that would be more than willing to do everything short of sacrificing their lives to protect their content, from those that would like to directly lift things from their pages. This is quite understandable. It hardly seems fair that we should work really hard, labouriously researching every detail to create a fantasticly useful website and then for someone to just take it as their own.
However, this is the nature of the World Wide Web, it is the information highway, everything there is there to be shared. I have seen people try all sorts of tricks and devices too stop people copying their work, the most popular being disabling right click. But, if people can see your content, they can copy your content, it is a simple fact.
If we want to share our website with the world, this is the chance we take, we are after all sharing it with everyone; the honest, the not so honest and the totally dishonest. So what are our options if we catch someone that has copied our content? Well, there are two main avenues of redress:
Spend all your promotion budget on a legal team and do everything you can to seek legal recompense.
Point out the similarities to the other website owner, take it as a bit of flattery and ask nicely for a creditation and a link back to your site.
'Humans... evolutionary parrots'
Why are humans such a successful species? Why aren't kindly dolphins or chimps ruling the world? It is, at least in part, because of our superior mimicking skills. Humans are indeed evolutionary parrots, making a living out of precisely copying the actions of others.
This very factor helped the spread of tools and in more modern times the spread of technology. So if you really have something that you absolutely do not want others to copy, my best advice to you is to not put it on the web, because you have little hope of getting people to change their instinctive behaviour.
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