Ways to get your Website Noticed !!

1. If you're launching a new site, or new content, write an introduction and submit it to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and Netscape. See 23 Top Social Bookmarking sites for more great places to submit your content.
2. Create a Yahoo Group in your niche.
3. Create a MySpace account and use it to publicize your site.
4. Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and if you're really keen, add a Del.icio.us button to your homepage.
5. Create a Technorati account and "claim" your blog.
6. Submit your site to free, search engine friendly directories. An excellent list can be found atInfo Vilesilencer.
7. Conduct a survey. This is an excellent way to generate offline publicity.
8. Place a free ad for your company on Gumtree.
9. Syndicate your sites content by using an RSS feeds.
10. Submit your RSS feeds to aggregator sites like FeedBurner, Squidoo, Feedboy,Jordomedia, FeedBomb, FeedCat, rssmad, Feeddirectory and Feedfury.
11. Write an article related to your site and submit it to article sites.
12. Sign up to StumbleUpon and get your friends to Stumble your site.
13. Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone encounters an error on your site, they are re-directed somewhere nice.
14. Set up a 301 redirect to take traffic from your non-www address to your www address. See here for more info.
15. Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums posts.
16. Tell your friends about your site. It's free advertising.
17. Spell check your style. Nothing appears more amateur than a site with typos or spelling mistakes.
18. Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers.
19. Buy enough hosting. No one likes a slow site.
20. Don't worry about Page Rank.
21. Offer something for free. Free is good. People tell their friends about free stuff.
22. Tell your neighbors, you never know what contacts they might have.
23. Offer your users as many ways as possible to contact you. MSN, Skype, Yahoo etc all complement email, phone and a real address.
24. Advertise your site on Craigslist. It's free, relevant and localized.
25. Do NOT use frames.
26. Submit your site to DMOZ.org and forget it.
27. Create an XML site map of your site and submit it to Goggle.
28. Get a custom t-shirt made with your web site url on it, and wear it often.
29. Ask a large breasted lady to wear one too.
30. Sign up with an affiliate program to sell your product, or if you're a publisher, make some cash!
31. On your Contact Page ask people if they mind receiving your newsletter.
32. Send out a newsletter!
33. Go to a free seminar for Web site owners. You might learn something.
34. Find quality and relevant blogs and leave a comment (with a link back to your site of course).
35. Don't pay people to submit your site to search engines. It's a waste of money.
36. YouTube and Google Video are excellent portals on which to launch a viral campaign.
37. Giving away an ebook is an excellent way to generate traffic to your site.
38. Sponsor a Wordpress theme or a phpListDirectory template.
39. If you sell products that are advertised on television by the manufacturer, add "As Seen on TV" to your site!
40. Avoid proprietary technologies like Java and Active X.
41. Put downloadable content on your site, but make sure it's not manufacturer specific - so mp3 rather than wma.
42. Learn about CSS. It's the new HTML.
43. Contribute to related subject areas on Wikipedia.
44. Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.
45. Have user friendly page names - most tools comes with some way to avoid www.yourdomain.com/pgInfoPages.php?cx=50799399822B393B
46. If you must have a Flash homepage, make sure you have a "Skip Intro" link.
47. Tell your local rag about your site. These newspapers are desperate for stories.
48. Become a leading authority on your chosen subject.
49. Donate money to a charity and most will place a link on their site back to you.
50. Abide by the W3C standards - it will help your site in the long term.
51. Your local community sports teams offer cheap, but highly effective sponsorship opportunities.
52. Publicize your site on related forums - but don't spam!
53. Ask bloggers to write about your site or product - in return for a link of course.
54. Offer a competition related to something in the news - so football around the time of the World Cup etc.
55. Add a "Tell a Friend" function to your site so people can easily recommend you to their mates.
56. Have a Site map on your site to allow users to navigate around quickly and to aid the search engines.
57. Have a nice keyword rich title at the top of each of your pages. Users and search engines both like descriptive titles.
58. Include a Feedburner button on your site so people can easily subscribe to your feed.
59. If you use PPC then create a landing page for each of your AdWords - it'll boost your conversations no end.
60. Appear on Dragons Den.
61. Create a Press section on your site where can you store all your press releases, logos and banners.
62. Add a link to your site from within your eBay profile.
63. Ask your friends to give you honest feedback on your site.
64. Gain exposure by submitting photos and pictures to Flikr.
65. Share your banners on banner exchange sites.
66. Make sure it's easy for your users to subscribe to your RSS feed.
67. Create a "lens" for your site on Squidoo
68. Ask friends, colleagues and associates to "Add to Favorites" your blog on Technorati.
69. You can add a Bulletin to your MySpace account promoting your site that all your MySpace Friends will see.
70. Respond to your customers emails promptly. No one likes to wait 3 or 4 days for an acknowledgement of their contact with you.
71. Get a professional Copywriter to give your site a once over. If you are on a tight budget, limit it to just the homepage.
72. Make a list, Top 10's work well. Update it regularly to give your visitors a reason to return.
73. What did you learn today? Tell other people and they might learn something too.
74. Do you have really hot content on your site that geeks would love? If so Slashdot will bring you a mass of traffic.
75. Deep link directories are an excellent way to promote inner pages of your site.
76. Meta tags might carry less weight than previously, but you should still have them on every page.
77. Ask your Gran for feedback on your site. Never ignore the silver surfers.
78. Include a "Add to your Technorati favorites button" on your site.
79. Google Analytics is free and will tell you all you need to know about who's visiting your site.
80. Search engines will find you. Don't pay money for your site to be submitted.
81. Don't be afraid to link to other sites, especially if they are relevant and to highly respected sites.
82. Keep It Simple Stupid: use CSS to control layout, style and colors and use HTML text rather than graphics to represent text.
83. Validate your HTML and CSS. It'll help ensure your site displays well in all browsers.
84. Small page sizes and optimized graphics will give your site a snappy feel and won't require users to wait around for it to load.
85. If you plan to submit your site to lots of directories or article sites, create an email especially for this. Delete it when you're finished to avoid spam.
86. Link baiting means, to write killer content that people will want to link to. Like a 101 Tips to Improve Your Web Presence list!
87. If your chosen field is technology related then write a white paper. That's a posh name for an article.
88. Google receives roughly 50% of all search requests, Yahoo 25% and MSN just 10%. That's a good rule of thumb as to how much emphasis to put on each.
89. Make sure you have a robots.txt file in the root of your Web site. You can use this to control search engines, but if nothing else it'll reduce the number of 404 errors in your Weblogs.
90. Free online games, a forum or chat rooms will give your users a reason to come back to your site.
91. Ebooks with re-seller rights make an excellent free gift for your site.
92. Upload your product feed to Froogle. It's FREE!
93. This is an excellent list of Top 25 Social Bookmarking Sites
94. Search out unanswered questions on Yahoo! Answers and add your site as the source.
95. PageRank is vanity, ranking is sanity.
96. Yahoo are catching up with Google with an excellent set of webmaster tools called Site Explorer.
97. Don't buy traffic. It's un-targeted and won't convert.
98. Pay Per Click advertising gets you fast results - and if it's handled well can be very profitable.
99. Upload a favicon.gif file so that your users have a nice icon when they bookmark your site.

Things You Really Should Know About SEO

1. Content. Content. Content. 
Effective, professional, optimized Copywriting is the single, most important factor in any SEO campaign. Search engines index websites based on the content found on each page of the site. With a thorough understanding of the language and grammatical conventions combined with intensive research, to find and exploit the market focus, one can move a website to the upper echelon of the "SERP's" (Search Engine Results Page) in a methodical as well as ethical manner.

2. Analyze Web Logs. 
Measure everything, at least twice, and then check again. While I would be the first to say that many of the procedures that make up website optimization are more art than science, one needs to take a very scientific approach to the results of the effort. This is done by methodically keeping a record of, and making an analysis of the sites web logs. There are a number of specialized software which make the job easier but at the bare minimum, one needs to keep a close eye on the site visitors and their activity while on the site. No matter how well planned the strategy, it is largely theoretical until proven by the results, which can only be measured by the logs, and a thorough analysis of their content.

3. No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, or any other search engine.
Those who promise such feats will either optimize for such vague search term phrases (such as, "green stunted widgets with purple Polka-dots and icing") that no one will ever likely look for, or they are making a false claim, which they have no intention of keeping, or they have an inside edge at Google, something which they will loose, quickly, when the honest folks at Google find out about it. The other option, that they will take the money and run, is worth mentioning here but I'll be polite.

4. Some things are just plain silly. 
You don't need to submit your site to 50,000 search engines. Businesses which offer this service are suspect, at best. 85% of the search results on the Internet come from one search engine, which, if you have one link from an established website, or better yet, a directory, will find your site just fine, on it's own. Four (4) search engines account for over 90% of the traffic on the web. As for any supposed benefit which may accrue from being listed in an obscure search engine in Botswana which specializes in safaris to the Kalahari Desert and receives 7 hits per day; well, you figure it out.

5. SEO is not Pay-per-Click. 
While no one would argue the effectiveness of getting increased traffic and sales, through a well planned, pay-per-click campaign, the fact remains that the conversion rates are generally low and they cease the moment the "pay" stops. With a well planned and executed SEO campaign, while results may take a bit longer, they continue to produce, and in fact grow, long after the work is done and paid for. Quite often we have found that after a thorough optimization of a site, only minor adjustments are needed on an ongoing basis, primarily related to new content and/or new items of sale or service.

6. SEO is not witchcraft, Druidism, shamanism. 
Neither does it require any special chants, ceremonial fires, or vestments, though some of us do like to howl at the full moon, on occasion. There are no "Top Secret" practices which a reputable SEO can not tell a client, a judge, or his mother, for that matter. The very nature of the Internet has always been cooperative and there is nothing about SEO that can't be learned, with a heavy dose of time and money. A reputable SEO firm will give you an item per item breakdown of just where the money goes. Be wary if you sense a secretive atmosphere or any unwillingness to answer questions. While there are technical points which might take some background to fully understand, if one has a solid overview of the entire situation, a simple explanation should be easy enough to come up with.

7. Do-it-yourself SEO. 
Yes, you can execute your own SEO campaign and find a reputable SEO firm to help plan and organize it for you. About one half of my own clientele do some part of the actual work themselves, or have their in-house dedicated personnel do it, after discussion of the goals and aims of the business/website, a thorough website analysis, comprehensive search phrase research, and focused instruction on the ways and means of achieving high SERPs. These preliminaries are followed up with a detailed program of suggestions and methods which the client can then implement themselves or hire others to perform. Average savings; 30-40%.

8. Phased Implementation. 
While many companies spend thousands of dollars per month on Search Engine Optimization, an alternative is available which will pay dividends to you in increased sales and leads without the high initial investment. The most important consideration is to have a reputable firm handle the initial evaluation and suggested optimization planning first. The trial and error method will cost much more, in the long run, with or without the desired result. After studying the plan and establishing a workable budget you may implement the plan as finances allow.

9"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." 
Never was this more true than in the realm of SEO. While concrete and measurable gains will always come from a well thought out and executed optimization strategy, the Internet is a competitive media and we all want to be number one. Accept that a steady upward movement, over time, will place you worlds ahead of a flash followed by a crash.

10. A thought to ponder. 
At stake, in the race for the top, is the very existence of your website, your business, and quite possibly your reputation. Beware of any "shortcuts" or less than ethical schemes that anyone might suggest to further your business goals. When it's all said and done it is you, the business owner, who bears the responsibility for any company or individual you hire. Insist on knowing exactly what the strategy is and what steps are being performed to implement it. If it seems, in the least, suspicious, ask for and get an explanation. In this case, not only is Ignorance not bliss, it could very well be the beginning of the end for your business.

11. All incoming links are not created equal. 
Both the relevance to your line of business and website subject matter and the PR value of the incoming link determine how valuable they are to your own PR ranking. With Google starting the trend, nothing new there, and most of the others following close behind, the days of grabbing all the inbound links, in any way possible, are gone. Not only will low ranked and/or irrelevant inbound links not help, they will, in fact, cause a penalty. Link farms, free-for-all link schemes, automated link accumulation software, or any other fad that doesn't carefully screen the links and websites they are coming from will, in the long run, do more harm than good.

12. It's more than just facts and figures. 
The relationship between an online business and SEO is, perhaps, one of the closest of business relationships. In order to be effective, a SEO must know not only the facts and figures pertaining to the endeavor, but s/he must know something of the dreams and aspirations of the business principals. Things which don't normally come out in a prospectus are often invaluable information when searching for the "right fit" into the complex world of the Internet.