How to Promote Your Website For Free

There are two areas you need to focus on to effectively promote your site for free: things you can do on your site, and things you can do off your site - i.e. throughout the rest of the web.

The first step is to get your site optimized as far as possible for the search engines. Optimizing your site for the search engines breaks down into on-site and off-site optimisation.

Off site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is basically about building lots of high quality incoming links but, since we're looking at on-site tactics here, I'll come back to that in another article.

On site SEO is about making it easy for the search engines to find your site and to find their way around your site.

Here are 5 things you can do to make their job easier:

1) Install a sitemap in the root directory of your site - You can create a site map here - it's a free site map generator tool - xml-sitemaps.com/. Just follow the instructions they give you and upload the file they create for you to the root directory of your site.

2) Make sure that your robots.txt file allows the search engine spiders to crawl your site - By default the spiders will crawl if there's no robots.txt file - so if you don't see a robots.txt file on your site you're OK. If there's one there check there's nothing in it that says *DisAllow. If there is, either delete the phrase that ends in *DisAllow or change the *DisAllow to *Allow. The default action the spiders will take is to crawl your site.

3) Use the Google Webmasters tools to register your site and make sure they're crawling it - Google's webmaster tools are one of the services available to you if you have a Google account. If you don't have a Google account you can get one for free and I highly recommend it because they have lots of very good and useful tools for webmasters.

4) Make sure that your META data (META tags) is fully completed on each page of your site - Make sure the META tags are unique and specific to the content on each page as well - especially titles, descriptions and keywords. In case you're not familiar with META tags and how to apply them, here's a free META tag creator tool - htmlbasix.com/meta.shtml. Fill out the fields, click the 'Create META Tags' button and copy the code they give you into your web page between the HEAD and /HEAD tags.

5) Make sure you use your main keywords thoughtfully in your H1 and H2 tags as well as through out your content. But, VERY IMPORTANT, don't stuff keywords! Remember that it's people that buy from you, not the search engines. So write your pages for people - don't stuff them with keywords for the search engines! Over repetition of keywords will just turn people off and they'll click away.

Following those 5 simple steps will help the search engines to understand what your site is all about and to find their way around it - both of which are necessary for your site to be properly indexed.

And getting your site properly indexed is the first step in attracting natural search traffic.

Martin Malden writes a blog covering tips, techniques and resources for small- or home-business owners. For more information check out his blog here: http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/.