by Bob Pritchard

Created on: October 06, 2010   Last Updated: October 08, 2010

Build it and they will come? Works great in the movies but not too well on the internet. You may have built a killer website but no one is going to see it unless you tell them about it. There are a number of things you must do to be discovered.

Search engines

The very first thing you must do the same day your website goes online is to submit your url to the search engines. Do the big three first.

http://www.google.com/addurl/ , https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit and http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx . Don't use an seo company that promises to list your site with thousands of search engines. A lot of them are not for real. If your site is important to you take the time and submit it yourself.

Webmaster tools

Google has a site called webmaster tools. Here you can tell google all about your site. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en This is an excellent way to watch what google is seeing as their robot crawls your site. The amount of valuable information you get in this site is incredible. Yahoo has a similar site called site explorer https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites

Groups

If you frequently contribute to groups that are related to your website content you can add your website url to your signature block. This is an excellent way to get traffic to your site but just be sure it is allowed. While some groups welcome this others consider it spamming.

Links

Exchanging links with websites that have the same type of content as your site is a great way of getting web traffic. And well targeted traffic too being you choose who links to you. You can not have too many links. This is a task that will be ongoing as long as you have your site.

Open Directory Project (odp) http://www.dmoz.org/

The open directory project also known as the dmoz is the largest directory of websites on the internet. Be sure to apply for a listing here. It is run by volunteers so it takes a long time to be listed so do it as soon as your site is published. There are many categories in the dmoz so it's important to apply in the correct category. Be sure the information you give the dmoz is accurate and complete. It's run by humans and if they don't like what they see they could throw it away.

Article sites

Go to sites like Squidoo and build a lens or Hubpages and build a hub. On these sites you can write short articles and link back to your website.

Blog

If you like writing, make a blog. Write about the same content as your website and link to it often.

Social sites

Join Facebook and Twitter and add your website links. You can get quite a bit of traffic from social networks.

When first publishing a website it takes a while before the search engines will pick up your pages. Don't get discouraged. If you have good content you will get good traffic. The number one key to a successful website is good content.

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