You've Got A Site -- Now What?

So you've got a website ready to go and you want to get the word out to either make money on it or promote it so it's the most popular page of it's kind. Now what?

Well, the first thing you should do is double check to make sure the site is as search engine friendly as possible. Go ahead. I'll wait. Done? Perfect. So, now it's easy for the search engines to find and categorize it once they do find it. Time to get that website where it can be seen.

One of the most common ways to get a site's pressence known in through Pay-Per-Click campaigns. They will assure you that the most qualified and targetted visitors come to your website. Keep your keyword and phrases as relevant as possible. If you keep your bids low it can be a profitable campaign when it targets the right audience. Keep track of the keywords people are clicking on to go to your site as well. This can tell you if you're targeting the right people or if you need to change your ad approach. Yahoo and Google are two very popular websites to do PPC campaigns on. There's numerous articles on the benefits and banes of PPC, and though it's not the focus on this one, it's usefulness to site promotion can't be simply disregarded.

Posting on forums is another way to promote your site. Do it specifically on forums with a topic relevant to your website. Check the TOS and make sure you can do it there first though. Simply placing our web address in your signature can create clicks through the forum, as well as create backlinks for your site. If the forum has a high Page Rank in Google it will work out even better for you. The main benefit of this is the backlinks your posts create which some search engine "spiders" deem gradually more important as they find your site linked more and more in different places on the internet.

On the idea of linking, reciprocal linking is another way to promote your website. This just means trading links with someone by putting a link on your website to them and they put a link on their website to you. Websites like Link Market and SEO Link Exchange are designed for just this purpose. As long as you keep the sites linking to you and from you relevant to your own site it should be just a matter of time before the search engine spiders find your site. The old fashioned way of emailing the webmaster of the site's can do it for you as well, but web services like the aformentioned ones, get rid of smaller steps that might make it harder to get linked using simple "Accept"/"Reject" buttons.

I hope this helps get your site to the top of the search engines.