Site Promotion

First, check to make sure that your site is working properly.

• DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THE VALUE OF RICH CONTENT! Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Make sure all your images display properly, and your links actually go somewhere - or your application will go into the trash.
• If you don't take the time to get these right, don't expect the reviewer to take the time to give you an award.
• Slow loading pages will make people move on to another site.

• Allow your visitors to subscribe to your mailing list through your website.
• Ask every client/customer you encounter if they’d like to join your mailing list.
• Keep track of other details (birthdays, purchase history, hobbies) to help you build a better understanding of your customers needs and interests.
• Contact your customers on a regular basis. Ideally, mail something to your customers every three months, even if it’s just a postcard or email with a funny message.

• Add your website address and contact information to the signature of your email.
• Don’t use all CAPITALS
• Don’t try to make pictures out of keyboard characters. They won’t display correctly in all email programs.
• Include http:// in front of your website address. This will make your link clickable in most email programs.
• Keep it short.

Talk About Your Website

• Leave your web address on your voicemail
• Invite prospective customers to visit your website for more information.

Submit Your Site to Search Engines

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Using specific and unique keywords in page titles is the best practice for human readers as well as search engines. DO NOT stack page titles with keywords to the point that they become unreadable gibberish. Search engines give page titles a great deal of weight in determining both relevance and rank. When someone bookmarks a page, the meta page title is the title they will see in their bookmarks list--so if the title is not accurate or is missing, users will may have trouble getting back to the site.

Copy and paste your words below to find out your exact character count. (Blank spaces are counted as characters).

Once your site looks good to humans, the next step is to try to make it look good to the search engines, so you get high ranking. This involves choosing the right keywords and adjusting. Click here for the character counter.

Title Tag - Unique for every page - max 85 characters

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site.