Hi there,
I've just created two new websites
//art.somaphotos.com
which is all my fine art photography
and
//www.somaphotos.com
which is more my fashion and portraiture business
Could anyone give me some advice on how to promote the sites?
The most obvious and easiest way to promote your site is add a clickable link to your "sig" in your email and to your "profile" in the forums you post in (like this one).
Then make sure your webpages are loaded with "keywords" so that search engine crawlers will find your keywords and web pages, and add them to their searches. I don't know the best way to do this, but you can easily find info on doing it the right way, by doing a simple Google search.
Then I believe there are services you pay for that will promote your website. I'm not sure how effecient they are or if you can basically do the same thing yourself or not, but you should probably look into that also.
man you cool cats are mean!
Hughie, I ahve no idea really but starting here aint to bad. Folks will check it out either out of curiousity or for support.
Dunno where you are, but tell your friedns to tell their frinds, add it to your signature on your email & ask your friends too as well, hand out postcards, business cards, or stickers & such.
There are also websites that will submit your pages to search engines. Don't pay for this though, because you can find ones that will do it for free, or go to each search engine you want to submit your site too and usually just fill out a form. Like stated above, make sure you have keywords in your META tag.
You can also do what's called "reciprical links." You have another site link to your site and you link to them. Usaully this can be arranged with a little bit of communication with them.
Also put your site up on free link sites like MarketingTool.com and other sites like that (sorry I can't think of any others right now).
there was an interesting thread here this week that was pointing out that because of marketing abuses, meta-words are almost useless now. I'll see if I can find the link.
Manually adding your site to search engines is probably the best way to go about this, however, it does take time (lots of it). Over loading your pages with metatags is not a good thing and could penalise you.
I use software to promote sites, you can download a 45 day free trial by visiting my fish site and clicking on WebPosition gold2. Its much more than just a submission tool. Getting to the tops of searches isn't just about slapping metatags on your pages.
btw, as far as I'm aware Google still doesn't read your metatags.
MSM (for example) now gets 20% of all search engine traffic. Here are a few searches with predicted daily 'hits'
Column 1 is the search term, 2 is the 'predicted' daily searches (based on 70 million searches a day) and column 3 is the amount of pages on MSM that contains the keyword.
I would strongly advise you don't use free tools that submit your site to 1000's of search engines. Many search engines also rank you higher if you have lots of links in to your site from others and also use the popularity of the linking site when doing this (a link from the BBC is much more effective than 50 links from sites with little or no traffic)
