How to Promote Your Site
After you have a site up and running, what is the best way to promote it and begin getting traffic to it?
Your ultimate goal in search engine optimization (SEO) is to get other websites to link to your website; this is how you gain search engine rankings. And the more important the sites that link to you, the more important (and hence, higher search rankings) your site will become. The trick is, how do you get important sites to link to you?
Build a great site. This seems obvious, but treat your website like a real business, even if it offers free information. Make it useful, and worthwhile as a a new web resource. Ask yourself: would other people link to my site because it's useful?
Submit to a few directories. You need to get other sites to link to yours to raise its profile. One way to get started in this regard is to submit it to directory sites, sort of like Yellow Pages. There are free ones and paid ones, and they will all give you a link if your site passes muster. Some of the best ones are DMOZ.org (free), Yahoo.com ($300/yr), Business.com ($200/yr), and Best of the Web ($100/yr). These are some of the largest and best, and will give your site a good headstart.
Take out a press release. Write a press release describing you and your new website in the third person, like a report would. Describe what it is, what you're doing, what's good about it, etc. Submit it to PRWeb.com, spending at least the $80 submission for wide distribution.
Create useful bite-sized content. Go to delicious.com and search for your industry. Delicious consists of people's browser bookmarks uploaded for the public to see, and you can tell useful sites by how many times they've been bookmarked. Look for sites in your industry that have been bookmarked a lot. Reverse-engineer them. Why are they bookmarked? Are they lists of tools? Are they blog posts? Try to create something similar for your own site, that would fit right in alongside the most bookmarked items.
Take out another press release announcing your new content. The content you just created above needs to be announce to the rest of the world. A good way to do this is to do another press release specifically mentioning your new tool, article, whatever. Hopefully, other sites will see this, think it's useful, and link to you.
The above is obviously a quick and simple version of promoting your site.
For more detailed information, check out:
Beginner's guide to Search Engine Optimization at SEOMoz
SEOBook's guide to SEO for Bloggers