Promoting and Marketing Your Web Site

First define your target audience. You can then concentrate your efforts on the places frequented by these people. Huge numbers of visitors are generally useless unless they are interested in your product, service and web site content. Make a list of the people you want to attract.
Now you know your target audience, does your web site serve any of their needs? Make sure they are pleased they visited your site by providing informative content. You don't just want to attract people, you want them to act when they get there or at least come back again.
Be patient. Allow at least 3 months for your efforts to start to bear fruit.

Design the Site to be Search Engine Friendly: Google 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. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
Check for broken links and correct HTML.
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Hand submit to search engines.
Participate in relevant newsgroups.
Contact related sites and suggest they might like to link to a relevant page on your web site.
Send paper press releases to relevant magazines and newspapers detailing how the new site will be of interest to their readers.
When you have a newsworthy item - a new product or service, news about an event, etc - submit to on-line press release repositaries.
Set up a blog with, for example, http://www.blogger.com/, and enter all your newsworthy events here. Don't forget to submit your blog address to Google and other search engines, and to quote your web address in all postings.
Create an RSS news feed and submit it to RSS directories. See http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/newsfeed.html for an example.
Quote the web address in all adverts and product literature - both on-line and off - and always include it at the bottom of your e-mail messages.
Consider mailing a regular newsletter to subscribers. Use an automatic mailing program like Subscribe Me.

Some strategies can do more harm than good

Never submit your site to a "Free for All" links list. These types of pages comprise a list of, generally unrelated, links. You type the title and URL of your site into a form, and it is automatically added to the list. There's generally a limit to the number of sites listed, and when this limit is reached older entries are overwritten. Submitting to these pages will:
1. Not generate any direct visitors. People only visit the FFA sites to add their own site, not to browse other peoples'.
2. Not influence your site placing in the search engines. Many search engines use link popularity to assess where in the rankings to place your site. However, they give no weight to untargeted FFA generated lists and may even penalise listings there.
3. Often generate large amount of junk e-mails. Many FFA lists will ask for your e-mail address before letting you add your site, and then send you advertising messages.
4. Beware unsolicited e-mails promising "50 000" new visitors. What is the point of 50 000 visitors of which none are interested in what you have to offer?

By Jill Studholme.