Increase Website Exposure for "Free"

Filed under Helpful Information by Eric Griffiths on 5/28/2008

Lately, I was considering doing some website promoting for a couple of my sites. As with most things I do, I always try to accomplish it as economical as possible. While doing some research on the internet, I came across a forum web site targeted towards web developers. Seeing people's posts and their "signatures" referring to their own website, I quickly remembered a strategy for website promotion. The posts on that forum with links to the author's site are more powerful than you may think. Blogs are just as powerful, if not more. I will explain to you how it works.

A few links on another owner's forum or blog may not seem too exciting. Traffic coming in from sites like this are usually minimal. Forum readers are not impressed enough with signature links to follow them. Often it is even interpreted as unwanted boasting. But there is another type of forum visitor that considers these links differently. Spiders. No, not the eight legged type, but the Google, Yahoo and MSN type. Search engines use automated programs that "crawl" the web, reading the content of websites. The term used for this is spider, or "spidering".

Even though you are not getting a lot of traffic from these signature links and blogs directly, they may be providing indirect traffic to your site. Search engines consider links to your site as a "vote" for you. The more "votes" for your site, the better the search engines rank you. Search engines even consider the rank of the site linking to you. The higher the rank the linking site has, the more that vote weighs. This among other factors determine your page rank. Page rank on the internet is a good thing. Ever wonder how Google sorts and orders websites when you do a search? Page rank is on factor. Therefore digital "votes," or links to your site from quality sites are crucial for your customers finding you on the internet.

There are many sites that allow you to start your own blog for free. Writing quality content and linking to your site from different blog sites may be one of the best ways to promote your site, for "free". I use the term "free" loosely. While it doesn't cost anything, this can be a time consuming process. But setting aside a couple of hours a week to blog or post in forums would be an excellent start. There are even companies that you can hire to do this for you if your time is limited.

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