Below are suggestions for publicizing your site based on our experience
getting the word out about Google Guide.
Include useful high-quality information on your site.
Create content that users want and will share with others.
Submit your site to various web directories and reference sites.
Post your site's URL (web address) to popular web directories, such as
- Open Directory Project (ODP)
- Yahoo!
- LookSmart
Post your site's URL to online reference, e.g.,
- Wikipedia
- industry-specific expert sites
- blogs
- etc.
Publicize your site to everyone with whom you communicate.
Add your site's URL, e.g., www.googleguide.com, to every
piece of communication you initiate, such as,
Business cards
Letterhead
Newsletters
Brochures
Press Releases
Fax cover sheets
Email signatures
Write a newsletter and send it out.
Inform people what's new or noteworthy on your site.
The newsletter will
-
remind people about your site
- encourage them to visit to find interesting content
Provide a Rich Site Summary (RSS).
RSS is also known as Really Simple Syndication
Make it easy for other sites to distribute your
headlines and content.
Your RSS feed will be indexed by popular Blog search engines, including
Ask other high quality websites to link to your website.
Getting other "good" websites to link to yours usually helps your website's PageRank and ranking on Google.
Provide motivation for highly ranked websites to link to yours.
Getting highly ranked sites to link to yours will improve your ranking more than getting many poorly ranked sites to link to yours.
Check out a site before you link back.
Is it a site worthy of your link, i.e., vote of confidence?
Tell the press about your site.
Telling the press may not get your website publicity.
-
Contacted national, and
international press and
got a poor response to our publicity.
-
Emailed journalists who specialize in search engines, but
again few wrote articles about Google Guide.
-
Wrote to reviewers of books on using Google.
A handful responded.
-
Response was mixed.
-
Some wrote that Google Guide was for novices
-
Others wrote that Google Guide was tailored for advanced users
-
Wanting to make Google Guide appeal to novices and experts alike,
I indicated sections that would appeal to particular users, e.g.,
-
If you have little or no experience with Google, read on. Otherwise, skip to the next section, titled "Go to the First Result."
-
We recommend that you skip ahead to Part II: Understanding Search Results unless you're an experienced Google user or you want to know how to use Google's advanced operators.
After several months, found links to Google Guide on
-
library sites
- class sites
- blogs
Got mentioned in a New York Times article.
History of the Google Guide Cheat Sheet
- Idea suggested by Matt Vance
- Created Google Guide using material from Google Guide's
Using Search Operators
- Announced Cheat Sheet on Slashdot
- Within 24 hours, my Cheat Sheet rose to #2 (after Google's cheat sheet)
Keep your website up.
If your website
- is not accessible for an extended period of time
- Google may reduce the ranking of your site
Give away content.
I publish Google Guide under a
Creative Commons License to enable others
to
- copy
- distribute
- make derivative works
as
long as they give Nancy Blachman credit and link to Google Guide.
Translate your website into foreign languages.
If you don't know a foreign language, find others that do.
Search Google for your website.
Search Google for your site.
Google Guide is highly ranked,
thanks to
- the sites that linked to Google Guide
- users who clicked on Google Guide in their search results
Being listed so highly on Google has improved the
traffic flow to Google Guide.
For the top ranked site, Google sometimes includes
useful links from within that site.
Google Guide
Avoid devious tactics to improve your ranking.
Google
may delist your site from its index,
if it suspects that you are trying to deceive it web crawler and
thus its users by
- including hidden text
- misleading or repeated words
- pages that don't match your sites description
- deceptive redirects
- duplicate site or pages
- other disingenuous tactics
To compute a page's PageRank, Google considers hundreds of factors including
- how fast a site is gaining links
- how long the links persist
- when your site acquired the links
- the click through rate
(CTR) of Google's search results, cached pages, favorites on the
Google Toolbar
- the stickiness of your site (i.e., the effectiveness
of your site in retaining individual users)
For more factors see
"Great Site Ranking in Google The Secret's Out" on Buzzle.com.
Google periodically changes how it calculates a page's importance,
thereby resulting in shifts in rankings, known as a Google Dance.
I don't try to keep up with the latest search engine optimization
tricks.
I strive to make searching Google easier by educating users about
Google services, capabilities, and features.
When I'm successful,
sites link to Google Guide pages and increase their ranks and
importance to Google.
Here are links to a few pages that discuss how to publicize your
website and improve the ranking of your web pages.
In the next section, Advertising Your
Website, I'll tell you how I increase traffic through running
inexpensive ads.
This page was last modified on
Sunday November 26, 2006.
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For Google tips, tricks, & how Google works, visit
Google Guide at www.GoogleGuide.com.
By Nancy Blachman and Jerry Peek who aren't Google employees. For
permission to copy
& create derivative works, visit
Google Guide's Creative Commons License webpage.
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