How to Promote Your GeoCities Web Site

You created the text, uploaded pictures and considered color schemes for your GeoCities Web site. Now for the next step: promotion. Visitors make your Web site come alive. It is a special thrill to see the numbers go up on the Page View Summary between visits, and when you realize how much you can do to make those numbers jump, site promotion becomes more of a game than a chore. Follow these steps to promote your GeoCities Web site.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Internet access
• Computer
• GeoCities account

1. Use word of mouth to your advantage. Tell your friends about your new site and invite them to check it out.

2. List your page on the Yahoo! GeoCities Member Pages Directory. Doing this costs nothing and your site will appear 24 hours after you make your submission.

3. Create links to your site. Find other Web sites that mesh well with yours and offer to exchange links with the sites' owners. Search engines tend to pick up sites with good and plentiful links.

4. Submit your site to the search engines. Yahoo! and other search engines offer free URL submission to their sites. The downside is that you are not guaranteed any results.

5. Win awards for site design, content or timeliness. Submit your site to the Webby Awards for consideration or pass on your blog to the Bloggies. Just getting nominated can result in a boost in site traffic.

Tips & Warnings

• If you are willing to spend money to promote your Web site, you can get submission and marketing tools designed to bring visitors to your site. The methods involved range from email advertising to sponsored search results.
• Use Yahoo! Directory Submit to speed up the inclusion process. This costs money, but guarantees that a human editor will look over your site submission within seven days. If your site is turned down for inclusion in the Yahoo Directory, you will get an email explaining why you were not included.
• If you are trying for hundreds and hundreds of hits per day, you may want to upgrade your site to GeoCities Pro or better to handle the additional traffic. These enhanced Web sites cost a monthly fee but have significantly more storage space for more images and content.
• Every time someone views your GeoCities Web site, the information on your site is transferred to their computer. The amount of data transfer you have per hour with GeoCities free is quickly exhausted if you have a large site and a lot of visitors.