Website Promotion Guide

The most common way of people finding information on the internet is to use search engines like Google, Yahoo, Windows Live or Ask. If you want to promote your business then you need to work towards getting your website referenced in the top pages of the search results, to do this you need to get recognised by the search engines as a more qualified resource than your competitors. You need to create a "Presence on the Web".

Search Engine Basics - Search engines have very basic tasks to perform, to crawl the web looking for websites, keep an index of all of the words they find & where they found them, allow users to search for words or combinations of words and present the user with a list of results sorted by the webpage rank (see Wikipedia PageRank). By breaking down the functions of a search engine we can work at meeting the requirements of each process.

Get Found On The Web - In order to get your website found by search engines you need to let the search engines know that you exist. You can do this by submitting your top-level domain name for example www.megashout.com to the search engines so they can index your website, for your convenience we have added links to the most popular search engines Submit to Google, Submit to Yahoo, Submit to Windows Live. Please note that Ask do not accept domain submissions instead they will only index your site when they find a link to your site from another. When adding a page on Megashout you can add a link to your website to resolve this problem.

No Website? - If you do not have a website then please feel free to use Megashout to get your business on the web. Megashout is already referenced by the most popular search engines so the information you publish will get indexed and displayed in search results.

Increase Webpage Ranking - To increase your position in search results (increase webpage ranking) you need to be seen as more popular and informative than your competitors. The formula that search engines use is complicated (see Wikipedia PageRank) but the basic principles are simple you need links from other informative webpages back to your own and you need links from your webpages to others.

Inbound Linking - The more links you have from other websites the more you will be recognised by the search engines and deemed as more popular than the competitor who has less links. This said, you want to make sure that your inbound links come from equally informative and well structured websites. You can do this by doing a link exchange with other businesses, making sure that the link is well positioned on their site and surrounded by good information, or you can create links on your Megashout pages which you control. You can also include a link on your contact details which forms your header and is displayed on all of your published pages.

Outbound Linking - Although not as beneficial as inbound linking, having links on your site to others will position you with search engines as a good resource of information. The problem with outbound linking is that you could lose your user/customer by sending them to another website. To limit this you can add links on your site to the pages you publish on Megashout, therefore you will be sending the user/customer to a page that you control and one that links back to your website.

To learn how easy it is to create inbound and outbound linking to and from your website see our Website Linking Guide.

Search Engine Friendly- Megashout is designed to be search engine friendly, each Shout requires it's own title and description (meta tags) these are referenced by search engines and displayed in search results, your title is also used in the header of web browsers when people view your published Shouts.

Information Is Key - If you have gone to all of the effort to get your business found and made sure you are fully optimised to be indexed then it would be a shame not to make the most of the information you get indexed. Search engines love webpages that are informative and are updated regularly, we cannot stress enough the importance of the written word, so much so that we have written an Information Management Guide dedicated to it.

Full Multimedia Capabilities - One last thing, although not part of search engine promotion, when a user does find your information, then it's always good to add pictures and/or video to keep your audience's attention. It's easy to manage and display your media on Megashout to enhance your Shouts.