Well, I started up a new website with some excellent suggestions from the members here (thank you all for your advice) and I am now beginning to market my one big website by building links and getting rankings. I have to say that Google appears to have the whole internet at its mercy when it comes to promotion and unless you have a large budget for Adwords they have really made things kind of difficult. Two suggestions I find repeated over and over in this forum are (1) listing your site in directories and (2) promoting your site through articles. I've gotten started on both and my head is spinning. What I have found with the directories approach is that there are what appear to be thousands of sites where webmasters installed directory software, created directory links to their own sites, opened up for submissions to a few hundred or perhaps a thousand or so other website listings, then switched to pay-for-submit listings, then appear to have simply lost interest in their directory and/or wandered off. It is truly amazing to find so many broken and abandoned directories. Pay-for-submission? How can a directory with no traffic ask for a link fee? If there is no PR on the listings page and the site receives no traffic except for other individuals coming there to submit there own sites how can I justify paying for a link? How are these sites helpful? I have submitted to about 1200 free directories + some recip directories and wound up with the first 20 or so links coming from a cluster of directories with the same IP number and tons of spam emails. I understand its free... but I cannot see these directories helping my rankings. As for article promotion, I am truly amazed at what total crap that gets passed off as articles in these article sites. It is mind boggling! Page after page of 500 word (or sometimes 501 word) articles stuffed with keywords and filibuster blah-blah-blah that is of no merit and of no value to the reader. It's millions of pages of just plain nothing! How are these article sites helpful to anyone? I cannot see internet users going to any of these articles sites I have seen so far to actually find information. They appear to be basically just a Free-For-All posting site that requires a 500 word description! How long until Google gets tired of these and purges them along with the articles I submit? Can someone please either help me to understand how these two methods will actually do any good for websites - or since I don't have a huge Adsense budget - point me in yet another direction? Thanks for your help!
Don, Marketing a website cannot be defined and prove efficient for all types of websites, it is truly dependent on your specific niche. Feel free to PM me your website and I can help you establish a more effective marketing approach.