5 one-time site promotion tips that pay off big

Most writers want more readership for their sites, yet throw their hands up in despair over the “Google Sandbox”, and assume that no one will find them for a few months. That’s just not true if you put a little effort into your site promotion efforts. Here I present 5 tips which will only cost you a few moments of time, once, but which will pay off over the long term.

#1 Add your site to Opinmind

Opinmind is a unique service that searches sites for opinions, rendering an “opinmind” scale for any topic. For example:


It does this by searching the content of sites, looking for opinions about the topic. You can get your site included in its searches, and linked on detail pane of their opinion search results by manually adding your site to their search engine.

Submit your site from the form at the bottom of any search results page.

#2 Add your site to IceRocket

IceRocket is a dedicated blog search engine. It has a number of interesting features, such as keyword term comparison graphs, where you can see how up to three terms have changed in popularity over time. Adding your blog to their searches will net you readers who are looking for blogs, which is a more valuable class of reader to many of us than the general reader referred from Google.

Submit your site on their Add Your Blog page.

#3 Add your site to TailRank

TailRank is an interesting site I first learned about on TechCrunch. They attempt to be a “newspaper of the blogosphere”, by aggregating hot conversations into groups, and highlighting blogs talking about or initiating hot topics. Most interestingly, they get their blogs to include from members’ subscription lists. You can get yours listed by importing an OPML feed list.

First, make an OPML feed list. The easiest way to do this is to make sure your sites are in your preferred RSS reader. I like Bloglines. Then, export the list as OPML. Most readers will do this for you.

Once you have the list, create an account at TailRank, and then import your feeds to TailRank.

#4 Submit your site to BlogPulse

BlogPulse is another dedicated blog search engine. It has a different focus than the others listed in this article, seemingly more interested in the “top sites” and “top searches”. Getting your site added to its search engine is a snap, though finding where to do it is less easy.

I found their blog submit page here.

#5 Add your sitemap to Google

Google will be able to crawl your site more efficiently if you give them a sitemap. This is especially easy to do if you are using WordPress, which has the excellent Google Sitemap plugin. If you aren’t using Wordpress, you can use Google’s own sitemap generator.

Once you’ve created your sitemap, submit it to Google and confirm that you own the site you are attempting to add. This will pay off in better-targeted searching at Google, as well as visibility into your crawl stats, errors and your pagerank. Nice payoff for a small amount of hoop-jumping!

Manage your sites and their sitemaps using the Google sitemap page.

Technorati Tags: SEO, icerocket, opinmind, blogpulse, google, tailrank, sitemap, site promotion

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2006 at 7:37 am and is filed under Links, Advice, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.