If you have a Website of your own available in the Internet you would like other users to find this page. This section provides an overview on things you have to keep on mind and methods to make your website known in the Internet.

Before promoting a website you should take the time to consider possible consequences and to find out the suitable strategy to do so. That requires of course at least basic knowledge on the mechanisms of how websites are found in the internet.

Consequences:

Motivation: When you published your website in the Internet you surely promoted it right from the beginning by telling your friends and relatives of your internet presence. In addition search engines are trying automatically to add new websites to their index, so there is a good chance your new website will be listed there soon. So is that not enough for you?

Before you take further steps in advertising your website you should be clear about your motivation. If it is your plan to earn a large amount of money, please consider how many people might have had this idea before (search for comparable websites in the Internet). Afterwards consider why so many other people are still doing normal work when they could earn their money so much easier running a website.

Legal consequences: Depending on the laws in your country running a website is connected with certain duties - especially if you are running a commercial website. Try to find out more on your duties which might be things such as implementing your contact data, offering legal indications for your users, ensuring the security of the personal data of your users. The previous is not a complete list but just a few points to give an idea of what might to be to consider. So be sure to be informed about the legal situation. Above that you should consider that the probabilty of juridical arguments naturally would increase with the publicity of your website.

Efforts: Making your Website better known will cost you much time and/or money. Usually the time factor is underestimated by a factor of 10. So you should reconsider your motivation under the aspect of the expenses it will cost.
A very important thing is to have your website completed and tested for bugs. As the internet provides a wide range of very good offers the acceptance for websites in process or containing bugs is low and most of the viitors you got onto your site would be leaving very quickly and what's even worse will most probably never return again (would you revisit a bad website ?).


Mechanisms:

Links:
To call a website, you can enter it's address directly into the addressbar of the Internet browser or you can call it by clicking a link at another website.
The first option normally is used by those who already know the website or by those who got the address from any external source (such as a business card). The second option uses the Internet itself but leads to the big question (which is dealt with in the next article) how you could get a link to your website onto someone else's website.

Ranking:
Actually links have not only the advantage of directly leading visitors to your website. They as well influence the ranking of your website at a search engine. Search engines try to present the best websites matching a request on the top of a result list. A good position for a certain keyword will lead a large number of visitors to a website.
Even though the exact evaluation algorithm for the ranking is kept secret the number of links and the quality of the linking websites is having a large effect to the ranking.

Content:
What is needed to persuade other webmaster to link to my website? How could I tempt visitors to click on those links? What can I do to make my visitors stay on my site and to come back later on?
There is one answer for all these questions: content.
If the layout and the information on your website is useful and presentable another website has not to be ashamed to be linking to your website. If the description of links to your site is meaningful interested users would be following these links on their own accord. If in the end your websites provided useful information seeked by the visitors they would be likely to come back and to tell their friends.
Just a short warning for those who plan to trick other website owners or internet users with wrong information or descriptions (also see "Spam"): without good content a tricked user would leave the website immediately and tricked owners of websites would in many cases remove the unwanted link. This way you are not building up any substancial influence of your website. To run a "succesful" Spam-Website needs advanced experience and great efforts, be ensured that it would take more than you could invest.