Your Website without visitors is not going to do any good to you or anyone else. You need to tell people where you are on the web. You need to build up an audience for your site.

The first step of your website promotion has to be free search engine and directory submission. Here are some important tips to remember when submitting.
 
Search Engines

Head to all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. and submit your site in their index for free. This is the easiest thing to do and cost you nothing. It will take couple of weeks to months to get indexed.

Be patient, do not spam the search engines with unwanted or irrelevant keywords that does not fit your site’s theme. If you do, there is a good chance of not getting accepted or worst get banned. Once you get denied, it’s harder to get accepted again.

Free and Paid Directories

While you are waiting to get indexed by search engines, find some good free directories and keep submitting to them. Web directories have different ways of accepting links.

• Free Submission: Submit with no cost to you. They are two types of free listings. Number one, they won’t request a link back from you. Example DMOZ.org. Number two, some ask your to link back to them before they include your site. This is also known as a Reciprocal or a two way link.

• Paid Listings: Here you pay them to get listed in their index. In most cases this is a manual hand submission by their editors. They will review your site and determine if the link is acceptable. The payment can be a one time fee or in some cases like Yahoo’s a yearly $300 recurring for certain listings.

• Featured Links: You pay a certain amount to highlight your site on their listings. For example they will display it on top of all the other links at a given category or feature it on the home page.

TIP:

For Reciprocal links, create a separate links page and list all of them in there. That way you do not have to add them to your main page to clutter the current layout. Avoid filling pages with all links which eventually leads to a poor visitor experience.

TIP:

If you haven’t submit your link to Open Directory Project aka DMOZ.org, go ahead and do that now. DMOZ powers Google, AOL, Yahoo Search, excluding Yahoo Directory. Yahoo Directory only accept paid listings