Working as a Webmaster for a research organisation is a different experience. Neither we have to sell any product nor provide any service to the visitors. Most of these websites gives information that includes articles, analysis, data, graphs etc. But we want that the information on our website should reach to each and every person of the interest. Promoting a organisational (.org) site is different from others because being a org site we cannot put banners or popups of other sites and usually these organisations do not spend much on the promotion of website. In the initial stage we had some difficulties but now South Asia Terrorism Portal (www.satp.org) is one of the very well known website on terrorism. While promoting a website you must also use the following effective and free options of site promotion.

Search engines: Search engines are the most effective way to promote your site. From survey it has been found that about 80 per cent of people use search engine to find site of their purpose. Therefore, why should not utilize these visitors. You should submit your site to as many search engines, as you can. Following are the urls to submit your site to some of the most used search engines:

Google: www.google.com/addurl.html
Hotbot:hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp
Altavista: http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl
Northernlight: www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html
Whatuseek: www.whatuseek.com/addurl.shtml
AlltheWeb: www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php
Ask Jeeves: static.wc.ask.com/docs/addjeeves/Submit.html
Bravenet:http://www.bravenet.com/searchsubmit/index.php

Submit all the new pages you add to your site. But before submitting your site to any search engine meta tag it properly. Meta tag plays a major role in ranking a site in search engine. To know in detail about meta tags please see following pages:

http://www.geocities.com/manoian/meta_tag_tutorial.html
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html
http://www.webdeveloper.com/html/html_metatags.html
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/wilbur/head/meta.html
http://www.addme.com/issue97.htm
http://www.addme.com/issue96.htm

Web Directory: Submit your website to web directories. The site should be submitted to appropriate category. It also helps in improving ranking in Search engines. One of the most useful web directory is Open director Project (dmoz.org). If your site has been accepted into the Open Directory, then it will also get place on its partner sites which use the Open Directory data, such as AOL Search, DirectHit, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Netscape Search, etc.

Yahoo has also very big web directory. Submit to the web directories of local websites also.

Forums/groups: Register yourself with the forums/groups of similar idea as your website and send messages with url of your website to the members. Some of the groups are following: http://groups.yahoo.com/ www.google.com/grphp?hl=en

Links/Recommended sites: Make a page Links/recommended sites and list sites that are similar to your site. In exchange of it get yourself added to their site. Invite Webmasters of interesting sites to see your site and get a listing in their link page.

Submit pages of other websites where your website is registered to the search engines. It will increase your ranking in search engine. The search engine logic is that the more sites linked to your site, the better of resource your site would be on particular topic.

After some time you will feel that you had submitted your site to all the search engines, web directories, sites etc. At this point you should learn from your competitor sites. You should find the places where your competitor site is registered. To find this just search link:<site name> (eg. link:www.satp.org) in any search engine like google and it will give you the list of the pages where it is registered. What else you need? Register your site to all these pages.

Now see the result. Have passions, it takes some time to give result. Search engines and sites take time to analysis sites. And once it is listed it will remain there for long and will give you results, whereas in advertisement we have to pay for each hour and day.

I had used the above said methods and had an increase of 80 per cent hits in one month and it is increasing every month till now.

About the author: Author is a Webmaster of largest website terrorism and low intensity warfare in South Asia – South Asia Terrorism Portal (www.satp.org)