Promoting and Advertising Your SiteOk, you've made your custom content, you've completed your site. Everything is ready for your hoards and hoards of devoted visitors. But where are they? They're out there, waiting to find you. The following is a tutorial (of sorts) to help you promote your site, get visitors, and make a name for yourself.
Step 1. GOOGLE (and other search engines)
First, acquaint yourself with meta tags.
This site has an excellent introduction to meta tags. USE them. It only takes a second to stuff them into your <head></head> tags, and the results will be long lived.
If you're too lazy to read, I'll abbreviate:
<title></title> is used for the title of your site/page. It's the part that shows up at the top of the browser as "My Sim Site". If it's omitted it will show up as "untitled document".. yeck. It should look like this...
<title>My Sim Site</title>
<meta name="description" content="" / > Whatever you put between the quotations after content will be what search engines will display under your site name when it comes up after a search. Not all search engines will read this; like google *sniff* but other will read it either entirely or partially.
<meta name="description" content="MySimSite is dedicated to helping you keep your Sims site free and independent! MySimSite is also a great resource for new sim site owners." />
<meta name="keywords" content="" /> Keywords are what the search engine flags for searches. So if you make one of your keywords say... Sims 2, then your results should show up in a search when someone types Sims 2. This is quite possibly the most important step for getting traffic from search engines.
<meta name="keywords" content="Sims 2, Custom Content, Free site, The Sims 2, tutorials, support, help, community, The Sims, Sims, Sims2, create a website, how-to make a sims site" />
*If you are planning on supporting more than 1 language, then you should consider translating your keywords as well!
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Second you are going to want to submit your site to the search engines. You can simply go to each search engine and sumbit yourself, or you can find a site that will submit your site to several at one time (phew!)
Doing a search (how ironic) for "Search engine submission" or "Site optimization" will yield results of your own, if you don't like those.
Step 2: Linking with other Sims2 sites
There are 3 types of links in the sims 2 community. 1 way links, link exchange, and affiliation. Inter-subject linking is going to provide the most traffic to your site.
1 way links: Easy enough, someone is a fan of a site, so they put a link to that site somewhere on their site. For smaller/newer sites, this type of linking (to you) is few and far between.
Link exchange: Two sites agree to place links on each others sites. This is probably the most common form of linking in the sims 2 community. I would first go around to all your favorite sites, e-mailing the webmasters (or signing guestbooks/writing in forums) asking them if they would be interested in trading links. It won't be very often that you get a "no.. sorry". Though you may have quite a few unreturned e-mails. Don't take this personally. Frequently, site owners have a seperate e-mail account for their site, and they don't check it regularly.
Affiliation: This is similar to a link exchange, but denotes a higher level of appreciation for each others sites. You typically want to affiliate with sites that are similar to your own; either in what you produce, like clothes, or in the style you fancy, like retro. Because affiliates should have a special place of their own on your link list, a good rule of thumb is to keep the number of affiliates small. Having a large number of affiliates is not beneficial to the sites you affiliate with, because as the list grows, the more links a browser has to choose from, and the less traffic your affiliate sites will generate from you. Since the whole point of affiliation is to give special treatment to those sites... the above defeats the point. Also it looks insincere.
The second part of this is getting yourself on lists. There are numerous sites devoted to listing Sims 2 sites, either as a list, or by content. You will want to e-mail the webmasters (or whatever form of submission they have in place) and politely ask for them to include your site. You may also consider adding youself to toplists, which are ranked lists of sites based on popularity (ranked by votes in, ranked by votes out, ranked by user comments.. etc). Frequently, some sort of link exchange will be involved.
STEP 3: Announce your updates!!!
I can't stress how important this is initially. You will need to find various forums that have "Site Promotion" or "Sims 2 Sites" sections and start a thread devoted to your site. Each time you add new content to your site... you should update the thread. I like to edit the initial page, and then bump the thread with a new comment like "updated with 8 female swimsuits". You can also just add your new updates as a new comment each time. I like my version because I find it more user friendly than having to wade through pages of comments to get to the new stuff, either way, it's up to you!
Also, there are some sites that do "finds". If they allow/encourage you to send in your updates or to at least notify them of your site's existence, you should. Doing "finds" takes up alot of time and its alot easier on them to have the finds come to them especially if its a site they have never heard of (or if you rarely update). Bines is one I know of that welcomes webmaster update emails. Check it out: Bines Sim Revue
Toplists:
Bines top 100
Starsim top 100
Sussi's top 100
Biene's top 100
Downtown top 100
http://simsbynish.gotop100.com/index.php
http://www5.topsites24.de/pro/Technomicky/index.html
Enchanted Forest top 100
Ultimate Sims List
Sherrie's top 100
Xtreme top 100
http://www.topsites24.net/pro/simtimes/index.html
Distant Eyes top 100
http://www3.topsites24.de/pro/Brina/index.html
Komo Sims top 100
Sims 2 Down Under
Sugarheart's top 100
Simply Sims2 Recolors top 100
Sims4um top 100
Cafe Review top 100
http://simplysi.gotop100.com
Startlists:
http://thesims2.startkabel.nl/
http://thesims-2.startpagina.nl/
http://thesims2.jouwpagina.nl/
Directory:
http://www.linkelink.nl/the_sims_2.htm
http://www.luniversims.com/annuairesims/index.php
http://chukhin.brinkster.net/Lynne/sims/simlinks.html
http://www.thesims2-search.com/learn-more/what-sites-are-included/index.html
http://www.activesimsites.com/
http://downloadwhores.farvista.net/ <---hasn't been updated since September 06
http://www.thesimsurfer.com/ <--- no idea when this was last updated looks abandoned though.
http://www.sims2inspired.com/
http://www.a-simslife.com/themeslist.asp <--- a list of themes, so if you have content that is ancient, gothic, etc this is your place.
http://www.beepworld.de/members38/suggarheart2/index.htm
Forums that will host updates: (most forums do, this list is restricted to large userbases)
http://www.insimenator.net/forums.php
http://lovecouture87.proboards103.com/
http://p218.ezboard.com/bstarlightsims
http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/ Don't laugh, lots of people don't even realize that fansites exist outside of the BBS/exchange.