Quote: " how would I be able to effectively promote my site? "
Your listed on google now
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=GamingColosseum+site&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
* Submit each app to as many download sites as humanly possible. There's are literally
1000's of them.
It's all about numbers. Why expect them too come to you, when you can go to them! If your game is listed on 10 download sites, you might get 100 downloads per month (could be 1000's, could also be none) lets be realistic. So in order to expose your titles to a lot of punters, means promoting your title on every download site, game listing site, etc you can possibly find that relates to your content.
Most use PAD files, these can make the whole upload process easier. It's easier, but still tedious as hell. Many PAD sites have free submission, but their free services can take days, weeks, months to actually get listed. Since their priorities tend to be in paid submission/advertisers.
http://www.asp-shareware.org/pad/
* As has been mentioned, Google ranks pages by a combination of many factors. Two that come to mind are relevancy of text on the page to the search query and another is the importance of the page/site that this page comes from. So latter is a sort of blend of both.
The first one you can sort out yourself pretty much. It just means that the text on your page can be tweaked to include certain key phrases that you wish to attract. If the page is focus enough, place this key phrase/topic in the page heading. To help reinforce this. Be specific, if the page is about "green 5 toed sloth's", then that's what the page should include.
One approach is working backwards. Like try an think as many combination of search queries that a person could type in to find your page about "green 5 toed sloth's" as possible. There's few marketing site that will give variation of phrases and stat's on them also, not that i think of any off hand.
This also helps you get a better Idea of what other sites/page are in this category. Take notice of how they word and lay out their copy. In particular the top ranked pages. Anyway. If your not listed in the first 20/30 results under your
target phrases then you've got work to do spreading the word.
It's a rather time consuming task, not to mention difficult. since everybody else is basically doing that same thing as you. So competition under key words is fierce.
Link precedence is another way to help improve the rank of a page. The concept is simple, the search ranks links between pages. So if you can get others sites to link to your site or your key pages, then this link helps to raise the importance of your site/page to the search engine under these queries. So it's important to spent some time mailing site admins (write a standard letter and mail it all of them
) for a banner swap/link exchanger.
Another is Keyword density, which used to be important, but i'm not so sure anymore. When your page is crawled by a search engine, it tallies up the number of occurrences of key words in the text. It the calculates a percentage for each word throughout the page . So pages with a higher keyword density on a would be ranked in front of others. While It's probably still used in some capacity, it was too easy to web site owners to create bogus pages that were stack with only target keywords. Which was impossible for real copy to out rank.
Meta Tags are another option. These hidden (to the viewer) tag's were meant to help describe a pages content and keywords to search engines. Some engines still use them in their search results, so it's probably worth filling them in.
