Whether you are starting a new business in Las Vegas with a big budget or a small budget, you can always take advantage of free web promotion.

One of the best ways to gain free promotion is by using press releases to highlight your company’s latest news stories, events, hires and client wins. In order to write a truly effective press release, it should be a newsworthy story. A grand opening, a special sale, a charitable effort within the Las Vegas community, are all great stories perfect for a press release and an excellent free advertising tool.

There are numerous press release submission websites, some free and some paid, which will allow you to submit your news articles. By doing so, you’re exposing your news item to newspaper and magazine editors who may in turn publish your article/s.

Your press release should be no more than one page in length. Make sure your name, mailing address and telephone number are included at the top of the page as editors will confirm your identity before publishing your news article. See the links below to find the standard format you should write your press release in.

More Information:

Tips on Writing Your Own Press Releases

Write & Submit Press Releases for Your Las Vegas Business

Found a few links to valuable free SEO tools so that you can judge and measure your search engine optimization efforts for your Las Vegas website.

http://tools.seobook.com/

http://www.seomoz.org/tools

http://www.seotoolset.com/tools/free_tools.html

http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html

http://www.socialseo.com/the-top-15-free-seo-tools.html

http://www.webuildpages.com/tools/

http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/tools/

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/

The Best Online Directories for You Las Vegas Website

It is a well known fact in the internet world that the DMOZ directory is the best online directory to submit your Las Vegas website to. DMOZ, The Open Directory Project (ODP), is a huge categorized directory of web sites and pages which is staffed by volunteer editors. Each and every website page added to the DMOZ directory is manually reviewed before it is added to their directory and it can sometimes be a challenge to get added as DMOZ editors are backed up with inquiries for additions… it can take month or years to be added. Being listed in their directory is free.

Alternatives and Supplements to Submitting to DMOZ

In addition to submitting your website to DMOZ, you can also submit it to hundreds of free online directories . Submitting site to online free web directories can quickly increase your google page rank and rankings on the google search engine. PageRank is an major part of google’s website ranking algorithm, and the higher the PageRank of your website, the higher your organic listing can appear on a google search. The PageRank within your Las Vegas website is increased by pages from other websites linking to it, and the higher the PageRank of the websites that link to it, the better it is for the your web site. 

When submitting your website to free online web directories, be sure to take time to find just the right category for add it to Don’t be tempted to submit your website to a category that is higher up the tree structure than it should be, because it probably won’t be accepted and will increase the chance of delays in getting your website added.

For a list of major search engines and directories visit searchenginewatch.com.

When looking for a free web host for your Las Vegas website, it may be difficult to find a good web host although they do exist out there. But through all the hosts which are listed in the search engine it can be difficult to sort the good services from the bad services unless you can find sources which have used most of the services in the past and can inform you where to avoid and where to look. That is what this blog post is here to help you with.

What is free web hosting?

Free web hosting is typically provided by companies as a sample to their services, or a reward to loyal customers who purchase domain names, or transfer domain names to their plans from another service provider. Free hosting does not give full control of servers or the page layout (ususally the hosting company will show their ads on your free website hosted page or website). Typically a free host will provide space on a shared server of between 100 mega bytes to 1,500 mega bytes on average. The actual bandwidth for visitors is often between 500 to 5,000 mega bytes. You can either purchase or use your own domain name on a free plan, or use a provided sub domain if the option is available.

Where can I find free web hosting and what kinds are available?

Free web hosting is available all over the internet in different forms. The most common form of web hosting is a shared host with advertisements. Although there are free hosts which do not force ads onto the free websites but the service is less reliable, and the providers may be at risk of disappearing or going out of business from loss of profits to afford to keep the service running.

Some free services also provide ad free services on a post to host basis, and provide the option to upgrade to a paid service once your website reaches the limitations of space and bandwidth. One example of this service is meek host. Meek host provides 1,500 megabytes of space along with 1,500 megabytes of bandwidth if you successfully manage to continually post 15 posts in their host forum every month before the date limit. Once the date limit is exceeded they will suspend your account and allow you approximately 1 month to redeem your posts to get your services back, or delete your entire account.

Some companies that offer free website hosting in one form or another:

• 000webhost.com - Free Web Hosting with PHP, MySQL and cPanel, No Ads
• Bravenet - Web Hosting, Free Web Hosting and Web Tools
• Free Web Hosting from Doteasy.com
• 110mb.com - Free Website Hosting Provider

What are the downsides of free hosting?

With free hosting you should never launch a website that is entirely important to keep live with NO downtime. Free hosts come and go often due to lack of supporting funds costing the users of the free hosting their websites. Also free hosts tend to have more limitations and also much more downtime than a paid hosting plan.

Professional Hosting Options for your Las Vegas Website

If you aren’t interested in launching a website on a free hosting plan and require the most professional solution from the start (and if you have the modest budget), you should consider a professional Las Vegas website hosting company like www.lasvegaswebhostingonline.com. They are backed by professional performance and excellent customer service.

If you have any further questions about hosting your Las Vegas website, feel free to contact me at michael@marketinginlasvegas.com or call me at 702.341.0085, I’d be happy to help!

Facebook has fast become a major social networking website for meeting other business professionals in Las Vegas and it is also quickly becoming an essential marketing tool to help market your Las Vegas business or company. If you don’t already have a personal page, create a facebook page right now. Once you create your facebook profile page, be sure to add a fan page for your business.

Reasons Why You Need a Facebook Fan Page:

1. It’s 100% Free - in these times, this is an invaluable and no-cost way to market your business products and services.
2. PR - You can publish articles, links to your blog/s, website or any interesting or helpful articles to your fan page that can help you communicate with people in your network and your fans and help keep your business in their mindshare.
3. Fan page is public - this means that major search engines such as google, bing, and yahoo! can index the page and your page can come up in their search results.
4. Personalized URL - upon reaching 100 fans, you can register for your own custom facebook URL (i.e. www.facebook.com/yourcompanyname)
5. Viral Marketing - when you post content to your fan page, it’s automatically added to the pages of all the fans that follow your fan page.
6. Applications - you can choose from dozens and dozens of apps that can help interact with your fans including photo galleries, polls, RSS feeds from your blog or presentations.

Social marketing and social networking is very important for Las Vegas businesses to participate in, now more than ever. As I always say, if you are not participating, your competition is.

For this reason, I have compiled a list of links to all of the top social networking websites. You should sign up, fill in your profile information as completely as possible, and log in occasionally to participate, find and add friends and share information and gain exposure for you company and its products and services.

• Social Networks in the Yahoo! Directory
• Social Networking God: 350+ Social Networking Sites from Mashable.com
• Top Social Networking Sites for Entrepreneurs
• Social Networking Websites Review 2009 - TopTenReviews
• List of Social networking websites - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Top 20 Social Networking Websites - Work Exposed the Blog