Media sites will find numerous opportunities to promote themselves through free channels readily available online.

They often rely on their traditional TV and newspaper partners to provide the bulk of their promotions. In return, a good site operation will provide online promotion for their media partner in addition to other benefits such as online classified order entry, subscription services and circulation customer relations.

Small Web startups often have no money and rely on free sources of promotion. They start with search engine optimization but include other forms as well.

Simple SEO tactics include:

1. A page title that has both the site name and document title;
2. A meta description that again provides the site title, a specific explanation of the page and, for a local site, some specific geographic information
3. Meta keywords that again are specific but not excessive;
4. Keywords on the page itself including headlines and abstracts that relate to the title, description and keywords;
5. The ability to drive links to that page.

The next priorities for free promotion beyond SEO include:

1. Numerous free directories that can build a site’s link popularity in the search engines;
2. A social bookmarking site such as Del.Icio.Us;
3. A story popularity site such as Digg.com;
4. Blog distribution sites that include Technorati.com and Feedburner.com;
5. Email signatures;
6. Reciprocal links with other quality sites;
7. link exchange sites;
8. Banner exchanges.

   The last two in particular are not widely respected and should be approached cautiously because of quality control issues.

   Any site that wants to maximize traffic while minimizing the expense will find a full range of free options online.