Your site is complete. Congratulations!
Now you need to promote it. That is to say, you need to let the world know that your site exists. One way to do this is to hunt down sites that are similar to yours, possibly other diaries, and ask them to link to you. They will probably request a link back to their site. If so, you can create a separate page called "favorite links", "other diaries" or something else.
This is a really great way to get people to your site. If they are already reading an online diary then they may be interested in reading other online diaries.
In this spirit, you could join a Webring. Webring's were created to do just that. If someone is reading an online diary and then want to go to another they can just click on a button and they will be at another one.
Another great way to get your site noticed is to get it placed on a search engine. There are several things you need to do before you submit your site to the search engines to get it ready. There are also many different ways to submit your site to them.
Getting your site ready for the search engines is as simple as adding a really great title, some keywords and a good description along with some simple code. The code you need will help you add the keywords and description and together they are called 'meta tags'. Meta tags and your "title" tags are what most search engines look for when indexing your page. If they are not good enough then you won't place high enough on the search engine for anyone to find you.
The title of your page should use descriptive words without punctuation. If your site is about flowers then your title should be something like "Flowers for spring summer fall - pansy dahlia mums roses carnations". You can make your title as long as your page but not longer.
When you are ready to submit your site to the search engines, you can use one of the many submission sites on the Net or you can submit to each search engine on your own. Using a submission site is simple and quick but will not submit your sites to some of the biggest search engines. You will still have to submit to the ones they don't submit to. There are also other ways to promote your site. How you do it is up to you.
Once you get your site submitted you may have to wait a few weeks to a few months to start seeing results. This is because some of the search engines only update once in a while and also because they get so many submissions, it's hard to keep up with them all. You will also have to re-submit every few months. They are all different, so read the FAQ of each one so you will know what they require.
Keeping track of how many people are visiting your site is fun. There are many statistics programs out there that will help you with this. All you need to do is sign up and copy/paste some code on your page. Some of these programs will tell you more than just how many people are visiting you. They will also tell you where they are coming from, when they visited and many other things.
