Marketing Your Web Site

A few ideas for publicizing your website...

Contents

Don't Forget Traditional PR...

Sort of a no-brainer: don't forget to connect your Web site to whatever traditional marketing methods you're using. This is most important for businesses that serve the local area.

Add the URL for your website to all of your print-based materials, such as business cards, brochures, flyers, ads, and even signage. It's also a good idea to add your URL to a signature line that most email programs can add automatically to all the messages you write.

Business Directories

Such as:

DMOZ

Yahoo Directory

About.com, Business.com

Google's Local Business directory. Froogle.

Local Chamber of Commerce listings.

WhidbeyWeb, automatically.

Industry sites.

Auction sites, using eBay, PriceGrabber.com, Amazon.com,

Search Engines and Improving Your Web Traffic

Submissions to Search Engines

Automatic submissions, better to do by hand.

Avoid "link farms" and automatic submission firms or software that does this.

Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL Search, Lycos,

Link Trading

Once we've got your site finished, trading links is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. Doing this also increases your page ranking in search engines such as Google, which over the long haul gets your site listed closer to the first page of results when people do searches.

One goal is to place links in sites that draw people you want to reach.

Another goal is to get your site to place closer to the first page in Google's search results; to do this, place links with websites that themselves have a high page ranking.

So by trading links you're really "marketing" both to people and to the search engines. I don't think it would matter to Google, for example, if you placed a link with a site that's totally contrary to the "people-marketing" goal, as long as it had a high page-ranking.

There are two main ways to format links. The simplest is to prepare a few lines of text accompanied by a link; here's an example:

Da Vinci Design Group
Painter, Sculptor, Architect, Engineer.
www.leonardodavinci.com

(Note: This format also works well as a signature that you can set up to appear automatically at the end of the email messages you send.)

The second way is to essentially do the same thing, but through a graphic "banner" link; something like

There would be a link attached to this graphic, and surfers click the graphic to navigate to your site. If you want to go this route, we would want to have the design of the banner parallel that of the website itself. The best time to do this is after the look of the site is settled.

Press Releases, Articles, and Viral Marketing

Another completely different approach is to get your site referenced in a review or press release.

Articles providing free content for other websites. Require that your name and website be cited as a condition of publication.

Put together an email newsletter you mail out periodically. This lets you keep in touch with current or future clients, helps you keep track of their contact info.

Send out notices of offers, specials, and contests.

Consider the case of SolarDeathRay.com, whose website got thousands of hits from a blurbs in an online newspaper and SlashDot.com.

The Google Toolbar

Do you have the Google Toolbar set up on your machine? With it, you can do Google searches without going to the Google site, and you can set it up so that it displays the page ranking of a site in its toolbar.

To get the Google Toolbar, go here:
toolbar.google.com/

Download and install it, and then from the new Google menu, choose Options, and then select the Page Ranking option and click OK. Up in the Google toolbar, you'll see a PageRank bar. If you hover your mouse pointer over the bar, a bit of text appears that tells you the page ranking of the site.

Sites having a higher page ranking than yours are good places to place links to your sites. To determine the page ranking of your site, Google's algorithm adds "votes" from each of the sites linked to yours, but "votes" from sites having higher ranking are worth more.

Search-Engine Optimization and Web Design

About keyword search terms.

Web Crawlers, spiders.

Write Descriptive Title Tags for Each Page

5-8 words, first search term first. Remove filler words.

Meta tags

Keywords and description. Google uses only the first 60 characters or so, others use 255. Use the same keywords used in the title and text of the page.

Keywords meta tag mostly unused currently.

Use Keywords in the Headings

In the Header tags H1, H2, and H3.

Keyword Density in Body Text

1-2% in text, especially the first paragraph on the page.

Using too many is keyword spamming and gets penalized.

Cross-site Linking

Frames can be difficult, supplement with bottom-page cross links.

JavaScript, Flash, or other links calculated on the fly can confuse web crawlers.

Sitemaps.

Indexing the website.

Targeted Page Content

Better to have many smaller pages that are keyword-optimized than put content into large pages. This also affects loading times

Be a Resource

Develop content, features, or services that give people a reason to go to your site other than to be pitched. Update and expand on this content so that people have a reason to return.

...adding more here...

Newsgroups, Blogs, and Forums

If you're something of an authority in some subject and are comfortable with keyboarding messages, you might consider establishing other forms of on-line presence in newsgroups, mailing lists, Yahoo or MSN interest groups, blogs, and other forums. If you add a signature containing your web address or other contact info to the bottom of messages you post, people can click through to your site.

Select newsgroups with care. Many are filled with spam and blatant promotion. Look for groups containing real discussion of relevant topics.

There's a bit of a cost though, in that you may get increased levels of spam or other unwanted email. To get around this, you might consider creating more than one email address associated with your website. For example, you could use "info@yoursite.com" as a front door address, and others for private communications that you don't cite in publically-viewable postings.

Google AdWords

You might consider checking out Google's AdWord service. When you do a search in Google, you get a list of relevant hits. Off to the right you see a vertical list of paid listings, which are generated from the search terms you've specified. If you click a link, you zoom off to the site, and Google charges that business a "click-through" fee which starts at 5 cents a click. You can set a cap on the money charged per day or per month.
Here's a link (opens new window): Google -- Welcome to AdWords