So you have just built your new website. It’s been indexed by all of the major search engines, but nobody is coming to see exactly what’s on your site. If you expect your site to do well without any effort on your part, then you are clearly mistaken. Building a website is only half the work. Now you need to spend a lot of your time making sure that people know your site exists.
There are lots of ways to go about advertising for your site. You can pay for pay per click advertising with services like Google’s Adwords, you can enroll in a link exchange program with other websites that are in a similar niche, or you can do something like posting in forums to build up your traffic.
Forums are a valuable tool for many reasons. First off, they provide the site they are hosted on with plenty of traffic because they heavily contribute to the search engine score of a site. Secondly, they can be used as a major asset for someone looking to get the word out about their brand new site.
In order to make sure that you receive valuable customers, you need to first find a forum to post on that has some similarity to your site’s niche. Are you selling fishing supplies? Find a fishing forum. Once you have found a forum that is suitable for your needs, sign up and start joining in the conversation. When you feel the time is right, place a link to your site in your signature. Doing so will make your link appear each and every time you make a post on that forum.
Now, you may be thinking that if one post is good, then spamming a forum must be better. Whatever you do, don’t spam any forums. You will just make the members there angry and there may be some backlash in the community against your website.
If you wanted to design a course and call it internet Marketing 101, what do you think would be taught through it? The first semester may work on teaching the basics of how to get people to come to your internet business site. It may try to educate you on the benefits of links. You want to bring people to your website, drive the consumer to you so that they can discover what your company has to offer in a product or service. Just like a good restaurant wants to be listed in the travel directories you want like or complimentary businesses to link to your website and you in return will offer a link to theirs. It never hurts to have not only your website on your business card but the directory you have linked to as well.
Another tool to use when marketing on the internet is the doorway page. This page is designed to tell the consumer almost nothing but to be interesting enough to draw them in and have them click on a enter button so they can visit the rest of the website. These pages are also called bridge pages or gateway pages. Some people do not like them, feeling that they are used to trick the person who has come to look at a website while others find them an interesting introduction to the site.
Search engine optimization, also called SEO, is an important part of marketing on the net. It is very important that the website has words that are typical of what a person will put into the search box when they are trying to find information on something or are looking for a particular product or service. These words are called keywords and they are used more than once so that the search engines will pick up on them and list their internet business when the consumer is searching.
Getting people to your website is the key to a successful internet marketing business. One useful tip is to make sure that you put your website’s address on any piece of paper relating to your business. This includes signs, handouts, business cards, your email signature or anything else you can think of. That address is the single most important key to promoting your business.
Aside from selecting an actual topic for your website, perhaps the most important part of any web design process is to actually create a way for people to find your website. And there is no better way to ensure that your website gets visited than by selecting the proper keywords for your web page. It can be a much more difficult task than you think, but what you will end up with is a flourishing site with the possibility of tens of thousands of visitors each and every day.
The first step to selecting a proper set of keywords for your site is to really sit down and think hard about what your site is about. Ask yourself some questions about your site and which audience you want to find. What is my site selling? What kinds of people would benefit from the information or products I have on my site? Is my niche crowded with similar sites offering similar products?
Once you have an answer to these questions, it’s time for you to start thinking about which keywords you want to focus your site around. Try to aim for keywords that are both specific to your niche and general enough that they will allow your site to place well when people search for something more general. A good mix of those two areas will yield you higher results in search engines.
Here is an example to get you started. Say you are selling unlocked cell phones on your website. Now, there are quite a few other sites out there that are also selling unlocked cell phones, and because your page is new, you need to work twice as hard to make sure that search engines recognize it for what it is. So, think about keywords like: “unlocking, unlocked cell phones, cellular phone, cheap cell phone” as general keywords, then go into more detail with other keywords like: “Sony Ericsson unlocked cell phone, unlocked Apple iPhone, low cost RAZR2 unlocking” and so on.
Search engine optimization, or SEO as it is commonly referred to, is a rapidly growing technique that is designed to help you get your site as high up in search engine rankings as it possibly can. After all, it is much more difficult to make a sale when your site is located ten pages down on Google and fifteen pages from the first link on Yahoo! Because of the important role that search engines play in helping connect clients with businesses, search engine optimization should be something you need to spend a lot of time on with your new business.
Before you begin to optimize your site for search engines, you need to actually have a site to optimize - so get out there and build yourself a website first and get it on the web as soon as possible. Many search engines look more highly upon sites that have been online for longer periods of time, so make sure that your site is up for at least a couple of months before you begin a massive search engine optimization campaign.
Now, a lot of people think that writing good copy and taking advantage of the meta tags on an HTML document are all that is needed for proper search engine optimization. They’re right, but that’s only part of the process. To properly optimize for search engines, you need to have targeted text, but also links coming in from sites that are in a similar niche to yours. These links can play a huge role in search engine placement.
So what are the basics that you should look into for a properly optimized site? Start with good web copy that is optimized for your sites niche, but not difficult to read. Next, make sure that every HTML tag possible is helping to optimize your site for search engines. And finally, go out and try to get as many links as possible. Join forums in your niche, ask if you can do link exchanges with other sites that are similar to yours, and spread the word through various social networking and social news sites.
