Promoting a website will show how to promote your web site online for free or cheap on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook & Twitter.
We look at the major strategies and tools to include in your internet marketing promotion ideas. You can use below strategies as a check-list to marketing your website or to enquire from an SEO consultant offering services.
There are links on this page to other pages of this website which expand on the website promotion techniques further and links to other search marketing resources.
Promoting a website, or internet marketing, can be either “natural” search engine optimisation (SEO) or paid advertising. SEO itself falls into two categories- ON-PAGE OPTIMISATION AND & OFF-PAGE LINK BUILDING.
On-page optimisation refers to optimise your website so that when search engines send their robot “spiders” your site gets indexed and ranked correctly. Off-page link building refers to promoting through external links to your site.
ON-PAGE OPTIMISATION
Here is a quick checklist of on-page optimization of a website:
1. Keyword-rich Page Content
After choosing the keyword terms you want surfers to find you with, create 450 word web-page for every keyword phrase and try to use “original” content that is not found anywhere else on the internet.
Include keyword phrase in the first fifty words as this is where search engines look for subject matter and ensure a good keyword density of between 1.5% and 2% throughout for a high ranking keyword.
2. Keyword-rich Page Titles
This means using the keyword term you want surfers to find you with as part of your page title. Try to minimise use of redundant words like “the”, “and” etc and still maintain readability. You should also keep in mind this page title will show up first when your page gets served up by the search engines so make it enticing for the searchers to click to find out more. You can use five to eight words or 100 letters but note only the first 60 letters appear in most search engine results.
3. Use Meta Descriptions
The Meta tag should be a keyword-rich description of the web page. Do not include any new keywords not found in the web page. Most search engines also serve up the met description in search results so it should include terms to induce searchers to seek more details by clicking to your website. You should try and limit to 255 characters including spaces and note only the first 160 appear in SERPS of most search engines.
4. Use Keywords in (H1, H2, H3) Headers
You should ensure keyword phrases appear in any headlines and sub-headers as they are given more importance by search engines.
5. Use descriptions in ALT Attribute of Image Descriptions
The ALT attributes not only help your images to rank in image search but also helps visually- impaired searchers in accordance with web accessibility initiative.
6. Hyperlink Strategy
You should use a keyword of the page you are linking to so as to give the search engine another clue as to what your article is about and link to many pages on your site. You should however try not to link out with your exact keyword phrase as this could dilute your page in favor of theirs.
7. Make Navigation System Search Friendly
Some content management systems (CMS) and ecommerce solutions create pages with long ugly urls marked with question marks and a string of numbers making it harder for crawling and indexing. There are many options of making pretty urls which tell the robots exactly what the page is about.
8. Make a Site Map & Robots.txt file
If you have a large website then a Site Map page with links to all pages will not only make search engines job easier but can also help surfers navigate your site. A robot.txt file will inform search spiders the part of your website you don’t want indexing. Also register with Google Webmaster Central to set up the sitemapping, geographic target, analytics, etc.
Off-page Website Promotion
Search engine ranking is also a popularity contest and major search engines like Google view external links to your site as a popularity vote.
There are many methods of website linking but not all external links have equal voting power so it is worth seeking links from high ranked trusted sites.
Here is a quick checklist for promoting a website through external links:
9. Promote Your Business Locally Online
The most popular activity on the Internet is searching for information about goods or services (84 per cent) and people overwhelmingly (40%) prefer ‘local’ providers of goods and services.
So it makes sense to promote your local business on the internet using local business marketing including Google local business center and local business directories.
10. Promote Your Website on Video sites
Video has become a very powerful form of communication on the web and increasingly being served up on search engine results. You should therefore consider making a short video on your speciality and upload it to YouTube and other specialised video streaming sites.
11. Submit Your Site to Directories
Aim to submit your website to major Internet directories, trade association listings and any specialised trade directories. This will not only get you a link but can also lead to additional direct traffic.
12. Request Reciprocal Links
You create an obscure web page to put links on your website and request reciprocal links exchange with similar pages of complimentary sites.
13. Write articles for publishing on other sites
Webmasters love fresh content for their websites so if you submit your content to ezines it can end up in several sites. Just make sure the link back to your site remains intact as part of the agreement.
14. Exploit Social Media,
The explosion in social media has made it ripe for internet marketing. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, blogs, social bookmarking sites forums are ripe for link backs and creating brand awareness. You can choose to become a very active regular contributor or just put up a profile signature with a link back to your website.
15. Make Links Look Natural
This means behaving like real searchers to the search engines. Link to different parts of your site not just homepage. Use different anchor texts when linking in addition to the main keyword. Get links from various sites, social media types and page ranks.
Internet Marketing Service
SEO is an ongoing process so you should always view your website with a critical eye and continuously tweak with optimisation in mind.
The amount of on-page tweaking and the need to build links is ultimately based on the competitiveness of the niche your in and on the keyword(s) and/or keyword phrase(s) that you’re targeting. For instance a local plumber will have a lot less work than a site with national or a international reach.
There are many software tools to help you monitor your SEO efforts on a continuous basis and to make link building easier many of which are reviewed on this site.
But ultimately promoting your business on the internet is a very time consuming and painstaking process which is why many organisations decide to outsource the process.
If you would like a free SEO service quotation, please contact us through our SEO Consultants page.
