When promoting a website there are some steps that need to be completed beforehand. Basically you need a fully function website. But it still needs to be open as it might require changing a few sentences for Search Engine Optimisation later on.

The basics

There are some very simple ways to promote a website that all websites should do. These are:

• Submit to search engines. This means going to Google, Yahoo, Lycos and Ask etc and submitting your URL to them. The will then “crawl” (scan) the page and pick up keywords and index them read for users to search. This process does take a few days.
• Depending on the category of the website it can be a bonus to submit the site to a directory service. For instance WebDirectory21.com is for sites so submit science and technology focused websites.
• Press release. Either an online or offline (or both) press release will get people interested in the site straight away. The place you submit the press release will also be important. You don’t want to send a small local websites press release to Sky News. It would not be read or considered for broadcast.

Communications

When communicating with customers or other interested parties it is useful to follow these rules:

• E-mail footer. Adding a web address or an e-mail address to the footer of all e-mails is a great way to get your web site out there. But not spam. Spamming companies with an e-mail will not help publicity at all.
• Letterheads and stationary. These are good ways of promoting your website offline. If it is appropriate for your site, you can go to conferences and hand out stationary with the web address and company logo etc on it. Letterheads can be used as a snail mail alternative to an e-mail footer.

Search Engine Optimization

This technique can help you get your website up the search rankings by using keywords in the right manner. This can also have the opposite effect. If you go over the top when using keywords the search engines might penalize you.

• Use keywords In meta tags in the HTML document. Using the same keywords you submitted to the search engine and having them in the “keywords” meta tag can help search engine ranking.
• Use keywords in titles and headers. This is the same as above but it will be visible to the user as well.
• You need to be careful and remember that you are writing for other people to read. A bunch of keywords will put off users, especially if the content is obscured behind the chosen keywords.

Syndication

This can mean a small number of things, from subscriptions, news feeds, widgets and pingbacks. Also this can be used to submit content to social media sites.

• If you have updated news articles or a blog it is useful to have RSS feeds. This allows users to follow your content without visiting the site.
• If appropriate you can create widgets or tools that other sites can use that will essentially link back to your site. This can be useful for the other site as well as driving traffic back from new sources.
• Pingbacks are when another site has a link back to yours and you display the links to the sites that linked to you. This helps by encouraging other sites to link to you, as they will get traffic back in return.
• Digg.com is a site where you submit content/link to the content, users of digg.com will then vote on what they think of it. If you do well enough to get to the front page you can get thousands of hits on your site as people view it. This does require unique and quality content.
• Other sites you can submit to include Facebook, Mixx, Del.icio.us and many others.

Larger budgets

With larger budgets you can pay for marketing, all the above methods require no payments at all. Paying for advertising can fall into a couple of categories:

• Pay Per Click (PPC) adverting includes you bidding for keywords and then if you bid high enough when someone searches for that keyword you little advert will appear to them, they can then click on it, you pay for each click. Obviously some keywords can be a lot of money to bid for, therefore raiding the cost per click.
• Direct Sourcing. This can involve you going to specific websites and directly asking to advertise on their site. It is better if they have spare advertising space already.

Word of mouth

This one is self explanatory, the more you talk about your website, the more others will talk about it, thus getting the word spread pretty quickly.

Promotion is an on going process. So going back over these steps again can be really useful in keeping the ball rolling.

Ollie

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