Promoting your Web Site
Once your Web Site is designed and implemented, the next step is marketing and promotion. Many Web Site owners make the mistake of expecting their Web Site to market itself. That will not happen. Marketing is an important on-going process for the success of any site.
In this section we will outline some of the important ways to promote your Web Site. However, we can also produce a marketing report for you specific to your Web Site and its requirements, which will outline the most effective marketing strategies for your Site.
Measuring Success
Before starting, it is very important to be able to measure the success of each of your marketing activities, so that you know which are the most effective. We also advise that you implement only one marketing activity at a time.
Obviously, the number of customer enquiries or the amount of goods sold from your Web Site is a measure of success, but it is also important to measure the number of visitors to your web site to see which pages they are visiting. You can then enhance your Site to include more of the pages that your visitors prefer and improve the less popular pages.
Your Web Site statistics may also be able to provide details of where your visitors are being referred from - very important when optimising for the search engines.
Your current Service provider probably provides detailed Web Site statistics for you, but if not, we can produce statistics reports if the raw logs are available. If you are hosting your Web Site on one of our Web servers, then your Site will have a comprehensive statistics report updated each day.
Optimising for the Search Engines
Before optimising your site for the Search Engines, it is important to understand a little bit about how they work.
There are 2 types of search services:
Search Engines/Crawlers
- These use "spiders" to crawl through your web site and index the text on your pages.
- For example: Google, AltaVista, Lycos, etc.
Directories
- Edited by humans
- Rely on submissions from site owners to populate their databases
- For example: Yahoo, Open Directory, LookSmart, etc.
When submitting to a directory, be sure to follow the submission instructions carefully. When they receive your submission, one of their editors will review your site and decide whether or not it is suitable to include in their directory.
This is obviously a time-consuming process and there is no guarantee that your site will be accepted. It is sometimes possible to pay for an expedited review of your site. For example, Yahoo Business Express will, for a fee, review your site within 7 days. However, there is still no guarantee that they will list it, and the fee is non-refundable.
For Search Engines and Crawlers the content of the pages on your Web Site plays a large part in their ranking criteria.
Before submitting your site to any Search Engines/Crawlers, it is advisable to optimise your pages to suit them. All the Search Engines have different ranking criteria for the sites that they crawl through and it is impossible to optimise a page to suit all of them. One way around this problem is to optimise different pages for different Search Engines and submit each page to its relevant Search Engine. However, this is extremely complex and time-consuming.
Unless you have a lot of time to spare, we would recommend some general optimisation to suit most of the Search Engines.
Before you start, however, you must decide which keywords or keyword phrases you think are most relevant to your site. You should only optimise a page for 2 or 3 keywords, therefore the choice is very important. We recommend using WordTracker.com to find the most suitable keywords to use. This is a paid service but has a free trial and is strongly recommended.
Once you have selected your keywords, you will need to modify the text on your page to contain several occurrences of these keywords. You should also aim to have at least 250 words per page (excluding any text that appears in the form of images).
Additionally, you should add your keywords to the following:
- Title tag
- Header tags
- Alt tags
- HTML comment statements
- Meta tags
Once your site is optimised, you are ready to submit.
Submitting to the Search Engines
Many of the Search Engines and directories are now charging to include sites. But before we look at which ones are worth paying for, there are still some which are free and worth submitting to!
Still Free
- Google (www.google.com/addurl.html)
- Open Directory Project (dmoz.org/add.html)
- Yahoo! Search Index (submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request - registration required)
Worth Paying for?
- Yahoo Business Express (add.yahoo.com/fast/add)
- Inktomi (accessed through www.positiontech.com)
- LookSmart Small Business Listing (listings.looksmart.com)
Google is by far the most popular Search Engine on the Web and it is therefore well worth expending some effort to get into it.
Pay per Click Search Engines
"Pay per Click" Search Engines are normal search engines for the searcher, but for the advertiser they are a great way to get cheap targeted traffic to your Web Site.
You must open an account and deposit some money as a starting balance (usually a relatively small amount). You then "bid" for the keywords that are relevant to your site. Search results are ordered by the value of the bid, so if your bid is highest, your site will be listed at the top.
However, you only pay if someone clicks through to your site.
So, Pay per Click Search Engines are a very cost effective way to get targeted traffic.
Recommended Pay per Clicks:
- eSpotting (www.espotting.com)
- Overture (www.overture.com)
- FindWhat (www.findwhat.com)
- Google AdWords (www.google.com)
eSpotting targets UK and Europe so would be your number one choice if you are not aiming for a world-wide market. Overture (formerly GoTo.com) is the largest (and most expensive) PPC Search Engine. The top results from both of these PPC Search Engines appear as sponsored links at the top of many of the major search engines.