Promote Your Website

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Before you start

What are you selling Is it the sort of thing people buy on the Internet Target the potential buyers Get a good domain name Display your logo and image Offer excellent service to your contacts

Then do the simple things first

For a start, do all these things:

email form, of course, on every page response form which is relevant and easy to use product feedback form on your homepage make sure your website is search-engine friendly submit to 10 major search engines tell your staff, customers, prospects, and friends, print your Internet address on your letterhead, business cards, advertisements, press releases, inform your trade associations, issue a press release, mention it in personal contact, These are the most important promotion activities

And then consider the more time consuming things:

check what your competitors are doing submit to all the relevant Internet directories join relevant Shopping Malls, something new on the homepage every week run a message board or discussion group organise links from other sites get an endorsment from these other sites banners on other relevant/appropriate websites product reviews in other websites

For serious marketing try these:

offer a small gift in exchange for the feedback update and support offers to customers who have bought periodic mailing of news to a subscription list Recruit Alliliates to sell your product on commission Provide 'Tell a friend' or ' Email this page to a friend' scripts Run a competition or event subscribe to an appropriate List Server and send them announcements Write an article for wide-circulation newsletters Set up a database of contacts with date of next action Email all contacts on a regular basis, but with a way for people to opt out celebrity conference, only open to signed-up contributers Kiosk terminals in your buildings, accessing only your own website radio advertising (targeted, economic, and effective) classified adverts in suitable journals newspaper adverts TV adverts (for the big websites)

Repeat visits are the key

Over half of the visitors to my site are repeats. And the same proportion applies to most successful sites. Why should they come back? That is the challenge. And my answer has to be that the content is useful to your target audience. The three things in a successful website: Content, Content, and Content - arranged in a friendly way.

Keep a Count

How do you know how well you are doing? If you do not know where you are how will you know when you get there?

You ought to have some statistics on how many visitors you are getting. The best way is to have your ISP provide stats each week, typically early on Sunday mornings, showing the IP quad-numeric code of each visitor, and the pages visited.

The IP code can be translated to URLs with a suitable program such as Webtrends from: http://www.webtrends.com/ though there are less expensive shareware programs. I use http://www.netlink.co.uk to host my site and they analyse my hits for me, about 25 pages of detail...

The page hits will tell you which of your pages are the most popular, and you can promote these pages more; give the customer what he wants to see, and perhaps you should drop the pages that no-one visits.

Second best is an on-the-page counter, but some people regard these as being a bit naff. If you want this, then your ISP should have one of these for you to display. If not there are a lot of other people who will give you a hit-counter in return for a little advertising. Chase up the advertising on one of the counters on someone else's website. Or check http://www.ipstat.com

Have a proper URL

You may find that if you have a long and complex URL, like the standard string from Compuserve Ourworld, or a URL with the word "members", or "users" in it, that you may not have much credibility, however hard you try. Perhaps worse is to have a URL with a ~ tilde in it. It is really worthwhile if you are serious to have your own domain name.

If you have a domain name on a different server, with forwarding to you website, your website may be concealed from the search engines by invisible frames, and in addition you may find that search engines ignore a forwarded reference. To help here, when submitting to search engines and directories in such cases you must always use the proper address of your website, not the domain name.

>> MORE ON DOMAIN NAMES

Are you Search-Engine-Friendly

• Title statement which will be displayed when a surfer scores a hit on your site. It will also show as the text on a bookmark, and at the top of the surfer's browser display, and be used by Search Engines and therefore should be the same as the META Description.
• META Description: Describe the site in an attractive way
• META Keywords: The words that potential visitors may use in searching for your product
  >>> MORE ON METAS

• Text for the first 30 or so words in the page, especially the headings and therefore these should include the main keywords. Some search engines may index words in the next 150-250 words.
• ALT= statements in GIFs or JPGs at the top of the page. So the title description should be repeated here, if possible word for word,
• Clear Links preferably text but can be images to the key pages in your website so these can be indexed

Links in JavaScript
If links to other pages are concealed in JavaScript, or as image maps, then the search engines will not find them; only text or image links are recognised. If you use JavaScript, also provide text or images.

Provide return links
Search engines may not always reach your site via the homepage. Every page should have a clear link back to the homepage or sitemap. And yes, that is a good rule of navigation anyway.

Have a care with Frames
Homepages with Frames will not get recognised by Search Engines unless you include the relevant material in the Frameset page.

Get the text up high
The text which will be seen by search engines is best right up at the top of the page. If you have, for example, JavaScript or Java on the heading this will distract the Search engines. Have these scripts further down the page, or avoid it on the submitted pages.

Avoid broken links and sloppy code
If there is sloppy code in your website, the search engines may get confused and give up. All tags should be closed even <P> ... </P> If you use comments they must be correctly tagged:
<!-- this comment is correct -->

The Search Engines

You can pay money to some search engines to get your URL looked at urgently. If you do not take this service which is quite expensive then it may be a few months before your get listed.

You should strictly resubmit to the search engines, but usually not the directories, each month. When you do this make sure that there is at least a minor alteration to your homepage, and to the META keywords, otherwise they think you are trying to spam them.

Directories are more difficult and take longer. You will probably find it useful to set up a page on NotePad, or WordPad or whatever with the following info:

• Contact Name
• Email address
• URL starting with http://
• same but starting with www.
• Site Name (like 5 words)
• Description (max 25 words)
• Full description, in case it is needed.
• Keywords list

Getting Noticed

Getting noticed among the one million websites on the Internet is not a trivial task. There are agencies and sources of help:

http://www.zdnet.com/pccomp/features/fea1096/sub2.html - features
http://www.1x.com/promote/ - Maher's Guide
http://searchenginewatch.com/

There are also people that will register your URL with Search Engines for you. Try http://www.submit-it.com but there are many others.

FOR THIS APPROACH: - if you believe the advertising, these submission companies are professionals and are able to do a better job than you do, and will contact a much wider circle of search engines.

AGAINST: - You will be signed on to search engines you never even suspected existed. But the 20 major search engines get over 95% of the traffic so why bother. And they will send you Email messages inviting you to resubmit or buy extra services.

Some of the major search engines now have barriers to prevent submission by the automated systems. This may prevent you being submitted to the important ones.

Banners

Many websites now have banners advertising other sites. You could do this. In exchange you can have your banner on other sites; surfers will click the banner and come right across to your site.

Alternatively, they will note your banner, and make a note of the URL and come and see your site later. To cater for these you had better show your company name and your URL on the banner very clearly.

No charge. Lots more visitors. Is this a good idea?

Fine if you like that sort of thing. Flashing and clicking away to distract you. I don't like them and tend to avoid sites that clutter up the content I want to read with a rash of slow-loading, usually unreadable, irrelevant banners.

If you have a popular site you may be able to sell advertising space for a few dollars per thousand click-throughs. Displaying a banner is no guarantee that people will click-through; if you get 0.4% of visitors clicking you will be lucky, and it is therefore quite and expensive way of advertising. If you want to go this way, look for the Free-Banner advertisements carried by banner lovers and check it out.

If you are serious about banners try:
http://www.advertwizard.com for the UK
http://www.doubleclick.com for adverts

Big Budget Advertising

• Sponsor a show on digitial TV £80,000 ( I think that is per show)
• 10 week series of ads in the Telegraph Weekend section £100,000
• 150 16-sheet posters on the underground £50,000

• A keyword banner ad on Yahoo in a selected place £90 per thousand impressions - say £500/month cost.
• Take banners for a number of random pages and random sites £5 per thousand impressions, or 50p per click through.

We mentioned free gifts. Several large websites are offering points which can be redeemed to goods or money. Try:
http://www.beenz.com
http://www.mypoints.co.uk
http://www.ipoints.co.uk

Link Swapping

So ask all your contacts and friends to link to you, perhaps provide them with a selection of logos and banners that they could use, and suggest some words that they could conveniently use to describe your site.

You could search the Internet for websites that would benefit from the material on your website and send them an Email saying that you are linking to them, and would they like to link to you. Make sure your Email addresses a named person if possible, say why you liked his site, a little about your own website, and the benefits that will follow by swapping links.

You can check on who is already linking to you by poking around in the search engine websites. For example in Altavista you search on link:www.waller.co.uk or whatever.

Surfing widely

In any case you should always quote your URL on all discussion messages, as well as all E/Mail messages, with a very brief one-line saying what you have in your site.

A more formal way of doing this is to belong to a Webring. This is a consortium of like-minded website owners who have agreed to have their sites listed by the webring organiser, and to have a link on their pages giving access to the other members.