To have a well visited and profitable online business you must promote your website. The big mistake we hear everyday from clients is “Great, my website is up, I’m so glad it’s finished!”
Sorry. It’s only just begun! Now the hard stuff really starts. Remember the way to keep the Googlebot coming back? Right! - keep creating great content. And this is the same stuff that will attract new “willing to buy” customers like magic! It’s no different that the approach used by retail stores. They change their window displays regularly; when you walk inside the interior displays are always different, with new merchandise being promoted in highly visible areas close to the doors. This is a well understood tactic to get customers coming into the store and to ensure repeat traffic as well.
The same principle applies to your website. To get a “ranking” in Google, MSN or Yahoo’s search engines, you must continually create new content. To please your customers you must create new content. Content is king on the Internet.
Now that you’ve got the content under control, how do you start to take advantage of it to promote your website? There are many ways to promote your site and it’s all about having keen new in-demand information. We go into these tactic in great detail in our Website in a Box programme, but here are the basics:
1) The greatest thing you can do to increase your chances of getting a high search engine “ranking” is to have many other high quality sites link to yours. There are many tools available that can help you search the Net for sites that may be suitable for your links. But first go to Google and type your site theme, niche or main topic followed by submit site, URL, page etc. and put the entire search phrase in quotation marks. For example – recipes “submit site” or recipes “submit URL.”
You’ll find a list of many sites that are inviting you to add your site to theirs. Make sure however that these sites are high quality sites that you’d like to have associated with yours. Would you recommend these sites to your colleagues? If yes, then go ahead and submit your link. If not, then take a pass.
The next item on your link list is to scour the Web and look for great sites in your field, sites that you’d like to be associated with. Send the webmaster an email requesting they put your link on their site. Provide them with the exact code for your link – and here’s why this is crucial to a successful linking campaign – the words that make up the link (anchor text) work to help get your site ranked for those keywords!
Avoid links that say “contact us” for example. Use links that say “Great low fat recipes” (To see how badly this linking is in reality, again go to Google and type in “contact us” in quotes! Last time I looked there were 2,950,000,000 results! Can you compete with that? Likely not, but you can compete by making your links your desired keywords)
2) Subscribe to newsgroups and forums relevant to your niche; and start posting answers for other forum users. You’ll soon be persevered as an expert and you’ll begin to see a corresponding increase in visitors to your site. Make sure you add your URL to your signature because “selling and promoting yourself” are not usually allowed on forums.
3) Take advantage of sites like MySpace.com, Youtube.com and the other social networking sites that enable you to really interact with your visitors. Create MySpace pages (no hard selling) and add links back to your main business website. There’s a bit more to it that this of course, but this will get you started.
4) Start a blog. If you don’t know what a blog is and why they are LOVED by visitors and search engines alike, please call us today!
These are the four quick steps that will help you get links into your site, raise your page in Goggle’s search results and help you promote your website on its way to hands-free revenue!
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