Basic Website Promotion for the Novice
Basic Website Promotion for the Novice, by Brian @ RankAdvance
Many website owners & smaller internet businesses simply cannot afford to hire a specialized web marketing / promotion firm to properly market their site for them. [link] This is not the end of the world for them - there are other possibilities, many of them free and only acquiring a bit of your time. Basic website promotion requires very little skill, rather just a few pointers of what needs to be done !
Let's say your site is ready to be seen on the www. You have done all the necessary things to optimize your site to a decent degree, ie. good title tags, description & keyword tags, plus have enough related content. The links between pages are all there, and you have a proper site map.
This will now be the very first time you market your site on the www. We assume that your site doesn't appear on any search engine, nor have any other link (direct or indirect) to it.
Step 1 : Submitting to Major Directories & Search Engines
This is a logical step, and one that can take lots of time, especially if you do manual submitting. It can take many weeks, sometimes months before a search engine will visit and index your site. There is also a risk that your site might not even be indexed.
There is a shortcut that we can recommend. Ask a friend or acquaintance with a website already indexed by the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) to place a temporary link on their site to your "new website". This will ensure a much faster inclusion in the search engines, and when the search engines visit your friend's site again, your site will be "seen", the link followed, and your site indexed. Your link can now be removed from the friend's site, except of cause if it's a related site to yours (an added bonus as you will have incoming link number one to your site).
Some directories ask a fee for inclusion. If you can afford a few, we highly recommend it, as this will count big time towards your search engine rankings. Be careful not to submit you site to insignificant, low traffic directories - go for the big ones. A proper internet search will put you on the track of the better ones.
Step 2 : Acquiring relevant links to your site
In essence this boils down to establishing better reciprocal links. You will do this over a period of weeks, months and even years. Put an amount of time every week aside for this purpose. It will be a very good investment in the end ! This long term link-acquiring program will eventually yield dividends. The trick lies in finding sites related to yours, but not directly in competition with your site or target audience.
You will need to "show cause" to the other site owner why it's advantageous to link to yours. Start by compiling a curtious email link request message that you can use over and over. Make the message personal by addressing it to a specific person whenever possible. Remember, the more relevant links pointing towards your site, the higher your search engine rankings will be. Coupled to good related content, it will not surprise me if you eventually reach a number 1 position on a major search engine for more than one keyword phrase !!
About the Author
Brian is a freelance writer, website marketing expert & webmaster of 3 websites, including Rank Advance : http://www.rankadvance.com