Website Promotion

Website promotion is an integral part of running a successful online business. Promoting your site on the internet follows the similar principle to promoting any business, listing you business in business directories, making sure people know about your business, news letter drops etc.There is one main benefit of Internet promotion and promoting your business on the internet, it can and will happen much quicker than offline!

So, where to start?Once your site is complete (and I mean 100% complete) you need to begin your internet promotion campaign.


Search Engine Submission:

Submitting your website to search engines is an effective way of driving qualified traffic to your website. What better way than attract a proactive audience, people are actively searching for your products. Addme provide a variety of search engine submission services, all available from the submission section of the site.

Directory Submissions:

Though not as effective, internet directories are also a good source of traffic and backward links (Backward links are beneficial for your search engine rankings). When compiling your list of directories make sure you have www.dmoz.com and Yahoo!.com at the top of your list!


Search Engine Optimization:

During completion of the above to practices we strongly recommend that you also start optimizing your website for search engines. Search engine optimization is an integral part of internet website promotion. Unfortunately simply submitting your website to a search engine will not get you top position – you will be required to make sure that the copy on the WebPages is unique. The copy should also included popular search terms that people will use to search for your products and service. To find out what people are searching we recommend using Keyworddiscovery. Finally, you will need to make sure that your site can be accessed by a search engine. Check out SEO Toolkit for all the required tools to complete your website optimization.


Paid Search:

Paid search marketing (aka CPC) is a very effect way to drive targeted traffic to your website. Many search engines offer a paid search program, the biggest ones being Google, Yahoo! And more recently MSN. Paid search listings generally receive 30% of the search traffic from a search results page. Paid search programs allow you to nominate what search terms you want your site to show up for. Other main benefits of paid search campaigns are:

* Day Parting; Nominate the time of day when your ad/listing is shown
* Geo - targeting: Target your paid search ad’s to certain geographical location (‘s)
* Target Pages: Drive traffic to specific pages on your site, this is done during the ad group set-up. You can even drive traffic to specific pages depending on the search term.
* Positioning: To limit your search spend and manage the flow of traffic you can specifically position your paid search add.


Trusted Feed:

The final search product available to increase your presence in the search engine results is trusted feed. Trusted feed is a hybrid search product combining natural listings within the Yahoo! Search results with a flat bid structure depending on your category. This form of search marketing works very well for sites with a large volume of pages i.e. shopping websites.


Email Marketing:

Another effective form of website promotion would be email marketing. Known as a more aggressive form of marketing, email marketing involves building or acquiring an opt in mailing list. This mailing list must suit your audience and MUST be opt in. if you purchase a mailing list that is not opt in you will do more harm than good, you will be send emails to people that did not request these , thus risking your site being black listed for spam. Another very important point to consider when purchasing a mailing list is the audience; make sure you’re not wasting your message on people that are not interested in what you have to say.

Combining the popular methods of website promotion, search engine submissions, directory submissions and email marketing is a step in the right direction to promoting your website, building brand and driving traffic to the site via search engines.Finaly, website promotion is an ongoing project. Like any other form of promotion - you need to keep at it for it to work.

Articel by : Addme.com

5 Steps to Search Engine Success

1. Title Tags

The single most important “on page?factor affecting search engine rankings is the title tag. This is a snippet of code in the header section of a web document. The title of a web page is given great weight by the search engines, and for lesser competitive keyphrases a good title tag alone may be enough to catapult a page to the top of the engines.

One common mistake made is that a website is created from a template in which all of the title tag information is the same from page to page. This can not only get your pages thrown into the supplemental results, it is an example of extremely poor individual page optimization.

Individual page optimization basically means that each page of your site should be individually optimized for the contents and target keyphrase of that page. Chances are that you desire to attract visitors using a variety of keyphrases. If you use the same title tag throughout your site, you are missing out on a wonderful opportunity to do this.

The title tag of each page should be individually optimized for the keyphrases that you are targeting for that page. Repetition should be avoided. For ecommerce websites, each product page should contain a unique title tag reflecting the specific product featured on that page.

For example, let’s say you sell a large inventory of widgets of various types and sizes. The title tag of your home page should probably contain the word “widgets? Then, each individual product page should contain more information in the title tag pertaining to the specific product, such as “Large Red Widget ?Model ABC123? or something similar. This allows users searching for specific model numbers, or manufacturer names, or even more general terms like “large red widget?to land on a page specifically relevant to their search engine query.


2. Rich Content

If you are not including keyphrase rich content on each page of your website, you again face a risk of having your pages thrown into the supplementals, or having your pages outright rank poorly for your target keyphrases. Be sure to include at least one instance of the keyphrase you are targeting for that page in the body text of the page.

A rule of thumb I use is to first go through and select the keyphrases you are targeting for each page. Then, optimize the title tags accordingly to reflect this. After that, write rich, unique content for each page, and be sure to include at least one instance of the title tag content in the body text.

A common mistake in this area is to write generic page content, and simply replace the target keyphrase on each page. This type of methodology adds no real value to individual pages of your site and is almost certainly going to result in your pages get thrown into the supplementals on grounds of duplicative content. It is not enough, therefore, to have generic content which is the same on each page, with a mere substitution of the target keyphrase.

For example, a real estate agency wants to be at the top of the engines for searches in all 50 states. They create generic content such as:

“We are your [state name] real estate experts. Browse our [state name] real estate listings to find your perfect [state name] home…”

The firm then creates 50 individual state pages, with the exact same content and only the state name changed. This will not work. Each page needs to have unique, rich content, and so in the example above, we would need to create 50 original pages of content rather than using a simple “find and replace?methodology.

An ecommerce site should write rich descriptions for each of their products. A common mistake I see in such sites is that individual product pages contain little or no written content aside from the product name and a picture. Be sure to write at least a paragraph on the features and benefits of each product in the product description field.


3. Blog

Your competition is blogging, so it’s time you jump on the bandwagon. There are a number of reasons to blog that directly relate to search engine considerations. Google and other engines generally prefer sites with fresh content over stale sites. This means that ranking well involves the regular creation of rich content, and typically this is done via a company weblog.

Blog articles should be useful and informative and should not be considered necessarily self promotional. Using the real estate example above, the agency should write general interest articles on buying and selling homes, how to select a realtor, and the like. It should avoid writing articles touting the benefits of the firm itself ?blog articles should not be press releases (although it is okay to repost the occasional press release in the company blog). The reason for this is that general interest articles (such as the one you are reading right now) are much more attractive link bait (see next section) than are articles on how wonderful your company is.

Additionally, once you have started blogging, you are opening yourself up to link bait and social media opportunities as described below.


4. Link Bait

Generally speaking, the more links you have to rich content on your site, the better off you are going to be in the engines. The creation of a blog is a wonderful way to attract links. Other ideas for link bait include video, images, sound clips, press releases and the like. Contests, quizzes, product reviews, top 10 lists (or in the case of this article, a top 5 list), and how to articles fare very well. Also, the provision of useful tools can be a great way to attract links.

In the example of the real estate agency, a tool likely to attract links would be a free mortgage calculator. Offering such a tool on your website can attract the attention of other sites in the form of links, increasing your reputation and pagerank, which has a direct impact on higher search engine rankings.

Be sure to create link bait on a regular basis through the regular creation of content, of whatever form you choose.


5. Social Media

Now that you have created all this wonderful link bait in the form of blogs, videos, tools, and the like, you need to make sure to get the word out about it so that people know it is there. Social media has already become one of the most powerful ways to spread the word. Social media is loosely defined as any sort of user driven content. Famous examples include MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia, and the like.

Social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon are wonderful ways to get the word out about your content. If you have a number of images (such as product images in an ecommerce site), image sharing sites such as Flickr are useful. Contests and quizzes are great fodder for social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Yahoo360. Video content can be promoted through YouTube, MetaCafe, AOLVideo, and similar sites.

The point is, the more you promote your wonderful link bait, the more people will find out about it and link to it. Put your content to work for you!