How To Promote Your Website
The final step in good website planning is a process that must be carried out continually to ensure your website stays in good shape and achieves its goals. Watch this presentation to see how you should go about promoting your website.
HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR WEBSITE
1. Start with the basics
2. You should already have done this:
* Submitted your website to search engines
* Submitted your website to web directories
* Sent out a press release
* Put your website address in your email footer, stationary, business cards, etc.
3. Continuously monitor your statistics
4. Collect and analyze data
* Which pages are visitors exiting/entering? Why?
* Which searches are leading to “conversions”? Why?
* Which pages do visitors spend most time on? Why?
Use this information to develop a marketing plan
5. Optimize your code for search engines
6. Target the right keywords and phrases based on:
* Your monitoring
* Research of your target market
* Research of the levels of competition for those keywords and phrases
7. Change your code if necessary
* Use keywords and phrases in page titles, meta tags, header tags, your content, and hyperlinks
* Provide the option of plain text links
* Keep it natural: write for humans
8. Build your domain authority for search engines
9. Build links
* Create quality content
* Create linkbait/viral marketing
* Provide free products or services
* Create widgets with a link back
* Design website templates with a link back
* Offer a reciprocal link exchange
* Write articles for other websites with a link back
* Target links from high quality/authority websites
10. Register your domain name for longer than 1 year
* Search engines are less likely to assume you are a spammer
* 5 years or even 10 year registrations are possible
11. Optimize your website for social media
12. What is social media?
* Online tools for sharing of content (often multimedia) in an interactive manner (e.g. Facebook, Second Life, Twitter, YouTube, Digg)
13. Use specific techniques for each social media website
* Become an active user on whichever social media website your target market uses
* Learn how the social media website works and how you can use it
14. General recommendations for attracting attention from social media websites
* Use multimedia on your website (e.g. audio or video)
* Use widgets to encourage bookmarking
* Develop a community around your website:
o Promote your RSS feed
o Send out email newsletters
o Comment on blogs
o Be active on online forums
15. Consider online advertising
16. If you have an online marketing budget:
* Try pay per click advertising
* Pay for a banner advertisement
* Contact appropriate websites and arrange advertising directly
17. Don’t forget offline media
18. Offine media is important too
* Send out press releases
* Advertise in newspapers, magazines
* Encourage word of mouth
19. Promotion is an ongoing process. Always get feedback from monitoring your visitors, and make necessary changes. Providing quality content is the single best way to raise your website’s profile
20. You’ve now seen how to promote your website. This is final step in a series of presentations on the process of good website design.
21. Need Help? Ask the experts at guiding you through website development.
You can also check the reference here.
