Website Marketing Ideas
Traditional methods for promoting your
website
Some of the most important methods
available for promoting your website are surprisingly
traditional: Tell people about it verbally. Tell them
about it in writing. Put your website address on
everything you can – business cards, brochures,
letterhead, print ads, the side of your delivery truck,
the signature on your e-mail, and your company pens. You
would be amazed how many companies fail to take these
simple but crucial steps.
Link Exchanges
One way to get viewers that may be interested in your
website is by exchanging links with similar sites.
This can be a text link or an image link. Here is an
example of an animated web banner.
If you do not mind if a customer uses the
image from your server, also known as hot-linking then you
can even provide a copy and paste box for this banner.
feel free to link to us,
send us an email and
we will do the same.
Pointers (redirecting URLs)
By using 301 redirection you can host your
website at one domain (ie. 1-stop-webshop.com) and still
receive traffic from other domain names that may generate
more traffic (ie. freelancewebdesigner.com). I do
not have any pointers set up so that is not an active
example. To see a live example visit
http://www.austinattachmenttherapist.com/
which will redirect you to my client
http://EmHardy.com.
Since a first and last name are not specific as a web
address, when using you name as your domain you may wish
to set up some pointers. These redirecting addresses
can either mask the address or just forward
it. The difference is what you see once the
redirect has taken place. In the example above the
address will not change to EmHardy.com. This is an
example of masking the URL. If it was just forwarded
to the domain it would show up as EmHardy.com at the top.
Digital Business Card
The digital business card is similar to
the web banner but it is used as a signature for emails or
web forums. I suggest keeping the animation to a
minimum since in these situations it should not be the
center of attention.
This card can also be personalized with
any information needed; names, phone numbers, email
addresses, ect. It too can link to your website when
clicked on. With any service, we will customize it
for your needs. If you would like a website that you
can log into from anywhere to retrieve your signatures and
web banners, we will set that up for you.
By-Hand Search Engine Submission
Another way to ensure that the search
engines see you is to individually submit your website to
as many search engines as you can find. If you do
this on your own, I suggest making a separate email
address. Many ask you to provide one and this is one
time I do not trust them not to sell it. Once you
have that set up gather your keywords, description and
submit! This can be a long tedious process, and may
even take effort to find each page for each search engine
to submit it. Hand submission services are available
and are also included in our website optimization plan
listed at the end of this page.
Meta Tags
All search engines use different methods
to categorize and list websites, one of those methods uses
meta tags. By providing adequate meta tags you boost
your chances to score high on the search engines. By
following the rules below we insure that we are not
disqualifying any key words.
Rules
I suggest first choosing a specific key
word. This should be the main word or words that
people type in to find you or your service. In our
case it is 'web design.
Title tag
This is the first and most important tag
in search engine placement algorithms. Ideally, the Title
tag should contain five to ten good, descriptive words and
not exceed 70-80 characters. The specific keyword should
be used, preferably as the first word of the title.
Remember, the title appears as the link in search engine
listings, so you need to make it attractive to humans as
well.
Description
tag
This is the second important tag in search
engine placement algorithms. The Description tag is used
by many search engines as a short description of the page
in search engine listings, so don't repeat the Title in
this tag, and make sure it's attractive, without being
misleading. It should not exceed 150-200 characters. The
specific keyword should be used at least once (try twice
if it fits and see how it ranks). Include common synonyms
and one or two of your most important general keywords.
Keywords tag
The Keywords tag is designed to tell the
search engine what keywords are important to your page,
and thereby how people should be able to find you when
they search. But this meta tag has almost completely lost
its relevance as far as search engine positioning is
concerned - it hardly affects the rankings these days.
However, just to be on the safe side, you should include
the specific keyword and one or two of your most important
general keywords in the Keywords tag. You can also include
some of the common upper/lower case variations of the
keyword. The rules for the Keywords tag are simple -
don't repeat any keyword more than three times and
don't repeat the same word one after another even if
separated by a comma - it can get you penalized for
spamming.
Don't create a long list of keywords. Consider including
synonyms to your specific keyword and related words that
may not be in the document itself, including misspellings.
You may grab some extra rankings that way.
Information to send us
Title:
Description:
Keywords:
Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Submission
This is what it sounds like, you bid on a
price that a click to your website is worth, and the
search engine will list you among the 'sponsored links' at
a specific place depending on what your competitors for
that same search word are paying. This is suggested
for people bringing in a lot of money from their website.
Since we do not really build large e-commerce sites this
is not something we would normally utilize. If you
have an existing site in which you need someone to assist
you in the pay-per-click submission, I would be more than
willing to help. I have years of experience in with
pay-per-click advertising. Please read more about
this process
here.
Website Optimization
For those of you who already have a
website you are happy with but not getting the visits you
expected, we will review your site and let you know what
we think we can do. By checking things like meta
tags, file sizes, code validation as well as alt text and
by testing for broken links we can optimize the
performance of your website for your viewers and search
engines a like. When you being your site to us for
an optimization we will need to have your FTP username and
password to inspect it thoroughly. After inspecting
the website we will send you a report of the work that we
suggest doing along with a price quote. An
optimization will usually run about $75 depending on the
shape of the website. This optimization excludes
websites designed in flash.
More Information about Search Engines
To understand seo you need to be aware of
the architecture of search engines. They all contain the
following main components:
Spider - a browser-like program that downloads web
pages.
Crawler – a program that automatically follows all
of the links on each web page.
Indexer - a program that analyzes web pages
downloaded by the spider and the crawler.
Database– storage for downloaded and processed
pages.
Results engine – extracts search results from the
database.
Web server – a server that is responsible for
interaction between the user and other search engine
components.
Specific implementations of search mechanisms may differ.
For example, the Spider+Crawler+Indexer component group
might be implemented as a single program that downloads
web pages, analyzes them and then uses their links to find
new resources. However, the components listed are inherent
to all search engines and the seo principles are the same.
Spider. This program downloads web pages
just like a web browser. The difference is that a browser
displays the information presented on each page (text,
graphics, etc.) while a spider does not have any visual
components and works directly with the underlying HTML
code of the page. You may already know that there is an
option in standard web browsers to view source HTML code.
Crawler. This program finds all links on
each page. Its task is to determine where the spider
should go either by evaluating the links or according to a
predefined list of addresses. The crawler follows these
links and tries to find documents not already known to the
search engine.
Indexer. This component parses each page and
analyzes the various elements, such as text, headers,
structural or stylistic features, special HTML tags, etc.
Database. This is the storage area for the
data that the search engine downloads and analyzes.
Sometimes it is called the index of the search engine.
Results Engine. The results engine ranks
pages. It determines which pages best match a user's query
and in what order the pages should be listed. This is done
according to the ranking algorithms of the search engine.
It follows that page rank is a valuable and interesting
property and any seo specialist is most interested in it
when trying to improve his site search results. In this
article, we will discuss the seo factors that influence
page rank in some detail.
Web server. The search engine web server
usually contains a HTML page with an input field where the
user can specify the search query he or she is interested
in. The web server is also responsible for displaying
search results to the user in the form of an HTML page.
Please contact us if you
have any questions about any service listed on this page.
