The building blocks of Web promotion

In order to gain business from your site it is necessary to conduct some type of web promotion; a number of avenues should be considered within your Internet marketing strategy to increase visitors.

It may sound obvious, but I will say it, marketing a website is important if you are going to gain any leads and sales; it is quite common for site owners to spend substantial amounts of money, time and effort developing their site and pay little attention to its promotion. Once launched many site owners sit back and wait for business and customers to come to them, and are surprised when the site does not perform as expected.

The Internet is growing rapidly and competition for the same products such as yours is increasing as more people realise the Internets marketing potential, websites which offer the same service(s) as could number into the millions. Consequently website promotion should form part of any business marketing plan.

Below you will find a number of website promotion points to consider that are tried and tested and when applied will assist with any website marketing strategy.

Website Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

If you wish to promote your website on the internet without paying for placement, then you must conduct SEO. This is the process of website promotion through organic methods, the process of gaining higher positions for key words through natural means.

Website promotion through SEO is not rocket science but it does take considerable knowledge and skills to be effective. SEO can be conducted by individuals or sub contracted to a company such us, Phrase One Ltd; whatever your decision it is imperative that the persons conducting the SEO have an in depth knowledge of the subject, as if it is not conducted in the right manner it can actually be detrimental to your website promotion and current position.

Onsite SEO is good for web promotion

Development of a search engine friendly website is key to gaining a high position. That said, even with good onsite optimisation your site may still not rank high as the competition maybe too great. What you will have is an SEO friendly website that has the building blocks and potential to rank high, and once other aspects of offsite SEO are conducted you should gain a high position, thus increase visitors and conversions to sales. Below is a few important onsite SEO points:

• Clean code (W3C compliant)
• Meta page title
• H1 title
• Key word density within page text
• Regularly updated content (content is king)
• Keywords within the site link structure
• URLs containing the targeted keywords of that page

Submit a site map using Google webmaster tools

Google webmaster tools and analytics were developed to assist you in monitoring and analysing your website traffic. As the name suggests webmaster tools provide a number of useful gadgets that can aid with the web promotion process. For example, a fast and efficient way of getting your site indexed is through Google site map tool.

Once your website is ready, create a site map and submit it using the site map tool, normally within a few days the site will be crawled and given its first ranking position within the search engine. This position provides a baseline to monitor your website promotion efforts.

Fresh website content is great for web promotion

Google themselves advocate development of websites with content that is updated on a regular bases. It is one of the many SEO factors. A common way of building content is through regular articles published within blogs, hence the reason many quality websites now have integrated blogs and forums, to provide topics of interest and conversation but ultimately to build content and expand website presence!

Promotion through offsite SEO

Offsite SEO is conducted through links from other sites of relevant topics; Google does not advocate paid link building for SEO purposes, in the same breath they will quite happily charge a business a few hundred pounds for a submission to their directory which of course has a link to your website, a little hypocritical on their part don’t you think?

Fact, one of the key areas the Google algorithm uses to determine a websites ranking position is the amount and quality of inbound links. That said all links are not good links, links from irrelevant sites are said to be detrimental, inbound links from sites with a high Google page rank are considered good juice, links from blogs, social sites and forums with related content are said to be good.

There is a clever dumb balance for the conduct of a successful link building campaign, it’s a case of getting the balance of inbound links right. Ideally the best links are from relevant blogs, forums, directories, articles and other websites, the amount required to get you on the first page for key words differs depending upon the key word competition.

Key offsite promotion points:

• Inbound links from relevant blogs
• Inbound links from relevant sites with Google page rank
• Inbound links from relevant directory pages
• Inbound links from forums with relevant subject matter

The SEO balance

Unlike what many SEO companies will have you believe, effective website promotion involves many different points, it is said that Google uses over 280 points within their ranking algorithm. These points are a closely guarded secret, if they were available to all, every webmaster would apply the criteria, consequently making it difficult to rank websites.

However, that said many of these points have been discovered though years of analysis, SEO enthusiasts/companies are now applying them to client websites to achieve high positions in search engines.

At the time of writing we have conducted SEO campaigns for over 50 clients and are glad to say all are on page one for their targeted key words.