Website Promotion
Your site might be easy to use, and well designed with top notch navigation in place and some great content, but it also needs to be found on the web.
You website must be ready for search engines to find and index, so when people search for 'training services' or whatever your site offers, your site should be listed (hopefully in the first few pages).
Imagine the web as a large village and each house represents a website. Those that come up high on search engines are the houses on the high street or main road. Customers will find them easily enough and stop by. Those who don't appear in the first few pages of search engine results, if at all, are the unreachable houses with unpassable gravel tracks, or houses positioned in the middle of the woods. Customers give up searching for them, or get lost or distracted and turn back.
Avoid restricting access and avoid splash pages and gimmicks which could have visitors leaving without even stepping 'foot' inside.
The majority of website users find sites via search engines or links from other websites. So these are the two areas to focus your web marketing on. But there's a certain amount you can do at the website design stage to make this easier, including making your site indexable.
Search Engine Readiness
When planning the content, text and design of your website consider:
- How you'll make your site indexable. Some rules to consider are avoiding the use of frames, making sure that your website search terms/keywords appear in the body copy of your home page and giving page titles that are meaningful.
- How you'll generate links in. You should plan to have a links/resources page on your website so you can link to other websites. Make sure all links out to other sites open in a new browser window so visitors can remain on your site, even if they click other links to other sites.
How Do People Find Websites?
1 links from other sites
2 search engines
3 friends: viral marketing; using private network
4 printed media: press releases
5 directories
6 signature files (at the bottom of each e-mail)
7 television
8 books
9 other
With this data in mind, and knowing what your core online marketing objectives are, you need to decide which strategies to make use of to get people clicking to your site and taking action once they arrive. You can use:
- Targeted manual site registrations - to register your web address on relevant sites, directories and search engines, helping to improve your search engine readiness and targeted website traffic.
- Link development - which entails persuading sites that share a similar audience to yours, but aren't competing, to link to your website. Most will expect you to link to them, so it is important to have a links page and follow the right etiquette in link requesting and reciprocal linking.
- E-newsletters and e-mail marketing - to build relationships with your website visitors and people who join your mailing list; regular interaction and communication with website visitors is key to repeat business online and e-newsletters are the ideal tool.
- Forums, newsgroups and discussion groups - to position yourself as an expert in your field, raise credibility, broaden your contact network or source useful information.
- Article writing and posting - to raise awareness of your website, build credibility, generate inbound links (via your author biography and weblink at the foot of each article) and position yourself as an expert in your chosen subject area.
- Targeted news submissions (snippet press release submission) - to raise awareness of the brand online.
- Incentives and giveaways - to encourage e-newsletter subscribers and increase your mailing list sign-up rate, or persuade visitors to purchase.
