Effective Website Promotion

Rich Heaney

April 21, 2006


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This article is going to show you how to get what you really need at your website – Traffic! You have finished building your new website and you have published it but there are no visitors. Unfortunately with the vast number of websites out there people are not just going to stumble upon your site by chance, you have to send them there. You can do this by starting some kind of advertising campaign or by getting your website listed in the search engines.

Online Advertising

There are numerous ways of advertising your website online, these are the methods I have found to be most effective:

Pay Per Click advertising involves paying another website which receives regular traffic to advertise your site. Some of the major search engines run pay per click advertising schemes, Google AdWords would be a good place to start to find out more details. You write a short advert consisting of a headline, a second and third line and your URL. You then choose a list of keywords which are relevant to your website and bid on the price you are willing to pay for your adverts to be displayed. This can be a very effective way of advertising online, you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad so as long as it is well written you are paying for targeted traffic. Also you can set a daily budget to prevent over stretching your advertising funds. Some sectors are more suited to this type of advertising than others, if there are lots of competitors in your market it can be expensive.

Article submission is an excellent way to promote your website and best of all it is free! You simply have to write an article on a similar topic to your website and then submit it to online article directories. At the end of you article you include a resources box which can contain details about your website and the web address. People may read your article and then visit your website to find out more details, also you get a backlink from the article directory. A well written article on a popular topic can bring good traffic to your site. Ezine advertising is another good way to promote your website. People only subscribe to ezines if they have an interest in the subject matter so if you can find an ezine relevant to you site you can achieve good results. The the larger the subscription to the ezine, the higher the cost to advertise. But smaller ones often get better readership, more people actually open and read the content from top to bottom.

Search Engine Listings

Advertising your site is a good way to get traffic in the beginning and depending on your sector you may get good long term results. However the best way to to get traffic is by getting your website ranked highly in search engine listings. There are two ways to improve your search engine rankings, on page and off page optimization. On page optimization refers to the design of your website. Your site should be based around one or more keyword phrases that you want to rank for in the engines. The keyword phrase should be included in the page title, in the meta tags and at the beginning and end of the main body text. Off page optimization basically involves getting links pointing to your website. All the major search engines place a high emphasis on the number and quality of links a page has when calculating it's ranking. Most of the links on your site should be at least partly relevant to your subject matter and links from highly ranked sites are more valuable. If you ask for a link exchange make sure that your site's keywords are in the anchor text that is displayed on their site. Paying for advertising can have almost instant results but getting ranked in the search engines takes time. You should be able to get your site indexed and displayed on MSN within a week or so of getting a few links however it will take longer before your site starts to show up in Google searches, just keep adding links and be patient.