Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Website Promotion - How To Do It The Right Way

By Raam Anand

Does your company has it's own website? If not, then it should have been there yesterday! Customers are extremely technically savvy nowadays and most prefer to find vendors online. If you do not have a company website then you are leaving a big share of your profits on the table.

The next obvious steps after you have setup your website is 'Website Promotion'. You need to let the world know that you have a presence on the Internet.

More on Website Promotion:

Just like offline advertising, website promotion essentially involves advertising your website in various ways to attract more visitors to your website. Your website can be promoted in banner exchanges, search engines, other niche domains and so on. Getting links back from other related websites and appearing on search engines like Google or Yahoo for selected search terms are collectively known as Website Promotion.

Search Engine Optimization is often the first thing any website owner will do in order to promote his/her website. It is the also the most difficult and time consuming task because a ton of research needs to be done to find out the exact keywords that your target audience uses to find your website in the search engines.

SEO - Being Careless Can Mean Disaster

During the early days, search engine optimization was just stuffing your web page with all possible keywords and phrases so that the search engines could pop up your website when someone searched for those terms. So, to avoid such nonsense results, the search engines have now developed sophisticated algorithms or formulas.

Putting all your keywords on each page of your website will most likely get your website out of the search engine databases. It is recommended to have 2 or 3 keywords per web page with a density (repetition) of about 2% throughout the content. Built separate pages of each keyword or key phrase and link them all together using a sitemap for optimal results.

Do not forget to do some research and make a list of specific and unique keywords that your target audience may be interested in. The more unique your keyword is, the more rankings you can achieve in the search results. If you are selling "pets", do not use "pets" as your keyword. Use more specific ones such as "pet parakeets", "pet food", "pet behaviour" etc. to make your website stand out. The more targeted your keywords are the more real customers you get (instead of general visitors).

Though SEO or search engine optimization is the most common way to website promotion, it is highly advice to add other methods to attract more targeted visitors to your website. This include banners, pay per click, video marketing, article publishing and so on. By combining various website promotion methods, you can achieve top rankings in the search engines too.

At first glance, website promotion may seem complicated, but once you know what works and what doesn't, it is fairly simple. It isn't something you should skip, as you need website promotion to reach potential clients and customers. - 15431

About the Author: