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The Importance of Website Marketing & SEO
Starting an online business, whether the venture is new or an extension of a brick-and-mortar business, can bring you vast success or it could turn out to be an empty investment. The difference between a website bringing in thousands of customers every day and one that isn’t worth the owner’s money is marketing. If you market your website effectively, traffic will find your website without trouble, but without marketing, the website you build will simply get lost in the sea of websites found (or not found) in cyberspace.
Marketing your website should be done both online and offline. One of the largest mistakes website owners make is marketing the site only in one place or another. If you want to connect with real people on a daily bases and reach the masses, you need to market your website on the internet, but to reach those most interested in your business, offline marketing is also necessary.
Offline (Traditional) Marketing
To market your website offline, treat it like a typical brick-and mortar business. Start with making business cards that include your domain name as well as a phone number where you can be reached. Depending on the product or service you’re selling, you may want to also consider making promotional materials like T-shirts, magnets, pens, and key chains. A third way is publishing your website domain in trade publication and other advertising you purchase for your business. Do what makes sense for your business, and then get your name out there. Think about your target market and brainstorm ways to reach these people. If it is a promotional item intended for your customer it should have your website address on it…period.
Online Marketing
No matter how well you market your website offline, however, making sure your website can be found online is very important. If you offer online services or goods that can be shipped all over the world, the bulk of your customers probably will not be from your own neighborhood. If you’re promoting an informational website with advertising, the same is true—the people most interested may live thousands of miles away. Effective marketing makes sure that when these people are surfing the Internet, your site pops up.
When talking about traffic, both quantity and quality are important. Quantity means simply driving masses of people to your site, in the hopes that even a very small percentage of these people will be interested in your product or service (or click on your ads, if that’s your goal). If you drive one thousand users to your website every day and even only 5% of them have any interest in your website, you’re still contacting 50 people every day! Quality means that you may not be reaching many people, but everyone you’re reaching is highly interested in your website. If you’re only reaching 100 people a day, but 80% of them are genuinely interested in your website, you are reaching 80 people every day! Typically, quantity is easier than quality, so a good balance between the two will maximize the traffic driven to your website in the least time possible and with the least work on your end of things.
Search Engine Optimization
One of the most common ways to drive traffic to your website is through the use of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Think of things this way: If you were to need, say, information about tooth whitening, how would you go about finding that information online? I bet you would visit a search engine like Google or Yahoo! to find products and articles about tooth whitening. But who decides which websites will be listed on the first page of your search results? Basically, you search for certain keywords and the search engine looks all over the Internet to find the websites that fit those keywords best.
Therefore, if you writing on your website with SEO keywords in mind is important. Think about what keywords people who need your website are most likely to search. For a tooth whitening website, for example, you might search things like “tooth whitening,” “whiten my teeth,” “get whiter teeth,” and “whiten teeth at home.” There are services you can hire to discover exactly what keywords you should use like Network Solutions Search Engine Visibility service. To optimize your website, you should use these phrases multiple times in the page tile, meta description, keywords and in the content of the page. Learning the keys to driving traffic means that you also use certain keywords a certain number of times (at least three seems to be the consensus).
Some of the best online tools to learning SEO and understanding how search engines can view your site are listed below:
· BruceClay.com – Simply one of the best places to learn the ropes to SEO packed with free resources.
· DomainTools.com – Once your site is up and running you can use their SEO text browser to see how Search Engines view your site...you may be surprised.
· GoRank.com – Free Keyword Density Analysis tools for both content and meta tags of your site.
Online Directories
One could research the best SEO methods for weeks, and experts are always devising new strategies, but there are other ways to get search engines to find your site. Submitting your website to directories is crucial. When you search for a term, not only does the search engine look for keywords, but it crawls all over the web looking in directories to see what sites are listed. The more times your site is listed, the better rank it will have on the search engine’s results page.
There are a number of very popular place to which you should submit your site, but the granddaddy of them all is DMOZ. Check out the site at www.dmoz.org to learn more about how the directory is categorized, but, in short, this site hosts one of the largest and most prestigious directions on the web. And rest assured, you will find a category for your website on DMOZ. Only submit your site to DMOZ once. It may take several months to get indexed but multiple submissions will get you nowhere fast. In fact, it might get your site blocked from being listed at all. DMOZ uses human editors and the backlog on domains is typically months long...so be patient.
Aside from DMOZ, a number of great directories can help to put your website on the map such as the Yahoo! Directory and Business.com The key is to find what works for you and your business. For example, if your site features articles, communities like www.digg.com are great places to submit links to these articles. Getting links to your site from these directories make it easier for customer to find you. Further, the major search engines offer “pay-per-click” advertising in which you can buy traffic through a featured listing. But there is a fee every time a client clicks on the link to your site. PPC is a great way to launch a site but other SEO techniques should be used to generate traffic over the long term.
Quality Inbound Links
Links to your site is the “flavor of the day” with search engine placement. When you exchange links with another person, you do have to take the time to list their site on your own, but they will do the same. This works well for businesses that are not competing, but which receive a lot of cross traffic. For example, if your website is promoting a new health supplement, you might look into exchanging links with a bodybuilding website.
But one way or inbound links are better than exchanging links with another site. Most search engines discount reciprocal links...so they won’t help you placement. Quality links from relevant websites show that you have quality content that other people believe you should read.
Inbound links can be purchased but be sure that you are getting links from qualty websites. Links from another site that nobody visits won't help your business. Permanent links from sites with relevant content and high page results will produce more traffic for your site and a higher page rank.
Summary
Website marketing really shouldn’t be much different from marketing a brick-and-mortar business. Although you do have to consider a few different techniques, in general your goals are exactly the same—to reach more people interested in your business and to make more sales. The Internet is a great tool for helping your business expand or get off the ground, but without effective marketing of your website, even the best-built websites won’t have vistors. |
