Irwin Associates Web Design
WEBSITE MARKETING
Whether your website is new or well established you probably want more visitors who want to buy your products or use the services you are offering. This means people must either know your website is there (and know the website address - or URL) or be able to find it using a search engine.
Getting your website onto search engines is not difficult. However, getting it on to the first or second page of search results of the major search engines is another matter altogether. For one thing you need to know - or more likely research - the terms (keywords) that potential customers are most likely to use to find your website. Many website owners stumble at the first hurdle and, if they come up with keywords at all, they often have too many or too few, irrelevant or overly popular keywords. Properly done keywords should be researched before the website design and copy writing begins and even before the domain name is chosen, although this rarely happens in practice.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the art and science of getting high rankings on search engines, and is a specialised service in itself. It can be costly to undertake and needs to be repeated regularly to ensure rankings are maintained especially if your search terms are common and bring up millions of websites. However, SEO is not the only way to promote your website. There are a number of tips that can be used in conjunction with, or in some cases instead of, SEO.
Here are a number of tips to get your website noticed:
1. Make sure your website explains clearly what it is about, preferably on the home page. This might sound obvious but it is surprising how many websites don’t tell visitors clearly enough what they are there for. Visitors aren’t going to click and scroll to find out, they’ll simply find another website. It doesn’t only help human visitors to say what your website does; it also gives the web robots (or bots) which crawl the web indexing the pages they find something to get their teeth into.
2. Probably the single most important thing that can raise the profile of your website is getting other "quality" websites to link to yours. The key to this is that they should be quality links. Do not participate in link exchange programmes that have little or nothing to do with your business or the purpose of your website; your site’s search engine rankings will be penalised for having too many irrelevant inbound links. One idea to get inbound links is to consider asking clients/customers to provide a link to your site.
3. Ensure your website address is given on all your emails, letters, compliments slips, business cards, advertising materials, company vehicles, etc.
4. Consider offering something free on your website, or a special offer for website visitors. What you provide will depend on the purpose of your website. You might provide tips and tricks or fact sheets, and if it is changed or added to regularly it will encourage people to keep coming back.
5. Consider joining networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook as well as blogs, forums and discussion groups related to your business or website activity and participate in discussions there. Depending on your business a video or series of videos on YouTube may be worth considering. It’s not about gratuitously advertising your website but getting yourself known and noticed as someone who has something useful to contribute within your particular field so that people will want to visit your website for more.
6. Write articles for relevant (print and web-based) trade magazines, local papers, ensuring your website address is given.
7. Consider writing a blog - but remember, a blog is a website too, so much the same applies to marketing a blog. Added to which you need to keep coming up with new material. That is, after all, what a blog is there for.
Useful reading: Google’s view on quality links.
To check what sites link to yours: LinkPopularity.com
Other webmaster tools
Acudí a Graham Irwin por las referencias que me dio la persona que había diseñado mi página web. Los servicios ofrecidos por Graham en el proceso de montaje de esta me hicieron sentirme en terreno firme, donde no tenía ninguna experiencia previa. Sus sugerencias y aclaraciones me dieron una mayor perspectiva para tomar decisiones, que por mi desconocimiento no me había planteado. También me siento muy agradecida por toda su paciencia y buen talante en los cambios que se hicieron.
Yolanda Medina
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