Website promotion - Build a succesful foundation for your website.

When people talk about web site promotion what do they really mean? How difficult is it to promote your online business and get a meaningful return on your marketing budget?

In this article I am going to discuss two of the most important web site promotion strategies that we use here at keyword marketing and show you how to build a solid web site promotion strategy for your Internet business.

There is no doubt that Internet marketing is getting harder by the day. There is more competition for the most valued search terms and the value of Pay per click terms is rising steadily. For example when I checked today for this article, "pay per clicks" for some sought after terms like “secured loans” and “casino uk” ranged between £10 - £18 PER CLICK.

That’s a frightening statistic and it shows how valued internet business is becoming. With over 200,000 searches performed on overture for the term “loans” last month you can see that getting top listings for popular search terms can bring a lot of traffic to your website.

So just how do you go about starting your web site promotion campaign and tapping into the vast amount of business that is conducted routinely on the internet?

Step one – Optimise your Web site design.

It’s important that your website is designed from the ground up with search engine optimisation in mind. Plain HTML is the absolute best technology to build any business site and wherever possible this should be utilised.

Advanced scripting languages have their place in web site development, for example contact forms and shopping baskets, but the core pages should remain as static HTML pages, this makes it easy for a search engine to list the information contained on those pages.

This is possibly one of the biggest reasons for internet marketing failure – I have known people to commission very expensive sites using the latest technology only to fail to draw any significant search engine traffic, and if the marketing budget doesn’t stretch to off line promotion then its game over.

Concentrate on building a site built using primarily HTML pages and then progress to more advanced technologies once you are confident that you are gaining customers at a sufficient rate to sustain your growth. This is the path to web site promotion success.

The reason you build a site in plain HTML is because a search engine indexes the text that it sees on your pages. If it sees no text then it has no information with which to rank your page and so it becomes page 5,000 of 10,000 pages or so. You must give a search engine content to work with so that it can index the text on your page and compare it with what it sees on other pages.

This is ultimately how a search engine decides which pages are placed at the top of the pile and which go at the bottom. Obviously you want to give your pages the best possible chance of being seen at the very top.

For this reason you should stay away from technologies like Flash – which give a search engine no chance of indexing anything at all and using tons of graphics on your page where text would do the job more effectively. The goal here is not to have the best looking site, although that’s a nice goal to achieve, but also to have the most functional site.

This is a lot easier to achieve if you go about it with simplicity in mind from the beginning rather than trying to knock the spots off of the competition who have been established for years.

Another bonus of keeping your site design reasonably slick and simple is that as well as keeping the cost down in the early days you can also build on it quickly when you start gaining new customers and revenue – All of your content i.e. your product descriptions, company profile etc can easily be copied and pasted into a new home. It’s the content that is of the most value to you.

Step Two – Build your content.

Once you have built your framework then you need to add content. No content will equate to no visitors. So be serious about adding plenty of useful relevant content to your site.

When adding content be sure to check out our article on finding keywords which will give you ideas for the type of content that you need to produce for your site.

What type of content should I be adding?

Product and service descriptions are a great source of valuable content, in many cases they will need to be rewritten for the Internet user but if you are in a competitive marketplace the more information you can give your visitor the more chance you have of:

A: Giving your user the information that they need to make an informed buying decision.

B: Giving the search engines the content they need to make that information visible to its users.

A good copywriter is a sound investment. Very often they can turn dull, lifeless and factual information into copy that is at worst highly readable. It’s no use producing stacks of content that no one wants to read!

Copywriting is one of the most underused and yet most powerful weapons in a web site promotion campaign and is an essential part of your promotion strategy.

The combination of building a reasonably simple and straightforward HTML based website with minimal JavaScript and other advanced scripting technologies combined with copious amounts of highly readable search engine friendly content is guaranteed a pay off in high amounts of search engine traffic.

It’s a technique that we use over and over again to build high traffic websites for our clients that produce new customers and new business on a consistent basis, long after we have done our initial work.