Once your website has been built and published, it’s time to promote your site. This is where website marketing comes in. Website marketing is simply the things you do to make your website known to others. There are hundreds, if not thousands of ways to promote your website.
Search Engine Optimization — SEO
Search engine optimization refers to what you do to your website pages so that they rank more highly in search engines. This would include things like making sure your page tags are complete, accurate, and relevant to the content of your site and pages. For the most part, this is something you do once during the creation stage of a page and you are done. It’s not that you never have to revisit. You should. There are several reasons. First, you may have missed something the first time around or even simply missed the mark. Secondly, because the web is an ever evolving environment. As it changes, you want to be sure you adapt. For example, the the early days of the web there was a tag used in pages that contained the keywords for the page. Search engines depended on these tags which were hidden from within the HTML. Most modern search engines no longer rely on these tags to determine the subject matter. Keywords are still important, but the keyword tag hidden in the HTML is less important, even vestigial.
Search Engine Marketing — SEM
Search engine marketing includes SEO and it also includes things like buying ads on search engines, getting links on other relevant sites and pages, writing content on other sites that link to your site.
Online Website Marketing
- Search engine and directory listing
What’s the difference between a search engine and a directory? A search engine is a searchable database designed to return a result based on words an individual types in. A director or index is much more like a phone book or a Yellow Pages. In the old days if you wanted a phone number you looked it up in a phone directory. You were essentially doing the searching manually. Once databases became available you could simply plug in some key words and the database would return only those listings relevant to your cirteria.
- Email marketing
Email marketing is not all SPAM. Email marketing can be a very effective tool for letting others know about you, your service or products, and your site. Just as in your pages, the key is providing information that is relevant to the reader, arrives in a timely fashion, and is very targeted. - Website citations and links
This can include directories and indexes, but may also include links on other similar or related sites. For example, if you are selling farming implements and have a link on a site that sells seed to farmers, or get a mention in a newsletter about farming, or if someone who blogs about farming refers to a page or quote from your site and provides a link, this is a powerful citation. - Article marketing
Article marketing can be a powerful way to get the citations mentioned above. There are sites set up specifically for articles. They are information aggregators. You write them or have them written for you, and then submit them to the aggregator who publishes them. - Social media
There’s much more than a paragraph worth of information needed here. at this writing there are hundreds of social media sites that may help you in reaching your audience. Each site works differently, reaches a different demographic, has different rules and protocols, and yields different results. I highly recommend that unless you are going to hire a team, you are already an expert in one or more social media platform, that you start with one, and as you achieve success tie in another. One of the great values of social media those is not pushing your message, but actually being able to listen to your target audience. You may want to study some good books on social media to get more out of it. - Email signatures
Do you have your website address in your email signature? Do you even have an email signature—a block of text and perhaps a graphic such as your picture or a logo that brand you can give people your contact information. If not, this is too easy and too inexpensive to not do. - Aggregators
- MANTA
- Review sites
Off Line Website Marketing
- Business cards and stationery
- Print ads, fliers
- Signage
- Store-fronts
- Billboards
- Vehicle Wraps