Making a Website is only half the work; you still have to ensure you get enough visitors. This is where promotion and advertising come in! This article explains the purpose of promoting your site and the methods you can use to do this.
Promoting your Site
Many people think that search engines are the ultimate solution for the promotion of a website. Undoubtedly, they are useful, but they contain information from millions of sites, thousands upon thousands of which probably cover the same subject. Unless you have a fairly unique subject, or the surfer knows you exist but can't remember your exact website address, you could be a long way down in any search results, and that surfer will have found many other sites before getting near yours.
However, don’t be discouraged as there are millions of home made, badly designed, and poorly optimised sites out there so anyone with a bit of good design and optimisation knowledge can do surprisingly well. Hopefully we’ll impart enough of this knowledge here for you to be able to look after yourself and your clients in this very competitive area. Promoting a website involves both offline and online methods. First we’ll mention a few offline promotion methods.
Offline Options
It is important to remember that a web site can be promoted using offline methods. For example:
• Press advertising – a small advert with the website address in it.
• Yellow Pages or similar directory publications: these include Thomson directories, BT Classifieds, Chamber of Commerce etc.
• Business cards, compliment slips and headed notepaper.
• Brochures and mail shots.
• Vinyl lettering for vehicles.
It's a lot cheaper to advertise a web site address than it is to advertise the whole business activities.
The point is that you should advise your clients that once they have the Web site, they have to actively promote it in a variety of ways. You and your clients cannot rely on “If I build it they will come” to make a web site successful.
Other options
If it is a personal site such as a hobby or a fan site, you can find other sites on the same subject and ask if they would place a link to your site on theirs in return for you doing the same. You may find a community on Yahoo or MSN which has the same subject. You can then join and post a message introducing yourself and include your website address in the message.
Take part in forum activity - a link to your site will appear in every one of your posts. If you become one of the expert posters, this will bring a sense of authority to you and your web sites.
Finally, one of the most successful promotions in the history of the internet was Hotmail; the people who started it put a small advert on every email sent using their service which read something like "get a free email account at hotmail.com". The name was a link which took the surfer straight to Hotmail. It rapidly became one of the largest email services in existence, and was eventually bought by Microsoft, to use in the MSN service. – We can all dream.
On a smaller scale you and your clients can do the same. On the bottom of every email you send, or within the email itself, include your website address.
Online Web Site Promotion
The idea is to bring targeted traffic to your site and to get those visitors to take ‘action’ while there. This action can be one of many things: a phone call, an email, submitting a form, buying online, posting feedback etc. These are all actions, and the success of the site can be measured in the number of enquiries, number of leads generated, amount of sales, etc rather than just the number of visitors. You could be getting 10,000 visitors a month but if they don’t take action on the site, there is something wrong!
Now, there’s no way this can be an advanced web site promotion tutorial as so many of the factors change regularly and this is a highly specialised area. However, we would like you to understand the basics, and will try to explain some of the factors which we believe will remain constant and which you can rely on to keep you ahead of the uninformed and the misinformed.
Note: when checking your web site stats, don’t look at the hits - a much more useful figure is the number of visitors. Compare this to the number of page views for an average number of pages that each visitor viewed.
How to attract the visitors
Search engines produce up to 80% of web site traffic and if you can get a site ranked in the first 20 results, then you will get your share. It follows that a high proportion of online sales are generated by this search engine traffic. What’s more, this traffic is free! The process of making sure a web site does as well as possible in the SEs is known as Search Engine Optimisation - SEO, or Search Engine Marketing - SEM.
What else can we do? - It’s time for a bit of research.
· Ask your client for a list of keywords - this is the best place to start.
· Apply the method discussed above to rework the keywords into useful search phrases.
· Ask your client who his main competitors are and examine their sites. What keywords are they using and where are they placed in the site.
· Use a keyword research tool to determine the number of searches; how competitive the phrase is; and alternative keyword suggestions. There are a number of services that compile search data and provide this type of information - look for the links in the support site.
What kind of link should I use?
This is very important. Sometimes all you can get is a simple link to your web address: <a href=http://www.domain.com>http://www.domain.com</a>
What you really want is a link to your site where the link text is optimised for one of your key phrases: <a href=http://www.domain.com>Web Design Courses</a>
The search engine spiders will follow this link and this immediately associates the key phrase Web Design Courses with the web site.
This article has been put together by the distance learning organisation Start Learning who are experts in home study. If you want to find out more about Webstart Practical Design or many other distance learning courses please browse their website: http://www.start-learning.co.uk
A good way to find out more about Webstart Practical Design is to sign up for a distance learning course on the subject. By studying in your free time and pace, you can gain the necessary knowledge while tailoring it to suit your schedule.
Kerrana McAvoy
Academic Director – Start Learning
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