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Promoting an online business varies only
slightly from promoting any other kind of website. The
main difference is that you can use the traffic you
generate to increase sales from your online store. This
opens up promotion opportunities that are denied to
websites that don't sell - the services of affiliates,
for example, are best suited to sites where a recordable
transaction happens.
There are many website promotion services available
including
- search engine optimisation
- pay-per-click advertising
- affiliate marketing
- offline marketing
- email marketing
- online PR
- targeted site advertising
- newsletter marketing
- blogging and RSS feeds.
Search engine promotion services are critical to your
website's online success. It's now estimated that 83.8%
of all website visits originate with a search enquiry.
That may seem incredible but consider how you use search
engines yourself and it may not be so suprising.
How do you use promotional services in the search engines?
There are two ways - search engine optimisation (SEO)
and pay-per-click advertising (PPC).
SEO is the service by which you get your site well
ranked in the natural search results against the keywords
and phrases that you are targeting.
PPC systems like Google's Adwords are online auctions
for keywords - the advertisers who bid highest and succeed
in attracting the most clicks get the top positions.
In both cases, selecting the right keywords and phrases
is critical. Keyword research is essential to eliminate
the guesswork from your website promotions. You can
start by checking your website's log files. These files
contain records of where your traffic was referred from
and what keywords were used. Practitioners of both SEO
and PPC also use tools that capture the search terms
used by people - you may have heard of Wordtracker for
example.
Using Search Engine Optimization Services for
your Website's Online Promotion
The main search results are known as the 'natural'
listings. Search engine 'spiders' or software, visit
your web pages, index the content that they can access
and check which pages are linking to yours and which
pages you link to.
SEO splits into onsite and offsite.
Your first onsite challenge is to ensure that the search
engines can access all the pages that you want them
to deliver in their search results. Many sites are built
with complex code using Flash, Frames or just far too
much messy code. This doesn't help the search engines.
Secondly you need to give the spiders plenty of relevant
content. That's RELEVANT content. Sorry to shout but
it's critical to remember that what the search engines
are trying to do is to deliver relevant search results.
They will reward web pages with content that's relevant
to web searches - it's that simple.
You need to write at least 450 words per page and ensure
that your keywords are spread across your site. There
are technical issues too - your meta title and description
tags need to be written in the same way that you would
write a pay-per-click advertisement - the reason is
that they are what the search engines display in their
results. When you write a ppc ad you have a headline
and a description designed to persuade the searcher
to click on your ad as opposed to the other dozen or
so ads on the page. The same principle applies to the
natural search listings.
Other onsite issues include sitemaps, alt tags and
robots.txt files.
Offsite optimisation is primarily about building links
into your site from other relevant web pages. Google
in particular regards 'votes' from other web pages as
one of the most important criteria in assessing a page's
position in its search results. You can build links
by submitting to directories, writing articles for other
sites, offering an RSS feed from your site and by buying
or exchanging links.
A question for you. Do you measure the number of visitors,
where they come from and what they do when they get
to your site? If the answer is 'no', don't worry, you're
not alone. There are millions of websites but very few
website owners manage their promtion activities properly
- what's worse, even less measure where their traffic
originates and how visitors behave when they get to
the site. Attracting more customers to a website is
therefore the key - increasing search engine traffic,
or any other traffic, is useless if it's not relevant
to your site's offer.
So, before you invest any money in online website promotion
services you would be well advised to install a web
analytics system that will tell you at a glance how
your site and its marketing are performing. We can help
you with that - Google provides a very good system for
free.
To discover how to use website promotion services to
get more customers, call us on 01453 873638 for more
information.
To find out more, call us on +44(0)845
456 5342
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