10 Tips for marketing your website for (almost) Free!

  1. Keywords: Brainstorm and research the keywords that your customers would likely look for in searching for your products services.  What are the product names, features, benefits that describe what you do.  There are many tools available for Keyword Selection that can give you ideas.  Here are two, note that the google page can make suggestions based on a word (or phrase) you choose, or from your website (or your competitors) J           

• Google Adwords Tool      https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal            
• Overture                         http://inventory.overture.com/   

2. Domain Name / URL / Email: Choose a domain name (yourcompany.com) that is easy to remember and tell people.  Dashes, underscores and the like make it difficult to remember. Using free websites (like shaw, geocities etc) give a poor professional image

• Use your email from the website domain (you@yourcompany.com) that way you promote your company every time you give out your email address. 
• Use an email signature that includes your website name and a sales statement.
• Put your website domain everywhere you can think of … eg. Business cards, letterhead, brochures are obvious, but also include it on your car, building signage, personal clothing like jackets, hats – even tattoo it to your forehead (maybe not).   

3. Content: In the internet world “content is king’!  Make sure the content you write includes as many of your keywords as possible, preferably several times – but not over used. People go to your website looking for information on something – hopefully something you sell.  The website should provide as much information as possible to help them make a decision. 

•  More importantly, the search engines look for the content of the website to include in their search database – the more relevant content you have the better you will place in the search engine rankings.  Content should be text (not images) for search engine purposes.  

4. HTML Tags: When designing the website (or providing your designer the information) make sure to include the basic html ‘Meta’ tags.  Although not as important as they once were, these are still used by many search engines.  These should be specific to each page of your site.  The key ones are:

• Title: 5 – 10 words describing your website, using the most important key words – this will be seen at the top of the browser and in the search results.·         Description: 15- 25 words (170 characters) describing your website using your keywords.
• Keywords: 25-40 keywords (700 characters)
• Heading: In the content include ‘Headings’ (H1, H2 etc) with your keywords included
• Alt tag on Images: Describes the image – useful for both search engines and browsers with images turned off or using voice systems.
• Filenames: Include your keywords in the filenames and directories (not page1, etc)  

5. Links:  Your visitors and search engines rely on links to go from page to page. You will need ‘text’ links (not images) within your website to move from one page to another. Make sure to use your keywords describing the page linked ‘to’ in the link text. 

• Include external links to other sites that are relevant to your content.  Have them open into a new window so it is easy for your visitors to return to your website.
• More important are links ‘back to you’.  Web browsers will find your site by links from other sites and in search engines. The search engines put a lot of emphasis on links in their algorithms so the more and higher quality links you can get the better.  There are many directories that you can get your site listed in for free and other relevant sites (suppliers, clients etc) that may link back to you.

6. Site Map:  Create a site map listing every page on your website and link to it from every page on your site. This will allow the search engines to easily index your entire site. 

• You can do it manually for a small site or with an xml tool such as Gsitecrawler (http://gsitecrawler.com/) which will crawl your site like a search engine and catalog every page it can reach, and then automatically upload the map and ‘ping’ Google and Yahoo.  

7. Google Tools:  Google have provided a number of very useful (and free) tools to help in marketing your website. You’ll need to create a Google account and then you can access their many tools.

• Webmaster Tools has the ability to track the pages listed in Googles index, the last time they accessed your page, and any errors they find in following the links.
• By adding your sitemap and submitting it, this will have the Google bots track the page and index it quicker.  You should update the site map and re submit it any time you change your site.
• The statistics will show you what search terms are bringing visitors, which sites link to you and much other interesting information.
• Google analytics are another service Google provide to track your visitors, keywords they used and where they have come from – very useful information!  

8. Email Marketing:  Consider starting an email newsletter (ezine) to keep your clients and visitors informed of any news about your business. This could include tips, announcements, invitations to events and possibly jokes or interesting tidbits. A really good item could become ‘viral’ with many of your subscribers forwarding it to their friends and contacts.

• Make sure you get their permission before adding anyone to a list, include your name, email and physical address and have an easy way for them to unsubscribe. 
• Once the list starts to become large consider one of the email services available.  They make the job easier and have worked on getting through the spam filters and other blockers.  You also don’t want your email address blocked for someone complaining about you sending unsolicited email.
•  Include a ‘subscribe’ section on your site to have visitors ask to be added to your newsletter.  

9. Blogging:  Blogs (or weblog) are becoming very popular and an easy way of updating your site. Some blogs are updated several times a day while others less often, but the key is to add more information on a regular basis.  The search engines like ‘new’ content and if the information is interesting and relevant your visitors will keep coming back to see what is new.

• If you provide very good information many other bloggers will start linking to your articles which can drive a lot more traffic to your site.·         Add the RSS (really simple syndication) links to the blog for those who use these services (they are becoming more common)
• You can also visit other blogs and post ‘comments’ on their articles which will get you known and provide another link back to your site.  

10. Social Media / Networking Sites:  Many new websites are coming up with the purpose of ‘connecting’ people of similar interests and backgrounds together. Popular ones are Facebook, Myspace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and many more. 

• There are also ‘message boards’ or ‘forums’ for almost any topic you can think about. Consider becoming a member and participating in the discussions. Spend some time reading the posts and then post relevant content and provide answers to people’s questions. Often blatant advertising is not allowed but a short signature file (with your keywords) is recommended.  

10.5 Some What NOT to do’s:

• Sites that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience
• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results
• Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
• Multiple sites offering the same content
• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page
• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
• The use of text that is hidden from the user
• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity
• Pages built primarily for the search engines
• Misuse of competitor names