These days, it’s all about being noticed – your website that is. With a mass of sites already in existence and the onslaught of new daily signups, having your website found is reminiscent of the old needle in a haystack metaphor.
With search engines getting more sophisticated and website designers becoming more savvy, there are often a number of things (some quite significant) you should do to help stand out in the crowd.
In this three part series, we’re going to explore a number of website promotion strategies (in other words — being found online) that you can implement yourself.
There are many strategies or points of focus that exist when it comes to marketing your website. Some are obviously better than others so here’s an attempt to select nine (three for three articles is a nice number!) strong ways to promote your site — part 1.
Fresh content
Whether in the form of articles, blogs, multimedia etc, by continually adding new content to your site, you not only keep the readers happy, and coming back for more, but appease the search engines by demonstrating that you are worthy of their attention. Search engines love new content and place value on these regular contributions — the more, the better. When these search engines target specific websites (because they have been identified as sites that produce constant, fresh material) they send their spiders to regularly read this new content. This repeat attention from search engines contributes to your site getting ranked well.
Keywords
Keywords are the words or phrases relevant to your domain or subject topic. By peppering them throughout the web copy, you attract the search engines and help them to categorise your site. For instance, if you sell fresh fruit, you could research what consumers are typing into Google and Yahoo in order for them to find sites that sell fresh fruit. Examples of these appropriate phrases and words may include fruit, bananas, green grocers, produce etc. Once identified, you then incorporate the keywords into your web site text.
Meta tags
Meta tags are used to include information about your website. They can define the site’s title, keywords and description and are used to more accurately list your site in search engine indexes.
Meta tags can be an area of confusion for some as they refer to the more technical side of website creation. This is because they appear in the HTML code of your website pages which not everyone is familiar with. However, don’t worry. After you have done it once, you will be able to repeat the process for any web page and/or site you create.
Some Meta tag examples are shown below:
<META NAME=”Name of Meta tag” CONTENT=”Your descriptive sentence goes here.”>
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Digital Pacific has provided reliable Australian web hosting, dedicated web hosting and Australian domain names since 2000.”>
Content, keywords and Meta tags are a great place to start for getting your website some prominence online. They all contribute to having your site ranked in search engine listings and are easy to put in place.
Read Ways to Promote Your Website – Part 2 of 3. where we’ll uncover further ways to promote your website.
