MARKETING YOUR WEBSITE

So once you have your website, what's next?
Its all very well getting to fabulous website, but how can you advertise your presence and get people to find you? After all a website should either make you money or save you money - but you have to find it first...

It can take months to get into the search engines, and years to develop a site that gets top rankings. So what can be done to improve your chances?

Add your website address to all existing and future stationary and marketing material: business cards, letter heads, even faxes and invoices. Use every non-verbal point of contact you have to advertise your website.

Is your web address on all your stationary?

Make sure your website is regularly updated with fresh content, at the very least once a month. This ensures that your website retains a sense of freshness and is worth revisiting, by both visitors and search engines alike.

Check that your content is grammatically correct and there are no spelling mistakes. Not only does this look more professional, but the search engines will think so too.

Get as much publicity as possible - consider advertising your website via a press release in a related journal, newspaper or news website. Try getting the site reviewed in a related other journals or advertise the site in conventional media likely to be seen or read by your target audience.

Add relevant links to other websites - by adding ten or more useful and relevant links to your website. Not only is this useful to your audience, but it also helps to improve your search engine ranking.

Get your website listed on other relevant websites, online directories and association pages. By exchanging links with other sites in related subjects, your website is seen as being part of the web community, and this can help to increase your website ranking. The most important links are from web pages with content related to your website and those that your customers visit. The more links you have pointing to you, the greater the chance of someone finding one of those links and visiting your site.

As standard, we ensure that your website is optimised for search engines. This means your website is technically of the highest standard, put through a validation process and that all required meta-fields are included.

We can provide you with guidance on "meta-data" and how to collate meta-tags that are relevant to your site. We can then integrate your meta-tags into your site.

If you can allocate a weekly marketing budget, you can always pay for the 24/7 advertising space offered by the search engines, such as GOOGLE ADWORDS.

Beyond what we can do for you, and what you can do for yourself, we can put you in touch with specialists in Search Engine Optimisation. Their field of expertise is focused purely on how you can improve your ranking among the search engines - involving a process of meta-tag analysis, monitoring and continual optimisation.

Finally a very interesting article which corresponds with the comments discussed on this page...: Five Common Web Marketing Myths Exposed: Myth #1: Build it and they will come