Phillips Innovations

Effective promotion is what separates mediocre websites from great websites. Anyone can make a small investment and launch a great looking website in a few weeks. Driving big traffic to your site is the tough task that will take months, and even years. In fact, most websites never achieve the traffic levels their owners originally hoped for. Huge sums of money can be on advertising and search engine optimization experts, but there is no guarantee of a good return on your investment. It can be maddening knowing that there are hundreds of customers out there searching for what you sell - and not finding your nice looking website.

For small business owners, the good news is that website promotion is not rocket science, and if you are willing put the work in, there’s plenty you can do to promote your website yourself. Also if you choose to hire an expert, have basic understanding of the subject will prevent you from losing your shirt - which happens far to often in this business!

5 Must Do Tasks – Search Engine Optimization 101

1. Know your keywords

This is the foundation of any Search Engine Optimization campaign. Before starting an SEO campaign, decisions need to be made about what keywords you aim to have highly ranked. What kinds of customers are you searching for? What keywords are they searching for online? It imperative that the keywords which you select are those that your audience is using, not the keywords that you think are important. Use your intuition to guess which key phrases customers might search for, and then do some online research confirm which words get the most traffic. Start by using the free version of WordTracker and consider a paid subscription if you’re serious about search engine optimization.

2. Write Useful Content

You want to rank well in Google, but you need to ask yourself: why should you rank well? It’s more obvious why you want to rank well; you want more visitors, and you want to sell something. But why should you rank well? In the eyes of Google and others, you’re just another webmaster – but search engines first and foremost cater to the searcher. So you better make sure you deserve to be ranking well in Google for whatever it is you deliver to the searcher. I may just want to sell websites, but it is the instructional articles such as this one that make my site somewhat useful for online visitors. It is time consuming to write good content, so if you’re still not convinced it’s necessary, read on:

• Search engines mainly understand text. So you need to make sure you create interesting, in-depth content in the form of text. It won’t hurt to include Flash animations, videos, or lots of images – but it also won’t help the search engine. A good test of whether your text can be seen in search engines is to open the source of your page (right click your site and choose “view source”, or however your browser calls it) and then check if that text appears.
• There’s a huge variety of search queries that may later on lead to your site. You can optimize for the most obvious high traffic search terms, but catering individually to the thousands of lesser keywords is impossible. A more realistic strategy is to have lots of content on your site. If you sell dog supplies, well then write about dogs, dog food, dog coats, dog coats fashion, tips on putting on dog shoes, and throw in an article or two about dog breeding during Renaissance Italy (and then translate all those articles into as many languages as you can).
• Let’s say you sell dog supplies, but your competitor does the same, and she also has lots of content on her site. There’s only one thing that will help you: you need not only to have lots of content, but you need to have original content. Create that special feed-the-dog game on your website. Show off interactive charts on the evolution of dogs. Provide a wallpaper download area for dog lovers. You get the idea – do something original no one else thought of. Being unique means that visitors have a reason to come to your site instead of your competitor’s site.
• Creating lots of original content is almost the easy part. What’s much harder, and there’s no short-cut, is to become an authority in your field. It’s possible you already are – great, then I suggest you share your expert knowledge freely with the world. People will like your site more if they get the best tips from you, ideally, those that make a change in their life, however small (maybe you are showing them a more effective way to do something, or you answered one of their questions). If, on the other hand, you’re not already an expert in a given field, I suggest you start a blog – a knowledge and news journal for which you need to research an hour or so every day, learning while writing. Just wait half a year, and you’ll be an expert in you blog’s topic.

3. Submit to Search Engines and Directories

Submit your website to every search engine you can think of – there’s only a handful that make up 99% of the market. For starters, here is the submission page for Google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks. There is no need to submit more than one page. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

Know that a directory is not a search engine. Rather, it is a hierarchical listing of sites sorted according to category and subcategory. Be warned that literally millions of directories exist out there, but only a few will really benefit your site. Be sure to list your site in the free Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com), overseen by overworked volunteer editors. But if you don't get listed right away, don't be impatient and resubmit, or you'll go to the end of the queue. A link in this directory will help you a lot.

Yahoo! Directory (dir.yahoo.com) is another important directory. Real humans read submission, so be careful to follow the instruction given. Hint: Use somewhat less than the maximum number of characters allowable, so you don't have wordy text that will tempt the Yahoo! editor to begin chopping. Yahoo! Directory Submit(ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/) requires a $299 annual recurring fee to have your site considered for inclusion within seven business days. Other paid business directories that might help are About.com and Business.com.

Listing in niche directories is also a good idea. A website called Info Vilesilencer provides comprehensive listings and up to date directories and organizes them by topic. Look for the ones in your industry, or focused on your geographic region. Also check out their top ranked general directories, but don’t get roped into paying for premium listings or spending 12 hours a day submitting tedious forms for 100s of irrelevant directories.

4. The Technical Stuff

Making sure the HTML behind your website is fairly important, and also fairly straightforward compared to the real make-or-break tasks of writing good content and attracting other webmasters to link to your site. Instructions on how to use Title Tags, Meta tags, H1 headings, Alt Tags, Sitemaps, robot.txt files etc, can all be found in a great little instruction file written by Google itself. The one topic I’ll emphasize here is good Title writing, because it’s a) very easy to master, b) very often done wrong, and c) very impactful on how your pages are ranked.

Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page - rich in keywords you want people to find you with - using roughly 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title (such as "the," "and," etc.) as possible, while still making it readable. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the<HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format: <TITLE>How to Promote Your Website Successfully - Phillips Innovations</TITLE>. (It also shows on the blue bar at the top of your web browser.)

Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that's what people will be searching for, don't just use your company name "Acme Ammunition, Inc.," use "Silver and Platinum Bullets - Acme Ammunition, Inc." The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title (called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is your identity on the search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.

5. Acquire Inbound Links

Links to your site from other sites drive additional traffic. But since Google and other major search engines consider the number of incoming links to your website ("link popularity") as an important indicator of relevance, more links will help you rank higher in the search engines. Google has a measure called PageRank that reflects the quantity and quality of incoming links. All links aren't all equal. Links from trusted, popular sites help your site rank higher than links from lower traffic sites. Start by getting your personal contacts to link with you, and then branch out by asking other webmasters with sites on similar topics. It’s a pain in the butt, but an extremely valuable tool Google uses to determine which sites are rankworthy. A wealth of information is available online and when you run out of ideas, just look HERE!

Going Above and Beyond - 4 More Promotion Ideas

Develop A Free Service

It's boring to invite people, "Come to our site and learn about our business." It's quite another to say "Use the free kitchen remodeling calculator available exclusively on our site." Make no mistake, it's expensive in time and energy to develop free resources, but it is very rewarding in increased traffic to your site - and a motivation to link to the site! Make sure that your free service is closely related to what you are selling so the visitors you attract will be good prospects for your business. Give visitors multiple opportunities and links to cross over to the sales portion of your site.

Issue Press Releases

Find newsworthy events and send news releases to print and Web periodicals in your industry. The links to your site in online news databases may remain for several months and will temporarily improve traffic to your site and increase link popularity. Use a online news release service such as PR Web. Placing your website URL in online copies of your press release may increase link popularity temporarily.

Ask an SEO expert

SEO is a specialist area, and it takes time and skill just to stay up to date. Unless you have prior knowledge and experience, you will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to learn things from scratch. While many of the tasks outlined in this guide are very basic, there is still much to be gained from an expert’s opinion. Most SEO experts charge a high monthly, and indefinite fee, and are thus eager to talk to potential customers and give an assessment of your site, which they will say always need lots of work! Press them for details on what specifically is wrong, and see how much of it you can fix yourself.

Make use of any PPC data

Chances are, your decision to begin a SEO campaign is fueled by your desire to reduce costly pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. While reliance on PPC will be reduced with a good SEO campaign, you can make use of your current PPC efforts when researching your search phrases to target. Analyze your PPC keywords and look to see which of them have brought the highest traffic levels, best click through rates and greater sales conversions. It is likely a search phrase that brought successful results through a PPC campaign will be very relevant in your quest to obtain top search engine positioning.