OK, now you have a bright shiny new website... but no one is visiting.
Could it be you have missed something?
This is the hardest part of a successful website, although if you don't
want the bother, contact us for details of our site promotion service.
If you want to do it yourself, then go to our Solutions
page for links to optimization services and online publications. You
can also use Google Adwords to boost your site visits through their
pay-per-click scheme, download a
FREE pdf guide on Adwords by right-clicking and saving this link.
It's by Brad Callen the creator of SEO-Elite and is a great place to
get started (you will need Adobe
Reader to view it).
There are literally millions of sites out there, all wanting to be
seen. There are several other ways of getting your site seen, and broadly
they fall into two categories.
Search Engines
Sites like Google (our favourite), Yahoo, Excite, etc. will give you
a list of sites that will fit a search criteria you give them. To
be
listed in the first 10 sites on the list is where you want to be, but
getting there is very difficult. Firstly there is no better alternative
than good content, well written and informative. It is important to
include 'key' words in the text that will be viewed, that is, the
words
that you hope people who should visit your site type into the search
engines. Try not to overdo it, there is a chance you will get blacklisted
if you do, just include the keywords in a natural way, and never try
to disguise keywords by making the text the same as the background.
The search engines consider that spamming them and will drop your site
from their indexes. You will have to use HTML METATAGS in your pages,
these describe what you think your pages are about and used to be important
to the search engines to decide the page relevence. Now apart from
utilising the important "title" metatag, their use is
mostly restricted to the "description" keyword in describing your page
in the search engine listings. You can register with the main search
engines
by
going
to their
site
and submitting your URL, we really don't recommend services that promise
to get you a high listing as a one-off. Assuming they manage it,
chances
are the website will drop out of sight the next month. You need to
bear in mind that there is an initial period when you will do a
lot of waiting
for your site to appear in the search engines, particularly Google.
Different sites work different ways, some send little programs to
check
your site, whilst others use real humans. Either way it will take some
time for them to check your site, so don't get impatient, they don't
take kindly to being hassled. The exception to this are blog-based websites using for instance the Wordpress platform. They tend to get indexed much quicker and you can get a Wordpress website from us.
Linking
In addition to the above, most search engines also check on the number
of links to your site. Reciprocal links from Link Exchanges used
to
be a popular way of gaining links quickly, however inbound non-reciprocated
links are now considered more important, particularly if they
are from popular
sites themselves. Don't forget though that the reason for promoting
links is that you will more quickly get the sort of people you
want
to attract to know you exist. So be careful about the sites you get
links from. Try and find people with similar interests and arrange
for them to link to you. This can be done through mutual contacts,
clubs, associations, etc. use whatever contacts and networks you
are
involved with. Also, use your URL at every opportunity, put it on
your stationery, Christmas cards, tell your friends to tell their
friends.
One way of finding out who is visiting your site is to use a webcounter
site such as TheCounter.com, which will give you an account for free,
with the HTML code to put in your pages. If you then visit their site,
you will be able to see all sorts of information on who has visited.
One note of warning, make the counter invisible. You will have to pay
a small subscription to make it invisible, but it looks bad when you
first start off and only have a few hits!
The other way would be to use Google Analytics but although it is free, it can be almost impenetrable in use for anyone who is not well versed in its use. You will get more data than you are likely to ever understand, but on the top level it will tell you what pages are getting hit most, where visitors come from and what search phrases are getting people to your site.
