How to promote your website. The basics - Part 1

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DIY Web site Promotion

The aim of this article is to help people promote a website for business or personal use using effective but ethical search engine optimization techniques. The article has been written in such a way as to offer advice to seasoned professionals as well as enabling total newcomers to start promoting and marketing their web presence.


What is website promotion


Website promotion is in effect marketing for your online business. Online marketing is very different to the more conventional marketing methods used by bricks and mortar organizations. The overall aim of website promotion is to get as many people to visit your website as possible. Ideally these visitors should be targeted visitors and be actively seeing your services or products. The main difference about the online world is that you are actively able to sell to anyone in the world.

The great thing about website promotion is that is doesn't not always have to cost a lot of money. Many very popular websites have been actively promoted and marketed without any form of marketing budget. It all comes down to the sort of products or services that you offer from your site.

First steps

The first thing you need to do is develop a website. You may choose to do this yourself or outsource this to a professional website development company. If you choose the latter be sure to check them out by looking through their portfolio. You might also want to approach some of their customers and ask for their opinion. When using a company ask what exactly you will receive for your money, also ask them to talk you through the process in such a way as you will understand it.

If you have previous experience if website creation then you may well decide you wish to do the development work on your own. If you have little or no experience then to be honest this is best left to someone who knows what he or she is doing. Your website is in effect what your user/customer will see and if it does not give out the right signals then your online business will suffer. Your website is not only your point of sale it is also your customers first and last impression as well as their sales person and customer services advisor.


During site construction


When you are building your site this is the first step towards website promotion. you need to build pages that are capable of ranking well in search engine for your targeted keywords or phrases.

Keywords: Keywords are what a user to your site will be searching for. You should write page content that is directory related to your keyword subject. You should also try to achieve a good keyword density ratio. This means what percentage of your total words on the page is your keyword. You need to be careful when doing this though because the page still needs to be easy to read to an end user. Excessive use of keywords, sometimes referred to as "keyword cramming" is also frowned upon by many of the top search engines. Keyword are also used within the header section of your web page. The header is the part that is invisible to users but visible to search engines. Within the header section you could use something like...

<meta name="keywords" content="keywords,seperated.by,commas">

Title: The page title is without a doubt the most important element if your page from a search engine point of view. The title is inserted within the header section of your page. The title is also visible at the top of your browser when you are on the web page. The title should be a short and very specific title that relates directly to the pages content. The title will also very often be displayed within search engine results pages as the part a searcher should click on to visit your page. When you are inserting a title the format should be like this....
<title>Page title goes here</title>


Description: The description is another section that is placed within the header of the page. The description is simply a fairly short description of the page contents. Some search engines will also display the description within the results page. Most however do not and will use actual content that they find on the page. The description tag should look like the following...

<meta name="description" content="A description of your page goes here">


All of the above elements are placed within the header of the web page. below is an example of the makeup of an average web page with descriptions for what each section is.

<html>
<head>
<title>Page title goes here</title>
All header content goes here keywords, description.
</head>
<body>
The body is the "body" of the page so all page content goes here.
</body>
</html>

The above is just to give you an example of how a simple web page would be constructed. You will notice that each page section has a start and a finish defined like this <element>element stuff goes here</element> The entire page is surrounded by <html></html> this means that the page was written in html. Hyper Text Markup Language.


As far as site development goes you have now done all the basics required in order to continue with your site promotion.