How to Promote Your Website

It doesn’t matter how amazing your product is; if you aren’t going to market it the right way, no one is going to pay it any attention. It’s, pretty much, the same case with your website. The internet is only a place that hosts your website, but, getting people to know about your site is something that is completely in your hands. Now, we understand that you might be a little concerned if this is your first time putting out a website for your business. But, there is good news. There are tried and tested methods in the field of website marketing that can help you out. We will be discussing a few of them in this blog.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the first thing you need to do in order to make your site visible. Search engine optimization deals with embedding your website content with keywords that are most likely to be used by your target audience.

There are tools to help you with this. One of the most effective tools available right now is Google Keyword Planner.

It helps you identify keywords that are best suited to your niche/industry. Now, there are mainly two kinds of keywords – long-tailed and short. You need to use both of them in the right amounts to achieve maximum SEO effectiveness. Similarly, you also need to go for keywords that have a high search frequency, but, low competition. Keywords need to be embedded throughout your website. You need to place them in the body of your content, the headings, the subheadings, and the meta-description. Even your images need to have keywords. You can do this by placing them in a picture’s alt tag and title tag. SEO is the most basic and also, the most important website marketing tactic. You cannot go further without it.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram allow you to interact with your followers/customers directly. It’s an effective way to build a network and of course market whatever it is that you’re marketing. This obviously includes website marketing. By simply communicating the right message at the right time on social media, you can make a great impact in terms of generating more traffic to your website. Plenty of brands/businesses already do this. They implement various tactics such as promos and giveaways to generate as many visits as possible.

Backlinks

Search engine optimized, high-quality content, as we mentioned earlier, is the first step to marketing your website. The next major step is called backlink building. A backlink is a link on another site that links back to your site. This usually happens when other sites come across interesting content on your site and post links on their own site. Now, if the site happens to be an authority on a topic, your traffic will see a solid spurt in traffic. For instance, if you’re a shoe retailer and the main Adidas site discusses you in one of their blogs, you can definitely expect visits.

But, how does one build backlinks?

Well, the most basic thing to do is to create search optimized, high-quality content as we already discussed. Then comes the rest of the strategies such as running promotions, networking with influential bloggers/journalists, guest articles etc. Use online tools such as SEO Profiler to check where your competitors are getting links from and contact the websites with a high link influence score. Unfortunately, this must be done manually and there is no shortcuts or cutting corners if you would like to achieve the best results.

Submitting your websites to all the major search engines

Since more than 60% of surfers use search engines as their primary means of locating web sites, your first step would be to submit your web site to the Google & Bing. South African businesses can also list their website with Ananzi Search Engine Directory.

Pay per click (PPC)

Facebook (Ads Manager) and Google (Adwords) offer pay per click services. You can setup a daily budget and add your keywords and start receiving clicks from both platforms in a few minutes.

The goal is to receive as many clicks as you can for the less amount of money spent. This can be achieved by not targeting the most popular keywords but rather to focus on alternative keywords that has less competition.