Traffic is the lifeblood of any website! So, how can you begin to increase the traffic to your site? Site Promotion.
Key points to get started:
- Advertising with Google Adwords
- Local online directory services
- Social networks
- Content generation
What is site promotion?
Site promotion should always form part of your SEO strategy, and it’s a logical follow-on from all the hard work you’ve done to make your site perform well in the search engines. For example, site promotion can help improve your search engine ranking and get your site indexed faster. Many aspects of site promotion happen off-site - think of it like handing out your business card at a networking function.
What do I need to do?
We’ve made sure that getting started is easy, and provide you with all the tools you need. From adding keywords, to setting up Google Analytics - you can do it all from the SiteBuilder.
Why do I need to promote my site?
Promoting your site is the best and easiest way to increase traffic. Think of site promotion as advertising your business and services - but cheaper (if not free!). Site promotion is part of SEO and includes using keywords that are picked up by search engines to enable people to find you, using social networks to gain fans, and listing your site on local directories.
The internet has a much wider reach than traditional advertising, and even better is that measuring your success is much easier. There are many channels and methods available to you, so take the plunge and get noticed!
How do I get started?
Here are some popular ways to get noticed by the search engines, and potential customers:
- Use Google AdWords. With Google AdWords, you can target your advertising using your keywords, and only pay for it when people click on your link.
- Submit your website to search engines.
- Submit your site to online and local directories.
- Off-page optimization.
- Consistently generate new content.
- Linking.
- Keywords.
- Headers.
- Promote your site via social networks.
Promoting your site has a lot to do with off-page search engine optimization strategies. These strategies will develop backlinks to your website as well as increase traffic and your authority in your topic area.
Here are a few to consider:
1. Use Google AdWords
Google AdWords is one of the most popular ways to advertise on the internet. Because it works on a Pay-per-click model, it’s ideal if you’re just starting out or you simply want to have a very focused advertising target market.
2. Submit your website to the three major search engines
To get you started, we publish your sitemap by default when you publish your site, letting search engines easily know what has changed without them having to crawl every page.
Submitting your site to a search engine does not mean you will be automatically included in the search engine's index. By doing this you alert the search engine to your website's presence and are added to a list of sites to be crawled. XML sitemaps make it easier for search engine crawlers to see the depth of your website and keep track of things changing like new pages being added and deleted.
Of course, you can also submit your sitemap manually. Here are links to submit your site to Google, Yahoo and Bing:
3. Consistently add more content
Building up more content on your site is an extremely important part of search engine optimization. When you add more content to your site you are:
- Providing visitors to your site a great reason to come back.
- Giving search engines a reason to visit your site often. Search engines want to keep the most updated version of sites in their index and they also want to consistently add new and improved information to it as well.
- Adding to the searchablility of your site. The more pages your site has in the search engine's index, the more possibilities your site has of being found for keywords searches.
The type of content you add to your site is up to you. You can add a blog to your site, run promotions, upload images and more. Publishing your site to your Facebook Page is also a great way to increase your visibility and attract more visitors.
4. Get involved in social networking
A great way to develop a following for your website is to get involved in the social networking arena. Becoming active on social networking sites will bring traffic to your site as well as develop back links. The goal of this is to get social with others on the web while promoting your site at the same time.
There are many more options including niche focused social networking sites to get involved in.
We love it when you tell the world about your site! So we've added some easy ways to do this after you've published your site.
When you click on the "Publish" button and publish your site, you will be able to click on the Facebook and Twitter social networking buttons on the confirmation screen and post your update to your preferred social network.
You can also add social networking widgets, such as the "Share", "Tweet This" and Facebook "Like" button, to your website. These offer an easy way for visitors to your site to share content quickly and easily.
5. Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and submit a sitemap
Google Webmaster is a powerful tool that allows you to manage Google's indexing of your site, and improve the traffic to your website.
6. Do link exchanges
Link building is an extremely important part of SEO. The search engines will look at the amount of links that come into your site as well as the status of the sites that link to you (the amount of traffic those sites get). Although the search engines look more favorably on links that are not reciprocal, exchanging links is a great place to start!
- Find other websites that have the same topic as your site and send an email to the webmaster asking if he or she would like to do a link exchange.
- Ask local organizations such as your Chamber of Commerce or Visitor's Bureau if a link exchange could be done. Ask your friends, family members and social networking contacts if they would like to exchange links.
7. Write a blog
Blogging is an exceptional way to consistently add new content to your site! We recommend taking a look at Tumblr. It's a great way to get started and once you've set up your blog you can add it to your site using the Tumblr Widget in the SiteBuilder.
8. Submitting articles to article directories
There are many article directories on the Internet that accept unpaid submissions of articles for inclusion in their article database. What you can do is write informative articles about your niche area, submit them to these article directories and place an Author Bio at the end with a link back to your website. When you submit your articles to an article directory you give other people permission to reprint your article in their Internet publications such as websites, newsletters, blogs, etc. as long as the Author Bio is included along with the links back to your website. As people begin to read your articles and reprint them, you will begin to not only get links back to your site, but visitors as well. Here are a few good article directories to get you started: ideamarketers.com, ezinearticles.com and articlealley.com.
9. Offline marketing
Don't forget to add your website to your business cards, brochures and print media advertising.
Strategies which will increase traffic to your website will also play into your ranking in the search engines; it's a great cycle to get your website into because more traffic = better rankings and better rankings = more traffic!
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