promoting your website

Promoting your business on the Internet

There is a lot of mis-information out there about what you should do to promote your business on the Internet. There are just a few basic rules however:

1. Your website must be complete in that there are no broken links or incomplete pages:
   • A website evolves over time and is never 'complete', however when submitting a new or revised site to the search directories for inclusion, it will be reviewed by a human who expects the site to work properly and to provide the content it claims to provide.
2. The HTML code is well written:
   • Well written code will show the reviewer you care about your website, and it will help the search engine robots to properly index your site.
3. Text is presented as text and not images:
   • Search engine robots cannot read the text on images and so will not be able to index words that are important as keywords in searches.
4. <META> tags are used, not mis-used:
   • <META> tags are useful for giving some search engines information about your site, such as a description of the site and the sorts of keywords it can expect to find on each page. Repetition of keywords and use of inappropriate keywords is not recommended.
5. List your site with Yahoo, the Open Directory, Altavista and any other quality search directories you choose:
   • This is done by hand, with care. Listing in an inappropriate place will cause the listing to be rejected. I can do it for you. It normally takes me about half an hour.
6. DO NOT list your site with the automatic submission services!
   • Sounds great... "We will list your site with 4,000 search engines for only $29.95!" Trouble is they do not list with the most important ones: Yahoo and the Open Directory. They DO list with FFAs (Free For Alls), automated link lists that list sites in turn. Eventually your listing is replaced by newer ones and no-one uses them anyway. They were designed to increase your "link popularity" and so enhance your search engine rankings. Search engines are smarter these days and tend to ignore FFAs. As a really bad side effect of this kind of listing, your email becomes fodder for Spammers. Trust me, I've been a victim!
7. Ask owners of sites who you would like to link to you to do so, and offer to give them a reciprocal link from your site.
   • This is the most important thing you can do. The greater number of sites that link to your site, the higher ranking the search engines will give to your site. This is how you get onto Page 1 of the search engine results. The two important terms here are "relevance" and "ranking".
     1. Relevance applies to the keywords requested by the searcher. If your page has a number of uses of the keywords, this increases the relevance of your page and hence the likelihood of it being returned.
     2. Ranking relates to the number of sites that link to you. If no-one links to you, you will rank poorly.