Marketing Your Web Site: A Beginner's Guide
Marketing is essential if you want to get maximum benefit from your web site. It's absolutely no use having the most beautifully crafted, easy to use, informative web site, if no one ever visits it!
We introduce the main methods for marketing your web site, and finish with a discussion of how best to implement them.
Search engines
Search engines are the most popular way for people to find what they're looking for on the web. There are lots of search engines, from the major ones which cover anything and everything, to country-specific ones, and search engines that cover a particular area of interest or type of content; but the most popular choice for web surfers today is Google.
Most search engines, crawl the web automatically, finding new web sites to add to their indexes along the way. Which means that if just one other web site links to your site, many search engines will probably list it eventually. However some search engines will only list sites which are submitted for inclusion. In some cases this is a free service, and in others you must pay for your listing. (We would only recommend paid submission where the benefits of being included in a particular search engine index outweigh the costs.)
Directories
Whereas search engines only offer searching of the web, directories usually provide a categorised listing of web sites. The other main difference between search engines and directories is the way they are compiled: search engine indexes are compiled automatically; and directories are compiled by people. In practice, the distinction between search engines and directories is often blurred - most directories are searchable; and many search engines also provide directory listings. Being listed in the appropriate directories is just as important as being listed in the major search engines.
Link exchanges
Many sites have a links page with related sites, and these are often used by people to find other sites that might interest them. Being linked to by other web sites can also help your site to achieve better search engine rankings. While this may seem odd, remember how search engine indexes are compiled automatically? Some of the big search engines use the number of sites that link to your site as a measure of how authoritative your site is. A top site on a particular subject will usually have many thousands of links pointing to it, and will appear higher up in the search results.
However, you need to be a bit careful with this strategy, as some search engines will penalise web sites that take part in excessive linking campaigns and that link to "link farms". If you make sure that the sites you exchange links with are related to your web site, and that they don't have more than 100 links to other sites on a page, you should be OK.
Offline marketing of your web site
As we've already mentioned in these articles, it's a good idea to mention your web site address in your:
- Business cards,
- newspaper adverts,
- leaflets,
- signage, and
- other existing promotional material.
The people who see these adverts already know about a little bit about what you offer, but the web allows you to communicate so much more than many traditional forms of advertising. When you include your web site address on your offline ads, potential clients can visit your site to find out more about you and what you offer. A well-designed and informative web site can do most of your selling for you, turning potential clients into actual clients.
Next Steps
When it comes to marketing your web site, you can either decide to hire a professional company to do it for you (like us!), or do it yourself. Which option you choose depends on how much time you have on your hands, how big a budget you have for marketing your web site, and how confident you'd be in applying web marketing strategies. It's possible to do some serious research into effective web marketing, and apply the strategies yourself for very little cost. On the other hand, you can choose to pay for the time and knowledge of people who are already experienced in this area, and get it all done for you!
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