Marketing Your Website

This article appeared in the March issue of Bizillion Magazine.

Some of the best methods for marketing your website are inexpensive or free.

A number of the inexpensive ways of marketing your website came about as a result of Web 2.0 online services and concepts.

As you may know, Web 2.0 is the result of a brainstorming session between O’Reilly (a company that publishes programming books) and MediaLive International (a company that produces tradeshows). The dot.com crash had taken place and MediaLive needed a concept for an upcoming conference. Clearly web wasn’t dead but who wanted to be associated with the dot.bomb? To distance themselves, they decided that everything before the bubble burst was Web 1.0 and everything current was Web 2.0. Then they made a list of what was out and what was in. Here’s a sample:

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick (NY firm)		Google Ad Sense
Page Views		Cost per Click
Britannica Online		Wikipedia
Personal Websites		Blogs
Domain Speculation		Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Publishing		Participation
Stickiness		Syndication (RSS feeds)

Many of the new services, blogs, wikis and Google Analytics are free (so far) and can aid in marketing your website. There are many ways to broadcast your product or services message online. This article looks at Organic Search Engine Optimization.

Organic Search Engine Optimization
Years ago there were many search engines and companies who offered site submission services. Today, there are three search engines that count - Google, Yahoo and MSN - and no reason to submit your site to any one of them. Your site will show up on the first page of search results if it has content that is the most relevant for a particular keyword or phrase. Here are some inexpensive ways to make your site more relevant:

Title tags need to reflect the content on each page (don’t use the same title tag for every page on your website. Google is putting more emphasis on title tags now than keywords or descriptions.

Keywords and Descriptions still need to be part of your HTML meta tags. Make sure that you don’t spam the search engines by repeating the same word or phrase over and over.

Add Alt tags to all of your images. Alt tags stand for alternative and were originally used to help people with disabilities or those looking at the web with images turned off, know what the image represented with a brief description.

Add a Sitemap to your website. A link to your text-only sitemap should appear on all pages.
Use text as text instead of text graphics. Search engines have an easier time of indexing your entire site if they can read the text.

Use text-based navigation. Leave the funky navigation graphics to the smaller personal websites.

Add and update content daily. And, here is where bigger is better. A 1,000-page magazine site on the environment will display above a 20-page site with similar content. If you can’t update your site daily, look for relevant RSS feeds that you could feature on your website.

Ask for inbound links from parallel businesses or services. If other businesses and organizations think your site is relevant then Google will too.

Use keywords in your content, navigation and text links.

Start a monthly newsletter with links to different areas of your website.

Start a blog or a wiki about your main service, product or organizational topic.

Create an Email Signature with links back to your site as well as a marketing message or promotion.

Use Google Analytics to track your SEO revisions on an ongoing basis.

If you don’t have a content management system that allows you to update your meta, title or alt tags, you can give title tag, keywords, key description and alt tag content to your webmaster to update throughout your website.

Things to Avoid
Home or landing pages without navigation, sitemap or text.
A content-starved website
An entirely Flash website
A frames-based website
Link generating services
Spamming search engines

Three Things you can do Today to Check your Site’s SEO
1. Search for your site using keyword on the three major search engines. Does it show up on the first page for a generic keyword such as banking, vacation, sustainability? If not, go to step two.

2. See how Google sees your site by clicking on the Cached link on the search results page. It’ll display your site with the keyword or phrase highlighted throughout your home page. Do your keywords show up in your navigation, text links and content? If not, go to step three.

3. Update your content, navigation and text links with keywords in mind. And, if your market is dominated by large players, continue to add relevant content to your website.