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Website Promotion and Marketing

If your online promotion activities is bringing you all the business and money you want from your website read no further. But, if you're like most of us in need to promote our website and get more visitors...read on. If you have a business site it means more profit.

Website promotion and marketing are important.

According to various marketing reports, people find websites by:

Website promotion is demanding and we would like to categorised it in 4 different ways.

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Design and architecture

Do it right from the beginning. Have an appealing site that loads fast and is easy to navigate. You want visitors to come back to your site. You need to consider things like Structure and Form . The web is about information and you don't need flash or flair to promote it. What you need to spend time on is the content . Your visitors must be convinced by you and clearly see the benefits. When all this has been considered and your site is ready then you can start with website promotion for your site.

Contact information

Have contact information on every page, preferably on both the top and bottom of every page.
You must let the visitors know who you are and make it easy for them to contact you.

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Hosting

First of all, get your own domain name that is easy to remember.

Choose a clear domain name that gives readers information about the content of your web site.
For example www.importedbananas.ca or www.swedishmeatballs.com. Some search engines rank a site high if they contain relevant words in the domain name, title and body text.

Imagine this. You have a domain name like www.freehosting/yourusername/ and the webhost for some reason shuts down permanently. All your listings in search engines will be dead links. Your customer's bookmarks will be dead. All references to your website on printed material will be worthless.
If you on the other hand would have had your own domain name, then you could have easily moved the domain name and your files to another host and your customer would not have noticed anything.

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Traffic analysis

You need to know who has been visiting your website lately. Where are they coming from? What pages do they enter and which one do they leave from? What did they search for if they came from a search engine? This information will help you make promotional decisions about your site.
Ways of analyzing the information are:

• Use your web host service if they provide it.
  See an example of how a report can look.

• Buy special software.

• Use online services such as Webtrends.com.

• Use information from Alexa as shown below.

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Positioning

Search engine positioning is a very cost effective way of promoting your website.
People search the Internet to solve a problem and at least 50% of the visitors come to websites via search engine's.
Therefore it is crucial your website is designed to rank high in the most important search engines. This is an important part of website promotion and marketing.

There are two considerations to designing a site:

• What the visitor sees when they come to your site.

• What the search engines see when they spider your site.

A well designed page will be ranked high in search engines and it is no accident that certain web pages are ranked high

Search engine submissions

Submit your site to +300 search engines......You have probably seen this advertisement. There are numerous services like that on the Internet. It is quick and painless. However, we prefer to and do our own submissions manually.

• Submission: Your site is submitted ...so what..it might not be listed.

• Listing: Your site is listed but maybe no one will discover it.

• Positioning: Your site is highly ranked and visited.

To submit to directories is different from submitting to search engines. For the directories the metadata is not so important. What you have to concentrate on is where your site should be submitted. To have guidance with choosing appropriate description that goes with the site is also important. Furthermore, today search engines sometimes won't allow more than a handful of submits from the same IP address on any given day.

Maintenance

It is of most importance that you Improve, Maintain, Promote, Monitor and Accelerate your site in order to stay at top.

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Meta data

Metadata is code hidden in the HTML which the search engine spiders read.
It used to be very important how you choose your keywords and description.
However, it is much more to positioning than just meta data, such as themes and link popularity. It is a tuff race for the search engines and lots of dollars are at stake. They compete to give the surfers the best and most relevant search results. Search engines do not want to be fooled by some simple tricks.

The Title-Tag

Include at least two keywords in your title-tag.

Keywords

Used to have a high importance. After a lot of misuse the search engines pay less notice to the keyword-tag.
As an alternative you can purchase keyword listings in some directories and bring more traffic to your site. You pick keywords or phrases that are relevant to your site and bid on them. You only pay when targeted customers click through to your site.

The theme

One way to increase traffic has been to produce door way pages.
A better way is to build your pages with a theme in mind. Keep your keywords in mind and repeat them but not to often. This will give the visitors a better idea of what the page is all about. Some claim you should try to keep your pages short, others say they can be long.

Link popularity

This is the number of links on other sites pointing to your site. If your link popularity is high it will improve your ranking on some search engines.
You can easily check it your self with Altavista by searching for links:youraddress.com/anyfile.htm

Directories

More and more directories take a fee for listings. To submit a business site to the largest directories such as Looksmart and Yahoo costs a great deal.
The LookSmart Network reaches 64 million people. That's four out of five US Internet users! They have Express Submit – $199 US and Basic Submit – $99 US .
Yahoo!'s Business Express Program includes expedited consideration of your commercial web site for inclusion in the Yahoo! directory and a guaranteed site review within 7 business days. Their processing fee is $199.00 US.

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Alternative website promotions techniques

There are many more ways to attract visitors or make them want to return to your site.

Banners

I am sure you have seen a banner on top of a webpage before, often a 468X60 pixels animation. Sometimes it is designed to fool you by looking like a message or something you should click on.
Banners are a very quick way to launch a website. There are many free banner ad services to choose between. Often for every two banners shown on your site, one of your banners is shown on someone else's site.
If your visitors view the same banner over and over again they will get immune to it. A solution is Rotating Banners. You can display different banners each time your page loads.
The average click through rate is pretty low for banners. Numbers between 1% to 3% have been reported.

What makes banners effective is branding. If your banner is designed right people will remember it even if they don't click on it.

An alternative is to buy a targeted category in for example Yahoo or buy a "keyword banner" which will pop up when a visitor types in a certain keyword.

Link exchange (Reciprocal linking)

To have links on your site to various resources on the Internet is beneficial to your visitors. It can be in the form of buttons, banners or plain text links. We believe you should not be afraid your visitors will leave your site by clicking on your links. However, you should not just give it away for free. If you link to another site why can't they link back to your site. Trading links with other sites by contacting them is one way.

Affiliate programs

Let people (other websites) promote your products or services while you do nothing and pay nothing! The way to do this is to join an affiliate program.
Put your store and your brand all over the Web and increase your online revenues by joining an affiliate network.
Imagine having tens of thousands of other websites selling your products or services.

Find out more by visiting LinkShare.com.

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E-mail marketing and Newsletters (Ezines)

This is little time consuming but a good way of nourishing the relation with your visitors/customers. Preferably you offer them something and they contact you or request information from you. You have to build a list with their E-mail addresses and treat them with respect. Absolutely no spamming or bulk E-mail. And remember it takes time to build their confidence in you. You can also advertise in existing newsletters.

A good way to learn and explore all the advantages with Newsletters and mailing list is to sign-up for a newsletter.

Syndicate services

By inserting some code into your HTML pages you will serve your visitor with fresh information. An example is our Canadian news web feed from Moreover.com. We do not need to update our news page and it is 100% free.

Free stuff

You can offer your visitor helpful advice in a special field you have extensive knowledge in. A good way is to have articles or free E-books for download. You can even get free articles for publication from websites.

Business cards and post cards

Don't forget to add your website address (URL) on your business cards, brochures, postcards etc.

Accepting credit cards

The easiest and most convenient way for your visitors to buy from you is to use their cards online. One easy way is to use PayPal which lets users send and receive money online. Read more about this on our Internet payment page.

Off-line advertisement

Advertise in many newspapers and magazines.
This is still a very good promotion tip

Signature files

Create an e-mail signature at the end of every e-mail you send to enhance the website promotion. It can look like this:

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Come to the best service online!
The Sweden Canada Link
Phone: 905 879-7886
E-mail: info@swedencanada.com
Web site: www.swedencanada.com

Newsgroups

There are newsgroups for announcing new websites and some others that accept press releases. Just search for Newsgroups or Usenet in any good directory.

Webrings

A good start is Webrings . There you can find out how to join an existing webring or to create your own ring.

Awards

Yet another part of website promotion. Please see our page about awards.

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Apply to win our prestigious award!