Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Best Practices To Website Promotion - Revealed

By Raam Anand

First off, having your own website is far more beneficial than you think. It's the most economical way to drive paying customers to your business. Whether you sell online or from traditional 'brick-and-mortar' stores, having a web presence is mandatory. The benefits far outweigh the extra effort in setting up your company website.

Once your website is ready, the next task would be to promote your website. This is also known as website promotion so that you will tell your target audience that you have built your online real estate that they can use to learn more about your business.

What Exactly is Website Promotion?

Getting your website in the search engine results page, within the first 10 or 20 results is the closest definition of website promotion. Rather, we can say it is the primary objective of website promotion. If you want real visitors to visit your website, you need to promote your website in various ways. All such 'tasks' that drive visitors to your website is collectively known as Website Promotion.

Search Engine Optimization is often the first thing any website owner will do in order to promote his/her website. It is the also the most difficult and time consuming task because a ton of research needs to be done to find out the exact keywords that your target audience uses to find your website in the search engines.

SEO - Being Careless Can Mean Disaster

There was a time when you add a bunch of targeted keywords to your web page and the search engines would present your website for people searching for those terms -- whether it made sense or not. This is known as keyword stuffing. Now, it is not so. In fact, for keyword stuffing, a website can be totally banned from the search engines and removed from their database.

Putting all your keywords on each page of your website will most likely get your website out of the search engine databases. It is recommended to have 2 or 3 keywords per web page with a density (repetition) of about 2% throughout the content. Built separate pages of each keyword or key phrase and link them all together using a sitemap for optimal results.

One more point to remember is to keep the keywords as unique as possible. If you are selling chairs, for example, it is most likely that your keyword will be "chairs". However, there are likely to be hundreds of other websites with the same search term. So, it would be a good idea to edit the word slightly and perhaps have a more specific keyphrase. It could be "chairs" followed by the place where your business is run, changing it to something such as "chairs new jersey".

Other than search engine optimization, you can also explore other common methods of website promotion including PPC, banners, articles and especially social networking sites. By combining various methods, you will be able to reach the right audience at the right time. Your ranking in the search engines will also go up and your website will start appearing the top results for your keywords.

At first glance, website promotion may seem complicated, but once you know what works and what doesn't, it is fairly simple. It isn't something you should skip, as you need website promotion to reach potential clients and customers. - 15359

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