SurfSmart Free Online Website Marketing and Promotion

SurfSMART Online Marketing Guide

Getting your website ready for promotion

Here is a list of things to do before you begin to promote your site:

First, determine your budget. Several Search Engines require that you pay for inclusion and there are many more that offer "pay-per-click" and other options. Submitting to all of the top pay for inclusion search engines listed here will cost you more than $500 annually. And if you want to get involved in some pay per click programs, you will need a monthly budget as well.

Your own domain name. This is important for any business who wants to portray a professional image and helps your visitors to trust that you are a legitimate company. With domain names and hosting so affordable these days, why wouldn't you get one?

Make sure the site is finished. Ok, in reality your website is an ongoing project, but it needs to be at a point where it is ready for visitors. Don't even consider promoting a site that has "Under Construction" posted on the home page or that is not fully functional!

Content, content, content! Does the triple repeat get the point across! It is amazing how many people overlook this simple concept. Make your site user friendly. Check for typographical or grammatical errors, broken links, missing graphics. And remember, it doesn't matter how many hits you get if your content can't keep them there. The number of sales you get from the hits is what's important. Most search engines will spider your site to index all of the pages, so it is important to optimize all of your pages.

Graphics should be clean and fast loading and should complement the content. Avoid blinkers, scrolling marquees, and anything that distracts visitors away from the content.

Optimizing your page with META tags and strategically placed keywords.

Keywords are important because many search engines use them to index your site. Start by thinking of what words you would type in a search engine to find your site. Try going to the search engines and typing in the words you choose and see what comes up. Make sure that this is where you want to be. You might want to click on a few of the top sites and check out their keywords to see if there are any you didn't think of for your type of site. And use phrases rather than single keywords. For example: "web design" rather than "web, design". Most people type phrases in the search engines. Use that to your advantage.

Here's a great software tool that will help you find the right keywords to improve search engine placement and ranking. It is called Word Tracker. This invaluable resource will save you tons of time playing around with your keywords trying to bring traffic to your site. If people aren't typing your keywords, how will they find you? Use this tool to learn what people are typing in the search engines to find products and services like yours.

Title and Meta Tags

Now you need to add these keywords to the Title and Meta tags on your page. Meta tags are code that is placed in your page that is invisible to your visitors but many of the search engines use it when they spider your site to rank your listing. If you use a graphical editor, then you may not be familiar with the HTML code where the meta tags are placed. Most editors, however, will have a tab or menu item where you can edit the HTML. The meta tags should look something like this and should be placed in the order listed here inside the <head> tags:

<html>
<head>
<title>Title of your web page - include your most important keywords and phrases</title>
<meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="here is where you put the description of your web page that you want to appear in the search engine results - include some of your keywords and phrases">
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="your, top, keywords, and, keyphrases, in, order, of, importance">
</head>

It is important to limit the repetition of a keyword in the Meta tag. For example:
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="web design, web marketing, web development, etc."> is OK as long as you do not use the word more then a few times. If you use a word repeatedly too often, the search engines might think you are spamming and ban your site altogether.

Optimizing Keyword Usage

Now that you have added your keywords in your Title and Meta Tags, it is important to have them in other places as well to increase your rankings on some of the search engines that may not use meta tags or may use other criteria for ranking your site. Add keywords to the following places:

Several times throughout the Content (text) of your page.
Page Headings - rather than make your heading larger by increasing the font, make it a "heading".
<alt> image tags
In your domain name - yes, many companies are registering domain names that contain their keywords and forwarding that domain to their website. For example: www.web-design-development-marketing.com could be forwarded to www.surfsmart.net. These domains make great doorway pages to your domain as well allowing you to optimize the page with your keywords. With domain names as low as $8.95/yr, it is now much more feasible to register several domain names for this purpose.

Now that your page is optimized for the search engines, you may want to go to the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) and label your website. Then install the rating tags in the <head> tag of your site. Some browsers use these tags that allow parents to set up filters for their child where unlabeled sites are blocked. So it is a good idea to get these ratings to be sure that everyone can see your site.

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