« Effective Project Management | Main | Conference Call »
For Webmasters: Tips on promoting your Website
By webmaster | March 28, 2008
Promoting a Website
Being a webmaster it is essential to know the various ways in promoting a website. Well, you just created a new website which is eye-catching and has an attractive look. How are you gonna get visitors for this website?
Various sources of Traffic
Webmasters can gain visitors thru search engines, directories, related websites, textual advertisements, social bookmarking sites, banner advertisements, newsletters, email marketing and other offline ads.
Traffic thru Search Engines
Organic traffic thru Search Engines is the most effective traffic and also available for free. But you really need to work hard to get your website in the top 10 list or atleast top 20 sites, for a competitive keyword. Your website needs to be optimized for Search Engines to get top rankings in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Page).
The website should be written in a valid html/xhtml format. Site content should be unique and should be in human readable format. Stuffing of too many keywords, doorway pages, content specially created for search engines and no use for humans, and also duplicate content will make your website banned from search engines. The website should have relevant and quality backlinks from other websites.
Google tops the number 1. position in driving traffic to your website. Yahoo and MSN (Live search) also are known for driving traffic, but comparatively less than Google.
Submission to Web Directories
Submitting to web directories has recently come down as most of the web directories do not drive enough traffic, except few. Directories with higher pagerank used to sell links based on their pagerank. Those were also recently slashed by Google by reducing their pagerank and SERP positions. However if you find a quality directory you might be able to get a considerable amount of traffic.
Building backlinks from relevant website
Building relevant backlinks should be one of the important tasks in web promotion. You should promote your website thru link exchanges (reciprocal link), although it is said that acquiring one-way link exchange yields good results. One should avoid acquiring links from link farms, sites which have numerous outbound links with no content.
Text ads and banner advertisements
Instead of waiting till your site gets organic traffic from search engines, you could drive traffic to your sites by placing textual ads/ banner ads. You can directly place your link in a high traffic website by way of sponsorships or participate in advertisement programs such as Google’s Adwords, Yahoo Ads, Adbrite etc. where you’ll have to pay per click.
Social Bookmarking Traffic
Believe it or not, your site will get enormous traffic from the moment you submit your articles in social bookmarking sites such as stumbleupon, digg, delicious, technorati, faves, furl etc. However it gradually decreases if you dont get the attention of users or your content is not of much use to others. This type of websites often rank your website according to the popularity or votes received by other users. If your website/ article receives a decent amount of votes chances are more that your traffic will increase. But you really need to have a quality and useful content to retain such traffic.
Promoting thru Newsletters & Email advertisement
You can promote your website by purchasing ad in newsletters relevant to your site’s niche. Again care should be taken in choosing a quality newsletter. Some high traffic websites have opt-in email wherein users could select this option to receive updates and latest information by email on a periodical basis, based on their interests. But if the service provider is sending out unsolicited emails, it would also deface your website. Advertising in newsletters is time-specific and you might lose your money by not getting a ROI (Return of Investment) if there is no good response.
Offline Ads
This type of ads include advertising in newspapers, television, radio, magazines etc. An effective and clever advertisement will result in a higher response.
Managing the Traffic
Once you start receiving a decent amount of traffic, you should analyze your site visitor’s behavior, get feedbacks from visitors, update content regularly, retain visitors (returning visits) and strive for driving more traffic, which I am sure would popularize your site and help you make money.
Topics: Internet |