Promoting Your Website

You will need an easy to remember domain name. It needs to be closely related to the product or service you have on your site.

Ensure you have relevant meta tags emebded into you web pages. SEO (search engine optimisation is extremely important).

Aside from using other media to inform your target audience about your site you can inform potential visitors by registering your site with appropriate search engines and category lists. WWW has many that allow you to list your URL (website address) free. The major search engines are:

THE ODP

List with the Open Directory many of the major search engines such as google favour sites listed here.

Web Links Pages/Link Exchange

There are thousands of dedicated links sites and millions of links pages linking to other sites. DO NOT use these they are either very poor or the search engines are savy to them now and you could get kicked out of google forever!! Build your own online relationships with quality sites, it will reward you in the end.

Submission tools

You can buy/download free software, which will automate the process of adding your URL to the search engines.. There are also a number of online services which will submit your site to a few engines free of charge. The problem is that they may be out of date and you will find your site has not been submitted to all. This leaves you to do it manually. Remember they all favour manual submission.

Banner Sponsorship of Sites

You can pay to sponsor other sites. They will display your link or banner in return for your sponsorship. A banner displays a message about your company, much like a billboard on a highway. The banner is clickable such that the browser can access your site from the advertising banner. You need to place your banners on sites whose target audience is similar to yours. Effective banners will drive WWW browsers to your site.

It is important to change (rotate) the banner frequently on each of the sites on which you are advertising. Research estimates that banners are not effective after three exposures to the same individual, this phenomena is referred to as "banner burnout". The cost to you is a matter of negotiation but will be related to the number of hits per day the site gets.

Banner Advertising

Similar to sponsorship you can use online agencies to place your advertising banner on the Internet. They will rotate your banner from site to site amongst those you have chosen to partner. This gives you wide exposure for your money and ensures that the pages which carry advertising have a good rotation of banners so that they look fresh. Banner exchange programmes allow you to place your banner on another site free of charge as long as you reciprocate. Many commercial placement programmes also exist on the Web.

Sales Promotions

Competitions and other promotions are widely used on the Web. If you have your own site, you can certainly use promotions to generate sales or simply to encourage surfers to access all the information on your site. Competitions, which rely on users collecting information, help to get more information across to them. Remember that offline promotions must also drive traffic to the website so ensure that your URL appears on all promotional literature. Those who do not have websites can also use online promotions. You can add these to a link or banner to drive traffic to your business.

Public Relations

WWW is an effective public relations medium for the larger business, but a smaller business would be unlikely to attract much attention this way. Nevertheless, "press releases" can be published on WWW unedited. You should certainly publish this sort of material on your website and remember it can be kept up to date in real time with all the very latest developments in your business.

Directories (Internet Yellow Pages)

Perhaps the first thing a business should do on the Internet. There are many directories on the Web both commercial and non-commercial. Many commercial directories will list you free of charge, because they want to attract more traffic and hence generate more income from advertisers and sponsors. They will also have a premium membership, which will cost you money but guarantee that your business is ranked higher than the free listings in any search category.

Directories may be vast and general, or they may specialise in a business type or they may be regional.

REMEMBER IT MAY TAKE SOME TIME!