Top 10 ways to promote your website

After you have spent hundreds or thousands of dollars creating the ultimate website, what are the top 10 ways to promote your website?

I was hired recently to help promote a printing and graphics design company. They have been around for nearly 14 years and have an established website. Problem was that the printing industry is very competitive. Search results on various business card keywords typically run within the tens of millions even hundreds of millions. Getting to the top of Google will not be an easy task for any company, even with their credentials.

The first thing we did was installed Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to track visitors and be notified of potential  problems with the sites structure and integrity. Once that was finished we were ready to build our promotional campaign.

Plenty of different websites exist that can help your cause. At the end of the day, you will pay someone, something to receive the tools necessary to promote your web site. Advertising is an art and many advertisers aren’t recognized for their out of the box ideas enough. I have seen some tremendous campaigns in the past that have taken companies from the bottom of the barrel to the top of Google. Here are my top 10 ways to promote your site in no particular order.

1. Blog – Blogs are great because you typically have complete control unless you are hosted by blogger or wordpress. Even then, you will have a very good chance of receiving back links and traffic. A self hosted WordPress blog is probably the most beneficial and most popular of all blogs, but this can always change. You need to blog about everything within your industry. Go out and see for yourself what is written…Top 10 of whatever blogs work well, you’re reading one.
2. Press Release – Press Releases can be a little costly if you can’t write a decent one yourself. There are several free press releases sites. If you are accepted they can bring a good amount of traffic to your site. They are also good paid media distribution sites. Here is a list of potential winners…
3. Be Social – The best thing you can do is self promote without hard selling. Ask people nicely to go and take a look at your website and ask for feedback. People have a tendency to help when you ask for them to provide insight. Also be social on the internet in forums, blogs, and message boards. Do not spam though, but sign up under your company name and leave good comments (not, “nice article now come and check out my website http://www.Iamdumb.com“)
4. SMO – Social Media Optimization. This could be considered with “Be Social” in the step above, but places like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn are unique and have a particular way of operating. Users do not like spam, do not like to be hassled, and definitely are trying to promote something of their own. I suggest sign up and take a look around at some other users pages and set your up similar to what you see. Invite people by searching for people by a particular keyword within your industry. Places like Twitter will return friend results if you type in a city like Las Vegas. Just add friends and comment and direct message once in a while. Don’t over do it, just have fun and provide valuable information, otherwise people will drop you like a bad habit.
5. Directory Submission – Directory submission can still be very useful regardless of what people tell you. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be directories. The directories help with back links and provide authority and link popularity to a site. It is imperative that you submit your site to the proper category, otherwise you run the risk of wasting your time by not being accepted. So if you aren’t going to do it right, don’t do it at all. Good place for free and paid directory submission is…
6. DoFollow – Most people aren’t aware of DoFollow and NoFollow. DoFollow tells search engine spiders to follow that particular link where as NoFollow tells them don’t follow it. The results means that your web site doesn’t get recognized by the search engines. In other words…NoFollow sucks! There are a number of DoFollow sites. It can be time consuming, but in my experience I have seen positive results. A great place for a DoFollow list and blog is here…
7. Website Optimization – I know this doesn’t sound like promotion, but I tell you, your website is your main promotion and careful attention should be paid to it. You can optimize your site with available tools, both free and paid. I use a combination of both, but prefer Google Analytics, Webmaster tools, and IBP paid service. These three programs have taken websites ranked 128th to 18th in 2 days, literally. There are books and information, some misguided, but nonetheless information is out there on how to use these programs. Just by optimizing the site, it promotes itself, now I can concentrate on listening to my customers and providing them with the level of service they deserve.
8. Local Search – Signing up for Yahoo and Google Local search is important. If you have a physical location it is important to create a profile and add your address and site to it. Create coupons in Google local, upload products if you sell them to Google Base, sign up for Google checkout because they make money every time you sell, so why wouldn’t they want to promote you? Treat it like a part of your business, if you play by the rules, search engines will help you. They want to provide their customers with the proper information.
9. Digg, Delicious, Reddit – Again, we could combine these with SMO, but they deserve there own category. When you write a blog or press release go to these sites and bookmark them. Ask others to politely bookmark your articles as well as your website. These have tremendous back link capabilities. Google pays a good amount of attention to these sites and what is popular.
10. Classifieds – Craigslist and USFreeAds to name a couple are great, but don’t provide DoFollow links.  They will provide traffic, but don’t spam every category and blast people out of their minds with a fire hose still promotion. Be subtle about it and respectful, plus you don’t want people to label you as a spammer.

All this can change especially since Google Caffeine supposedly will take effect sometime after the holiday season. We will see what, if any, change are in store for all the websites. If you find this article helpful please submit it to any social bookmark website. I appreciate the help and I hope you forward to more blogs. You can email me at cgiseo@gmail.com for more information.