26 May 2011

24 Ways To Promote Your Website Offline

Getting large numbers of visitors to your business website has two major benefits:

1) The more traffic you get the higher your website will feature in the search engines – when Google is deciding where to rank websites in its listings, it is going to put a website that gets 20,000 visitors a month much higher than one that gets 20. Why? Because it takes the assumption that if more people are using a website then it is likely to be a good, relevant and informative website.
2) The more people visit your site the more opportunity it gives you to test and measure – you can experiment with your content, with offers, layout, and calls to action.

Ultimately though, the main reason to get people to your site is so that they buy from you!

Below is a list of possible places to advertise your website – some you may be doing already, some you may not.

1) Advertise your website address on your business stationery – business cards, compliments slips, letterheads and invoices

2) Include your website in your email signature so it is at the bottom of every email you send

3) Email all your contacts (customers, prospects, suppliers etc) to let them know you have a new website and give them a link to it

4) Advertise your website on your brochures or other company literature

5) Tell customers about it via telephone, give the address to all telephone enquiries, and if you are telemarketing give every prospect the address too

6) Include your website address in all quotes and tenders

7) Advertise your website in the signage of your premises

8) Advertise your website clearly on the signage of your company vehicles

9) Include the website prominently in your directory advertising (Yellow Pages, Thompsons, BT etc)

10) Ensure any salespeople are using the website to show potential customers

11) Direct mail potential or existing clients and include the website address

12) Include your website address in your leaflets and flyers

13) If you are a retailer, include the web address on your receipts, on your bags, window displays and in your point of sale displays

14) If you have a premises which customers visit, advertise the website via posters and signs at your premises

15) Run a newspaper or magazine advertising campaign to direct people to your website

16) Run a radio or television campaign to attract visitors to your website

17) If your website is newsworthy and you can think of a story the press would be interested in, do a press release including your website address

18) If you have a PR company make sure they are promoting the website

19) Make the website clear and prominent in any trade shows or exhibitions you do

20) Include the website on any promotional gifts you give (pens, calendars, diaries etc)

21) Advertise the website on outdoor posters, billboards, cinema or post office advertising

22) Ask for an ‘email this web page to a friend’ link on your website to encourage referrals

23) Include your website on any company stickers, fridge magnets, tags

24) Include the website address on your company uniforms/name badges

22 May 2011

Updating Content

When we introduced our website (which is a content management system which allows small business owners to easily edit their websites) we knew it was important that business owners could easily update the content of their websites, and you may be one of the many clients we have who chose to work with this system because of the fact that it is so easy to edit your website. However, we also come across many business owners who do not see the value of changing their website. One of the most common things I hear from business owners when I talk about content management (the ability to update your own website) is ‘but our business never changes!’
While it may be true that your core products or services have changed little over time, your business most certainly does change – the world is now changing faster than it ever has done before and your business is no different. Your industry is changing, you are doing new projects, working with new customers, there are new regulations, new opportunities, you have new members of staff, new procedures, new products, and your competitors are changing.

So why bother updating your website? There are two reasons for this. Firstly a website that is regularly changing is one that will perform much better in the search engines. Google will rank a website that is changing regularly higher than one that has stayed exactly the same for a year.
Secondly it gives your customers a reason to come back to your website – and the more they come back to your website, the more they buy in to your company message or identity, the more contact they have with the full range of your products and services and the more likely they are to buy again from you and refer you to their friends.

19 May 2011

Stay Visible

Much debate out there on the net about whether or not to include a sitemap, and after much though and reading and research, always include a site map page. Spiders cannot index your websites pages if these can not be crawled. Make sure you use a site map plus the correct HTML and other codes which will ensure you stay visible to spiders. The spider will easily comprehend the hierarchy of your site. Don't forget to have an easy-to-crawl navigation menu. You may discuss the details with an experienced webmaster to help you to improve visibility. For those who have a huge web site, make many site map pages. Every one should have less than 100 links. All your SEO moves should have a clear objective. Make use of web analytics software along with online experts to track the best methods and get rid of, time consuming and irrelevant efforts that don't produce results.



The URLs and file names should be friendly to SEOs. Use two to three hyphens at most to avoid your file from appearing like a spam. Always use hyphens and not underscores, in your URLs and filenames. Hyphens are considered as a "space", unlike underscores.

Relevance Matters

Always ensure that you have a relevant title and meta description on each web page. The title of your page is by far the most important factor of on-page SEO. It is extremely unlikely that you will rank high for a primary term if the word is not included in the page title. Disregard the keywords meta completely should you find that these are not relevant and only confuse visitors. Always write for both users and visitors. The content of your site and articles should always be associated with your industry and company.

15 May 2011

Stay Visible

Stay Visible


Much debate out there on the net about whether or not to include a sitemap, and after much though and reading and research, always include a site map page. Spiders cannot index your websites pages if these can not be crawled. Make sure you use a site map plus the correct HTML and other codes which will ensure you stay visible to spiders. The spider will easily comprehend the hierarchy of your site. Don't forget to have an easy-to-crawl navigation menu. You may discuss the details with an experienced webmaster to help you to improve visibility. For those who have a huge web site, make many site map pages. Every one should have less than 100 links. All your SEO moves should have a clear objective. Make use of web analytics software along with online experts to track the best methods and get rid of, time consuming and irrelevant efforts that don't produce results..

The URLs and file names should be friendly to SEOs. Use 2 to 3 hyphens at most to avoid your file from appearing like a spam. Always use hyphens and not underscores, in your URLs and filenames. Hyphens are considered as a "space", unlike underscores.

Relevance Matters

Always ensure that you have a relevant title and meta description on each web page. The title of your page is by far the most important factor of on-page SEO. It is extremely unlikely that you will rank high for a primary term if the word is not included in the page title. Disregard the keywords meta completely should you find that these are not relevant and only confuse visitors. Always write for both users and visitors. The content of your site and articles should always be associated with your industry and company.

11 May 2011

The Blog Article

Don’t have enough readers for your free blog website? Do you want to create your own blog the fast and easy way?
If you answered yes to any of these questions then free blogging sites are for you. Firstly, you might be wondering what blog is all about. A blog or a web blog is like an online log where you can use to build traffic for your website. It can contain any topics you want and it can even contain your diary.

So just how do you start blogging for free?

Creating your own blogging website is very simple. You can visit websites that offer free blogs which has step by step process on creating your blogging website. It will usually just take a few minutes of your time to create a blogging websites in sites that offer free blogging web pages.

However, before starting to go to websites that offer free blogs, you should first determine several factors for your blogging web page.

Firstly, you have to think of a name for your blog. To do this, you must first determine what kind of topic you will dedicate your blogging webpage to. Ask yourself what you want to discuss, what are your interests or hobbies or if you have a website that is dedicated to a particular topic, you can discuss that to. It can be anything, it can be dogs, cars, casinos, food, travel, and you can even create a blog about yourself.
After knowing what name your blogging site should have, the next step would be what to put in it. Basing from your title, you will have an idea on what to put on your blog. You can put in any comments you want with different topics regarding your title and headline. You can even post in surveys as your topic; this is very useful if you sell a particular product where you can get consumers opinion on how to sell your product more effectively.
Another way to generate interest in your blog and attract a lot of readers is to make your blog a bit controversial. People like controversies and making your blog one, can create a lot of curious people to read your blog. You should post comments that can be controversial and this can result in many people wanting to post in their comments too.

Now that you have finished creating your blog, with title or headline, a comment, how should you attract people into reading your blogs? One of the best ways is to write an article about a particular topic in your blog and post them into article submission websites. This can generate a lot of targeted traffic and in no time at all.
To make this work, you should write the article with your blog site URL included at the ending of the article or in the footnote. With a good article and a little bit of luck, your blog will be discovered by people and chances are, your blog will create a lot of traffic by word of mouth.

Free blogging websites are one of the most useful tools to generate targeted traffic to your website. It can even generate a lot of loyal readers or fans of your work to post in comments and suggestions regularly to your blogging website and will often recommend it to other people. The best thing about this is that it’s easy, convenient, fun, and as the name suggests, it’s all for free.

Natalie Eastaugh is the Internet Marketing Specialist for JDRwebsites.co.uk
If you wish to find out more on

09 May 2011

Keyword Selection For SEO

One of the main components that helps determine the success, or failure, of your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is your keyword selection. Although this may not appear much, choosing the right keyword to use for your website is one of the more gruelling parts of the entire SEO process, especially if you aim to find one that will be most effective for your site’s search engine optimisation.

When using keywords for search engine optimisation, you just need to follow a few simple steps in order to properly find the right keyword that will do the job. There are also a couple of things that you need to look out for in order to avoid any problems when trying to optimise your web page.
Make a list

The first thing that you should do if you want to be able to use keywords effectively is to start out by making a list of “key” keywords or phrases that are relevant to the content of your site, and by doing this, it can actually lead you to create or discover more keywords or phrases that may blossom from the original one that you have chosen.

Select key phrases or words
Once you’ve made a list, try to select ones that contain a “key” keyword or phrase that can help you identify your site’s content. Let’s say your site’s content is all about cars, using cars as a keyword won’t put you high up in the page ranking of search engines, especially since a lot of sites or pages have that as a keyword. Try to avoid using words or phrases that are too general, as this will not help improve your page ranking. By adding other key terms to your chosen keyword, such as “second-hand cars”, or “second-hand sports cars” will actually help improve your chances of going up higher in the page rankings. Just make sure that these are relevant to your site’s content.

Check your competition

It also helps if you took the time to search for keywords or phrases that your competition are using so that you can narrow down which ones to use, and which ones to avoid. There is no sense in using a type of keyword or phrase, such as “cars”, which a lot or most of your competition are using as well, and if their site’s are ranked high up in the search engine’s index, then you might have a difficult time going up against that.

Use your location

You can also improve your chances of getting a much better page ranking result if you incorporate your location to the keyword or phrase that you are trying to use. Let’s say your business is located somewhere in Hertfordshire, by simply adding the word “Hertfordshire” to your keyword selection (“Hertfordshire second-hand sports cars”), you can fair better in your page ranking. However, this type of method usually entails that people are planning on seeing you in person when they do searches like this, so make sure that you only utilise this technique if you are open to the idea of them visiting you in person.

Use your niche

Always try to choose the keyword that you specialise in, or at least the one that offers you with the most profit.

06 May 2011

SEO Traps To Avoid

Even though SEOs have been considered as very cost-effective and useful tools for online marketing, it is important that you understand the risks and potential drawbacks. You can help your business run more efficiently by staying prepared for the possible consequences. You can also determine which approaches will work best for your target customers, thereby giving them quality service and unique content each time. Here are some proven tips.

You first have to determine your current risk level to know what more you can do to protect your business completely. First of all, you have to gauge your level of expertise and experience in using SEOs. The more experience you have, the less problems you may encounter since you may already have gone through and solved a number of common pitfalls and problems. Consider the types of SEOs that you have used in the past, then check which ones can still work for your current industry.

Black hat SEO users are putting themselves at risk for losing credibility and even getting penalised or banned. Some web sites and webmasters have been banned by search engines because of the abuse or misuse of certain techniques. There are plenty of black hatters who still believe that overstuffing keywords and using irrelevant content that boosts visibility can work for them in the long term. You are only waiting for search engine crawlers to find the site and render it useless.

White hat search engine optimisation is the ideal since these promise you long term visibility and a good reputation. Your target customers can better relate to you if you follow the guidelines and rules given by search engines to boost rankings. It will take some time before you score high on search results pages, but the wait and experience will be worth the wait.

Reward is not proportionate to the workload given. A single click may be enough for some web sites to instantly land on the first page of search engine results. The hard work of other webmasters who practice ethical methods can be trampled by unapproved techniques like spamming, content aggregating, scraping and plagiarism. Manipulating an algorithm may temporarily catapult your site into the front page, but you can face greater consequences once your actions are discovered.

Although several black hat approaches can offer you visibility instantly, the results are only temporary. People cannot refer to you or your company as reliable if you resort to unapproved techniques in trying to get their attention. You can boost your reputation and experience by following the right guidelines and patiently waiting for the right traffic to start flowing into your web site. Over time, you will find that your client base expands continually as long as you maintain good content and quality service.

Try to write good and informative articles yourself. Visit online discussion boards and listen to what other online experts have to say. Check out other ethical methods used by top web sites and learn over time how you can also become a master in your chosen industry. You can start learning more about keywords and meta tags to improve your visibility. Review how search engine crawlers work and what items and elements are needed in your site to make it easier for them to find you.