Beginners Guide to Marketing your Website

There is wealth of information on site promotion these days and sometimes it can be hard to know where to start if you’re new to marketing yourself online.

Over the last few years we have helped a lot of our clients drive significant traffic to their sites, here are just a few tips to get started.

1. First of all in order to optimize your marketing and see what’s working and what not you some kind of traffic analytics software for your site. I recommend Google Analytics . It’s free comprehensive and very easy to use and setup. Analytics will track all the users that arrive at your site; where they came from, what link brought them to your site, how long they spent there, and where they left. This is the truly amazing part of the Web Marketing no other form of marketing will give you such a quantitve review of your visitors and their activity. The downside is it can become quite addictive and if you’re not careful you will be checking your stats every other minute you have.
2. Make sure you have a strong domain name and stick to it. Your domain name is a big part of your brand and all your hard work and marketing goes to build the equity of that brand and domain name. If your site is hosted via someone else make sure you have full rights to it and steer clear of free hosting such as www.yourdomainname.tripod.com. If you want advice on picking the best domain name this article is a great start.
3. Take advantage of Pay Per Click Advertising like Google adwords. Depending on your niche the cost of advertising can be quite cheap and can be targeted to specific countries and sites.
4. Good design is important. If you have an ungly website, redesign. Don’t launch something you are not happy with. Your visitors take under 4 seconds to sum up your site and make a decision about whether they want to move on or not, first impressions last. Keep the site look consistent through out.
5. Keywords are the significant words that a user types into google or any other search engine when they are looking for something i.e. Dublin Hotels. Research the important keywords that are related to your site and brand and keep them in a handy glossary. Keep this glossary in mind when you are writing content for your siteand make sure to include these keywords. Do it naturally however as some search engines will penalise you for overuse of keywords which will result in a negative ranking rather than improving it.
6. Setup your site with Google Webmaster Tools . These tools let google know how your site is setup and where the content is via a sitemap this makes sure it can be indexed easily and is faster to find.
7. Make sure your Web Designer or Developer is using good web standards to build the site, this helps make the site accessible to the widest audience possible.
8. Make sure to add a signature with your site address on all your emails and ensure to include the address on all print materials.
9. Content is king, think seriously about blogging about your business area. Fresh content keeps visitors coming back for more and you can establish yourself as an industry expert.
10. Contribute to social networks like Facebook, Flickr, Myspace and Twitter e.t.c but remember don’t shamelessly promote yourself this can have a negative effect.

Hope some of these help. If you have any you would like to contribute I’d love to hear about them.