Website Marketing and Promotion

Let Expert Computer Help drive traffic to your small business. Just see how we do it!

Website Marketing and Promotion - What we do for you

Several key factors go into Website Marketing and Promotion. Many people still think once you have a website the traffic just comes naturally, this is far from the truth. Website owners must to understand, after your website is up and running, even if you spent $20,000 on it, you will need a Marketing Campaign to generate traffic, otherwise you will have this beautiful webite that no one knows is there.

Most people have heard of Search Engine Optimization or "SEO". This is very important, but in reality it's only a small piece of the puzzle. Once all of the elements in your webpages are optimized, you then must go through what I call, The Search Engine Marketing and Promotion Checklist. Search Engine Marketing and Website Promotion is probably the most overlooked aspect of generating traffic.

To help you understand what is involved in this process Expert Computer Help outlined some basic descriptions of each element we perform on your website when you request this service.

1. Webpage Title

Your webpage title describes the webpage in only a few words. We make sure when writting your page title we remove as many "filler" words from the title as possible (such as "the," "and," "if", "to" etc.), while still making it readable. Typically, this title should be something that your visitors will type into search engine to find you. This page title will show up in search results as the main Link when your page is found in Search engines.

2. Webpage Meta Description, Keyphrases and Keywords

Today most search engines include a description below your main Linked page title in the search results. Your description should only be a small sentence describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases on this page. These Keywords and Keyphrases should be found on your webpage.

The number of characters should not be more than 60-100. Be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.

When preparing a webpage, we write the article first, then develop a keyword-rich title and description cromprised of the niche keywords and keyphrases found in your article. The description, keyword and keyphrase information then goes into the META tags at the top of your webpages for easy interpretation by the Search engines.

3. Include Keywords in Your Headers

Search engines consider keywords that appear in the page headline and sub headline to be most important to the page. Search engines don't parse Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Keywords must be used in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engines on which is the most important content from top to bottom. (Note: Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags, that's a big mistake. Make sure your designer defines these tags in the CSS rather than creating headline tags with other names.)

4. Keyword Positioning

Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document, where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You don't want to just artificially stuff keywords here, more is not better. Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 2.5% to 3% for a word that should rank high, so don't overdo it.

5. Descriptive ALT Tags

Web designers have the option to add a description to images also known as "ALT tags". These ALT tags are placed on each image so that the search engines can easily identify your images by name. This equals out to a greater density of keywords which means higher rankings and more traffic to your website.

6. Use Keywords in your Hyperlinks

Search engines are constantly looking for clues to the focus of your webpage. When they see words hyperlinked, they consider these words to be important, so hyperlink your important keywords and keyphrases to other webpages within your own website or another website that has relevant information. This is just another way to provide the search engines with clues.

7. Search Engine Friendly Navigation

You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus look cool for humans, but search engines don't read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML or CSS links. Ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists will take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site. Don't set up your navigation system using HTML frames. This is an old technology that has been known to cause severe search engine indexing problems. Some content management systems (CMS) and e-commerce catalogs produce dynamic, cookie cutter webpages, often recognizable by question marks in the URLs followed by long strings of numbers or letters. Search engines sometimes have trouble parsing this information and may stop at the question mark character, refusing to go farther.

8. Create a Site Map

What is a site map and why does your website need one? A site map is a page with links to all your pages that can help search engines (and visitors) find all your pages easily, particularly if you have a large site. You can use a free tools like (XML-Sitemaps.com) to create XML sitemaps that are used by the major search engines to index your webpages accurately. Upload your sitemap to your website. Then submit your XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing, following the instructions on their sites. By the way, Google Webmaster Central (google.com/webmasters) has lots of tools to help you get ranked higher. Be sure to set up a free account and explore what they have to offer.

9. Create Webpages that Focus on Your Keywords

There are many techniques webmasters use to get traffic to a website. In the past, external doorway or gateway pages were used to help generate traffic to websites. However, this practice has been frowned opon by search engine companies, especially since most of these type of webpages are just duplicate webpages or pages that trick traffic to your site. This practice will only end up hurting you down the road or get you penalized by the major search engines. It's preferred to develop unique webpages that focus on target keywords and keyphrases which are easy for search engines to index and more likely to result in higher rankings.

10. Promote Your Local Business Online

Today many people search for local businesses online. To make sure they find you, you must include your business name, website address, street address, zip code and phone numbers.

To name a few key Business Portals, we list your local business on Google Places (Google Places), Yahoo Local Business (Yahoo Local Businesses), Bing Local Business Portal (Bing Local Business Portal) the (Yellowpages) and (Superpages). That way your business can show up in local search results as well as on a map when people do a local search.