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You’ve got a great website and now we need to get people to go to it; the old adage of “Build it and they will come” isn’t strictly true as if nobody knows that your website exists it won’t do you a lot of good. There are many ways to get people to your website, some obvious, some not quite so. There are a multitude of companies that specialise in “SEO” or search engine optimisation, whilst many do seem to work some kind of virtual voodoo the majority just follow a few simple steps that with a small investment of time we can do too.

We can break the necessary steps down in to three major areas

1. A well built site
2. Day to day marketing
3. Search engine marketing

Step 1 – A well built site

You can define “a well built site” as many things. A designer might say that “a well built site” is one that looks beautiful, a usability expert might say that it’s a site that is functional, a developer might say that it’s a site that doesn’t fail. None of these examples are wrong and in fact to make a real world website we really need a bit of each, but for our purposes “a well built site” is one that is ACCESSIBLE.

Accessibility

The concept of accessibility is so obvious that you’d think it was standard in all websites; this is not the case. Accessibility is just a matter of making a website available to as many people as possible – you’d think all websites would want to reach as many potential customers as possible wouldn’t you?

“Accessibility” was originally intended for people with disabilities, the blind and visually impaired particularly. A website for the blind seems at first thought a little difficult, until you realise that a technology called a “screen reader” exists that reads aloud the pages being visited. If a page however has lots of images or flash animations within it, the screen reader will stumble and not give the listener an accurate depiction of the content of the page. A “well built site” is one that complies to web standards(w3c) and gets around these problems offering a fully accessible solution to ANY visitor.

So, what has this to do with marketing my site? Well, let’s think of Google as hundreds of millions of people with visual disabilities. Google doesn’t understand images or flash animations, but it does “understand” text and a website built to W3C standards. This instantly gives “a well built website” a massive chance to be fully indexed by Google (or any other search engine), as well as opening up new markets, such as mobile phones and people with disabilities.

Of course if your website is built by SimpleWeb, you can take for granted this has been done for you already.

Step 2 – Day to day marketing

Marketing needn’t be expensive nor time intensive, the very word “marketing” instills fear into many small businesses, yet it’s the very thing that enables your business to survive. Every time you meet someone new and give them a card or tell them what you do, you are marketing.

Why do small businesses break into a cold sweat when thinking about marketing? We’re not going to do anything too costly, we’re just going to bare in mind that our website is in theory an online resource that shows off your business for you and can send “warm” customers to your door (or phone). So all we really need is some common sense.

The next time (or first time) you get your stationery and business cards done, ensure that your website and your primary email address are clearly visible. If you have a shop, make sure that your website address is on the sign somewhere; the same goes for a company car or van. In fact anywhere that you put your company name, make sure that your web address and/or email address are there to complement it.

Another really simple tip is to create an email “signature”. All this means is that at the bottom of every email that you send, your web address is clearly visible. You can even extend this to include your latest product or achievement.

An example signature could be:

Yours Sincerely,
Mark Panay
www.simpleweb-online.com
Great websites. Low price. No catch.

To some readers this will sound like the most obvious of things but you would be amazed at how many people forget this simple stuff and then wonder why nobody emails them or visits their website.

Of course if you do veer off into the world of paid advertising such as newspapers, magazines, radio, etc then your website will become an even greater asset for you, as your “call to action” could be to get customers to visit your site to print off a voucher, enter their details for a competition , register their interest in your product or service or of course actually make a purchase. Interestingly you can also allow your company to appear “bigger” than it is, with a perception to the customer that you are not in a small unit on an industrial estate although this takes us into the world of brand creation and that’s a whole different guide…

Step 3 – Search engine marketing

As we’ve already mentioned a “well built site” will appeal to the majority of search engines currently available on the Internet. Google is by a long way the most popular search engine at the moment and will be for the foreseeable future, so we’ll concentrate on just Google for now, although luckily if Google “likes” our website then so will the others such as Yahoo, Lycos, etc. Our main aim is to get our website to the top of Google when people search for a product or service that we are offering.

So assuming that we’ve already got a website that is well built, we now need to make it “relevant” to Google. Google measures websites based on its “PageRank” algorithm, basically meaning that it ranks our website by how popular it is and how relevant it is to a person’s search words. It does this through many factors, but we’ll focus on the simplest – LINKS. The more websites that have links to your website the more relevant it becomes. So the question is “How do we get incoming links?” There are a numerous ways we can achieve this, we’ll outline a few of the more straight forward possibilities below.

Blogs, forums and message boards

For this we need to spend an hour or two every month “link building”. Essentially meaning that we need to find websites with a similar topic to ours and some how get them to link back to us.

The first thing that we can do is to contact anyone and everyone that we know who has a website and ask them to link to our site from theirs, even if they are “off topic” – any incoming link is better than none.

Next we need to find websites that are relevant to ours, we can do this by searching with Google for blogs, forums and message boards that are based on a topic similar to our site. Let’s assume that we have a website about “Cleaning Products”, so we type into Google, “cleaning products blog” and see what results we get. We’re looking for websites where we can go and leave comments on what other people are talking about. We then need to find a topic that we are knowledgeable about and get into the conversation. Not all of the websites listed by Google will offer this facility and starting off you may find this a little difficult but perseverance is key here.

Once a suitable “conversation” or topic is found, we can comment, which normally entails adding our name, website address and of course a comment. A word of warning, make sure that whatever you say is relevant to the topic, if it’s not, it will be considered as spam and you will get blocked from the site. Just by “posting” this comment we have added our website address to this site and now we have our first incoming link. As a side note you will probably find that if you keep this up you will start to encounter potential clients and new colleagues; blogs, forums, message boards and mailing lists can be great ways to extend your business network.

This all may seem a little daunting at first, and your first attempt may take you an hour in itself, but after the first time it should get easier and easier. I can not stress enough how powerful this can be for your website and your business.

Online Public Relations

Online PR is one of the things that people always feel the need for a professional. Although this is in some part true we can quite easily use the power of the web to make sure that we can announce our new website (and anything else for that matter to do with our business). Firstly we create a press release, this needs to offer an angle on our launch that could be interesting to a certain set of people. So we could create a press release about our “new cleaning site” or we could create a press release about “Dirt at all time high, new website aims to clean it up”… The latter is certainly less generic and more appealing. I’ve listed some resources at the bottom of this article to help you get an idea of writing a press release.

Once you have your press release you can release it to the Internet through a site such as Prweb, which is free and will literally send you press release to thousands of on line news sites. It may or may not get “picked up”, but one thing is for certain it will generate incoming links to your site for just a little effort.

Resources for online PR

• PRweb – send out your press release
• Online PR – blog about general online PR
• Top Rank Blog – blog about general online PR
• Pressbox – Tips on writing a press release

Wrapping up

Hopefully by using some of the techniques in this guide you will be getting the most out of your website. These concepts are pretty much the building blocks of most “Search Engine Optimisation” companies and whilst you can go much deeper than the tips in this guide you won’t go far wrong if you put in a little time and effort.