Merely setting up a website isn’t enough – if you don’t get traffic, all your efforts go to waste. Therefore, promoting your website is just as important as setting it up. Now when it comes to promoting a website, there are actually two ways to do it:
- The first are the paid methods – we have dealt with these at length elsewhere.
- The other is the free method – and that is by Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Now, instead of giving it to you in a chunk, we have broken it up into 8 convenient steps – each highlighting a separate thing to be done. And when you carry out these in order and competently enough, your website will surely get quite a few visitors from Google.
The 8 steps to SEO Success
Let’s outline the entire process for you:
Step 1: Do your niche research first. This means you find out what your target audience profile is, what the is language your target audience uses, what their problems are, what are the keywords they search with and what they are looking for. That’s a long list…but, this is the background you need in order to tailor your entire site as well as the promotion. This information will determine all the rest of the steps.
Step 2: Do the basic SEO for the site – this means optimizing each page, ensuring that the content is unique and good enough to make it popular. This also involves ensuring you have a good web host and your page is loading quick enough. Also, you need to avoid things like keyword stuffing, purchased links and elements that make it a bad experience for the audience.
Plus, pay attention to domain names – use keywords and keep them consistent and old school.
Step 3: Get your SEO campaign up and running – this means you build links so that every page has at least one link pointing to it. Also, ensure each page has the targeted keyword the requisite number of times, and no page should go without a unique meta description.
Step 4: Ensure you are not doing any of the things that will make a search engine avoid your website – these could be overuse of key words, or links that have been purchased. The other thing of course – and this is very important – is user experience. If the users do not have a good experience, then no matter how much your site is indexed, you will not get good traffic.
Step 5: Optimization should be done using Social media as well. All this will add to your site’s image in the eyes of the Search Engine.
Step 6: Decide whether you want to go for completely paid streams of promotion or search engine marketing – through pay per click ads or organic SEO campaigns. If yes, then set these up.
Step 7: Consider how you will do the content marketing from your own website. In other words, this entails what you will do to add value to your website. Your options include info-graphics, free e-books, videos, tutorials, reports, an informative blog, webinars that are recorded, etc. All of these add value to your website by offering some extra information – something that your competition may not be offering.
Step 8: Your last step is off site content marketing – this could include YouTube, sharing of documents, having a secondary website, setting up or contributing to other blogs and forums, information hubs, etc. This is your way of spreading the word about your website.
Photo Credit: Ed Yourdon via Compfightcc
This was a list of 8 steps – but these are in no way exhaustive. SEO campaigns and promotion needs to be tailored for separate websites – and you actually learn a lot as you go.The bottom line however is that promoting your website – whether it is paid or through SEO – is a must. Because if you don’t, nobody really sees your website – and all your hard work in developing it actually goes to waste!