Seven Ways to Jump Start Your New
Website
By
Donald Nelson
You’ve just
got a new website and it looks beautiful, but unless you take
some active steps to promote it, it will just sit there like a
new car without any gas and empty tires.
If you are
not sure where to begin, here are seven steps that are free or
inexpensive. All of them will help you to get your new website
rolling.
1.
Tell Your Friends
– Often we are thinking about reaching the unknown millions
of people out there surfing the Internet, but we are
forgetting the hundreds of people who we already know. Look at
your e-mail address book and get the word out, tell your
business contacts, friends, relatives and tel them to tell
their friends too. Send an e-mail to all the people who made
inquiries or bought products or services from you in the last
year.
2.
Link to Your Own Site
– Once again we are often thinking about getting some
unknown people to make a link to our websites and we are
forgetting possibilities that are nearby. If you already have
one website, make sure that this site is linking to your new
site. A website without any incoming links to it will have a
very low page ranking in the all-important Google search
engine and will face an uphill battle to be seen in Google
search results, especially if you are in a very competitive
category.
Even when
your site is in the construction stage you, or even your web
designer can link to the new site from another already
well-established site, mentioning that the new site is under
construction. If you already have several sites, then link
them to your infant site. It will help the new site to be seen
in competitive search engine listings even in its debut
period.
3.
Get a paid inclusion in
one of the big search engines. It takes 4-6 weeks to get
listed in Google, and other search engines are equally slow.
However there are a few fairly important search engines that
have inexpensive express inclusion programs. If you join these
programs, then your site will be listed in 48 hours. Inktomi,
which provides results for MSN and 100 other search services,
has an inclusion program which
costs $39 for the first URL that you submit, and
subsequent ones cost $25. The value of the Inktomi submission
is that they revisit your URL every 48 hours and if you make
changes on the page you can see the results in the MSN
listings very quickly. Thus, you can tweak your pages and see
how it affects your position.
Similarly
there are paid inclusion systems for Teoma (which feeds the
popular Ask Jeeves Search Engine), Alta Vista, and Lycos.
4.Add
your site to the Open Web Directory and the major search
engines. Quality is more important than quantity when it
comes to search engine submission. Forget about the sales hype
that tells you to add your URL to 300, 000 search engines.
Only a few search engines and directories provide the lion’s
share of Internet traffic. If your site is in good shape, no
longer under construction, then go to www.dmoz.org.
This is the Open Web Directory. Find the category where your
site fits, and make a submission. If you are accepted here
your site will appear in the many search engines and local
directories that use the results from the Open Web Directory.
Inclusion in this directory usually takes time but it will
help you a lot. Similarly
submit your site to Google, Alta Vista and All The Web, these
are the remaining giants where you can submit for free.
5.
Start a reciprocal
links campaign – Once you have given yourself a link
from your other sites or from your designer’s page, you can
go out and ask other complementary sites for links. As I
mentioned, these incoming links will help your page rank in
searches but they will also generate traffic. If you can find
specialized sites or directories dealing with your particular
product or service, then a link on one of these sites can
provide a large amount of targeted traffic.
6.Write
an article about your product or service – If you have a
website the chances are that you are an expert in the field
that your site is all about. Write an article about your
product or service, or write an article related to the subject
matter of your site. Submit the article online to various
websites and e-mail lists dealing with your topic. The
publication of your article in a big e-zine, or on a popular
web site can get your new site off to a roaring start.
7.
Promote Your Site Off-line – Now that you have a site,
put the URL on your stationary, on your cars and trucks, in
your brochures, business cards, your newspaper and TV
advertising, and circulars. You can also put it on hats,
t-shirts, mugs and other items. The cafepress.com has a
program enabling you to put your URL on these items and even
sell them online.
If you follow
all or some of these steps your new site will definitely
receive visitors and within a short period can become an
important asset to you.
Donald
Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He has
been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently the
director of A1-Optimization (www.a1-optimization.com),
a firm providing low-cost search engine optimization,
submission and Internet marketing services. He can be reached
at support@a1-optimization.com
© Copyright 2003, Donald Nelson, all rights
reserved.
|
