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How have you promoted your website?

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Posideon
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 04, 2004 4:57 pm    Post subject: How have you promoted your website? Reply with quote

Hi all,

I am going through trying to get the company I work for website promoted. I am reading up through various sources, signed up to DMOZ (which I hope we will get accepted for listing, but I won't know for a while). The solution needs to be free and cost nothing. Time is not reallly an issue as long as I can monitor the success of how this is progressing.

I want to know how other people (SME's and medium sized businesses) have promoted their websites to first page listings in some of the top search engines.

I know it all depends on how your site is crawled and indexed through the nature of your site i.e. HTML and links from other sites. The problem is this site is fairly new and trying to establish links from others is hard, we have a few on LYCOS and MSN but other than that not a lot.

I will look forward to viewing the responses on this.

Thanks....

moved from Gen Sec Disc - s3c
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paperghost
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 04, 2004 5:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dont neglect real world advertising - most SME websites get their best advertising by stumping up and getting the word out on the street, so to speak. there may be an outlay involved, but any website advertised in a different medium to the one they exist in stands out from the crowd to some degree. After all, everyone and their dog is listed on google/yahoo etc.
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Posideon
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 05, 2004 9:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

This type of business attracts big UK customers some of which you just cant just pass word ont he street to. These are high profile customers some of which you will all (who live in the UK and USA) will recognise and of heard of.

This neeeds to be done professionally but without the cost involved.

I admit our site is current written in flash which makes it hard to index. The site may be changed in future but I need to get it working as it currently stands.
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historian
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 05, 2004 2:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

There are going to be a lot of posts about the technical side of advertising your website listed here but you might want to consider the following based on your advertising budget and that you're providing a service people really want or need.

Radio-This is a great way to get your message to many people at once. It’s still the most popular advertising media around. Especially, since print media has seen a reduction in readership every year since 1972.

Sponsorship-A lot of times you can do this for free if you’re willing to work with charitable organizations by lending a hand with their fund raisers. This gets you community exposure. Depending on your market it can get you a lot of attention. Particularly, if you can get on a t-shirt people will wear…and thereby advertise for you when the event is finished.

Fixed advertisements-Your avatar indicates that you are in the UK. Most European nations have excellent mass transit systems. Consider renting advertising space in one of your tunnels (subways) or on the side of a bus. It’s expensive, but you’ll get constant exposure.

Public events-See if you can get a table at some kind of chamber of commerce expo within your community. We often have “trade shows” that attract thousands of people. The most recent one I went to was a “home” show filled with all sorts of crap people didn’t need or want…but were shelling out big bucks for.

Shoot big-Buy a larg add within your local telephone directory. Something with a picture that catches a person's eye. This is expensive. But wow does it work.

Last but not least-Join your local business organization like the chamber of commerce and the better business organization in your area. Being aligned with them and attending their meetings will gain you a great deal of exposure.

Just some things to think about---Non-technically speaking.
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 05, 2004 3:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i should point out that by word on the street, i meant the kind of things Historian mentioned, such as billboard ads, different media (eg tv etc), not walking round with a big billboard or something. lol Very Happy
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Posideon
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 05, 2004 3:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

historian wrote:
There are going to be a lot of posts about the technical side of advertising your website listed here but you might want to consider the following based on your advertising budget and that you're providing a service people really want or need.

Radio-This is a great way to get your message to many people at once. It’s still the most popular advertising media around. Especially, since print media has seen a reduction in readership every year since 1972.

Sponsorship-A lot of times you can do this for free if you’re willing to work with charitable organizations by lending a hand with their fund raisers. This gets you community exposure. Depending on your market it can get you a lot of attention. Particularly, if you can get on a t-shirt people will wear…and thereby advertise for you when the event is finished.

Fixed advertisements-Your avatar indicates that you are in the UK. Most European nations have excellent mass transit systems. Consider renting advertising space in one of your tunnels (subways) or on the side of a bus. It’s expensive, but you’ll get constant exposure.

Public events-See if you can get a table at some kind of chamber of commerce expo within your community. We often have “trade shows” that attract thousands of people. The most recent one I went to was a “home” show filled with all sorts of cr@p people didn’t need or want…but were shelling out big bucks for.

Shoot big-Buy a larg add within your local telephone directory. Something with a picture that catches a person's eye. This is expensive. But wow does it work.

Last but not least-Join your local business organization like the chamber of commerce and the better business organization in your area. Being aligned with them and attending their meetings will gain you a great deal of exposure.

Just some things to think about---Non-technically speaking.


Might I add that this post is centred around promoting the website using search engines, so this is the main focus of my project really.
I want people to be able to either type the name of the company or keywords relating to our business and get a first page hit on the main serach engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, LYCOS etc.

This is easier said than done, but I am after people who have actually gone and done this, there are obviously people out there who have already achieved this.
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chris
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 05, 2004 5:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've spent a few years on and off doing search engine optimisation with varying success.

One thing I really didn't like was the expectancy of clients, I found the time spent on optimising sites was not proportional to the results, some sites you could spend hours, other days with the sites with less effort doing better.

Firstly you need to be realistic with your keywords to start off with. If you are selling 'widgets' maybe have keywords such as widgets north west, blue widgets, more specific keywords. Although you wouldn't see as much traffic it's more targetted and quality traffic is what you are after, not simply bulk, it doesn't matter if you get a few thousand referrals a day if the traffic doesn't convert etc.

DMOZ is always worth doing, I still don't like their process with sites being reviewed in a complete random order rather than a first come first served basis. I've had some sites indexed within a few weeks, others are still in the queue after the best part of a year.

If it's for your own company its not as bad, I found when doing it for clients it was hard, at the end of the day they were paying and if they didn't get the required traffic they were understandably annoyed.

When I was first doing SEO, using automated tools like web position gold, altavista was one of the sites to be in, obviously google is now the major player. I've noticed for a few sites , including security forums that the google referrals are hugely more than any other search engine, we are talking several thousand referrals a day from google.com .de .co.uk etc with only a few hundred from the likes of lycos, MSN etc.

With this in mind I do always tend to still focus on google. I've tried a mixture of tactics, from downright spam to basic SEO , you should really start at the basics and work up from there.

Clean meta tags and descriptions, with different keywords specific to every page on the site, even if this means going through and adding different keywords to 100s of pages. Relevant title tags, alt source on images and generally clean code. With the use of mod_rewrite you can also make the URLs nicer for indexing, or even with good directory structure and keywords in the page names:

http://www.specific-keyword.com/specific/keyword/product.html etc.

You mention your site is in flash, this is likely to be big problem especially if you are using framesets and so forth. The best option would be to not use it at all if search engine positioning is really important to you, any flash sites I had dealt with previously had doorway pages or even doorway sites on additional domains. You can however over optimise your site and having lots of spammy pages isn't ideal, what if you were penalised and removed from google altogether?

Backlinks are also important for page rank, you need to get links from relevant sites, whether you need to pay for these links / banners is up to yourself.

Personally I wasn't keen on some of the pressures of SEO, I imagine its a 'job on the side' in this case but once you start spending time on it the expectancy gets greater, and I didn't like the fact that not every site did well and it never seemed to be 'finished' like with other jobs, something either works it doesn't etc. This is just my opinion, its rewarding when your site does do well and the search engines bring several thousand referrals a day.

Personally now I would stay away from the automated tools and submit your domain manually if you haven't already, if you already have some indexing its a matter of optimising and waiting for the reindex and hopefully increased rankings!

As another quick option you could look at the likes of adwords and overture pay per click, whilst you might have ruled this out due to cost it may be worth checking how much you actually need to pay per click on your chosen specific keywords, if the competition isn't too high you could be looking at a few pence per click for some good targetted traffic.

If your company relies on your website heavily for sales, and especially if it sells something online can you afford not to be listed highly on the search engines?
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historian
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 05, 2004 7:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

paperghost wrote:
i should point out that by word on the street, i meant the kind of things Historian mentioned, such as billboard ads, different media (eg tv etc), not walking round with a big billboard or something. lol Very Happy


That’s why I pointed out alternative methods of advertising to work along with the web technology/search engines.

Ultimately, it’s human interest that’s going to get you to the top of any list. And that means exposure using more than just one technology and limiting yourself to one media. Successful media campaigns are never limited to just one format.


Last edited by historian on Fri Aug 06, 2004 2:10 am; edited 1 time in total
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 06, 2004 12:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

everytime I add something - product or service.. or if I just feel like it, I do a press release to all our local papers and some online sites. Many of them will use it because tech writers in these parts really aren't too saavy and the business section writers feed off things like that.
I usually get called and they do a short blurb or even a full article occasionally.

Don't forget newsletters and other things. Thats a great way to get your site known. People will link to you and consider your site a source of valuable info. I'm going to explore RSS shortly too..

Little things like this have gotten my GPR up to 7 at one time and a steady 5 or 6 currently. And I'm around 5th to 34th on Yahoo.. with certain keywords
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Posideon
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 06, 2004 11:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

LMAO nice hidden keywords in your website Robogeek Laughing Laughing Laughing

I have refrained from doing that due to the possibility of being banned from search engines.

But hey if it works
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 01, 2010 1:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

hello

Here are some SEO advices for beginners i can say.

First of all i am in this field for over 3 years. I can say that i don't like the time spent and that's why i hired someone. But before that here is what i have manage to learn:

1. Link Directories - Good only for PR (google case)
Example: I paid about 300$ for links on many directories, on PR3-5 pages. All good. When google crawled some of them the PR went to 1 or 2.
Conclusion - Don't waist your time too much and especially the money on those.

2. Social Bookmarking - 100 digs for some pages
Example: I had a Web 2.0 Design Tutorial website and got about 100 digs for some articles, technorati, del.icio.us and so on.
When checking backlinks digg.com showed only 5 of them.
Conclusion - Pretty good but make sure your article is 110% original.

3. Article Submission - 20 articles on "famous" article directories
Example: As i was writing the tutorials i thought "let's publish them".
Backlinks - very few after so much work

4. Link Exchange websites - Paid about 50$/monthly for 3 link exchange websites.
Example: I added my website to this websites and received about 400 links every month. I added a link exchange script with the "nofollow" attribute ON. I even added the disallow rule in .htaccess. All good so far.
After 3 months i got about 10 emails from different people asking me to remove their links because their sites were banned from Google.
Conclusion: Don't do this kind of link exchange.REALLY DON'T. Your link will end on a 100 link page which of course will end to banning from Google and who knows others too.

5. Paid Traffic - About 50$/monthly for as they said " 3000 unique visitors"
Example - Because i did not had the time to surf other websites i paid for this services.
Conclusion: Google Analytics was telling me that from 3000 visitors/monthly i got only 200 from that site.
Alexa was the only one who showed that i had heavy traffic. But if you don't pay for 1 month the Alexa rank will go down too. Don't waist your time with this.

Moderator note: removed signature link advertisement - capi
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 09, 2010 8:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

By using social networking sites
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 16, 2011 1:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I believe that the best way of promoting a web site is creating content for the community
Let the company staff write on company weblog pages.

Make targets for employee to produce content that is related with your company's area of business
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 25, 2011 7:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I haven't actually promoted my website TOO much on random places because you never know who is going to be clicking. So right now, http://www.facebook.com is my best and favorite marketing tool. It's free, and doesn't reach TOO random of a crowd. I like mutual friend clients.
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 8:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

There are some techniques in SEO that you can do it at your own.. Like Submitting your site in general and region specific directories, you can submit your business details in hotfrog and other business development sites, Use of Social Networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to promote your business online will be the extra advantages for you.

You even can take help of E Mail Marketing for direct Marketing.

And apart from online advertising you must try to advertise in your local area by putting hoardings, or giving advertising in Local Newspaper and magazines...
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 26, 2011 12:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

by posting on social networking sites and also by making pages to promote Smile
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