Promoting Your Website - the Guru's Mantra

Well, so you have decided that you are going to develop a website and want to do business with it. And the questions which are tinkling in your mind are how you can promote it? Or how people will know about your website?

The first step obviously your decision to go for it, which you already have taken. The next step is to build your website and here these things you must consider. If you are developing it of your own, you must take care of these. Or if you are developing it through any vendor, you must specifically ask for these features.

1. Website title: Your website title must be dynamic, so that it can address the content of the page. Or in other words in every page a part of page title should change. Like the contact us page can have title like your 'company name - contact us' while about us page can have title like 'company name - about us'.
2. Website URL: All URL shall be search engine friendly. Avoid query string in URL. If you are using Linux-Apache, then a simple htaccess file can do the trick. It is called mod rewrite. If you are hosting in windows server, the same thing exists there too. I must give you an example for better understanding. Say you have a product listing page and when anybody clicks on the product listing page then the detail page appears and the URL which carries the product number for the identification of product. Using mod rewrite you can easily omit the query string part to pass it internally.
3. Try to make the URL always in lower case.
4. Put as much as text content as you can. All images of the page must have descriptive alternative names.
5. Avoid flash as much as you can.
6. Try to minimize number of images.
7. Avoid background pictures.
8. Use Meta tags and Meta keywords and Meta description should have higher density keywords. You can judge the keyword density using many online keyword selector tools.
9. And last but not the least. The content of your website should be rich enough to address the context. Mind it, content is what will help you to retain potential customer.

Now you have your website ready and you are ready for promoting it. Here you must know how search engine works? A search engine crawl or spiders your page and the based on site content it indexes your website against the keyword. Like if its gets any keyword mobile phone then it puts your website URL, title against the keyword mobile phone in its database. Some search engine like google, MSN crawls automatically where some needs manual submission. It is important for you to get higher ranking in search engine as generally people psychology never lets them to search more than twenty results at a time. So, if any body types the keyword mobile phone in any search engine, you must end in top twenty results in order to get him visit your website. Now search engine ranking depends on mainly two factors, namely inbound links and outbound links. That is the number of links are directing to your domain and the number of links present in your domain. With search friendly URLs you already created as many links as possible in your own website. The next step is to create inbound links. Here are the steps you follow.

1. Start visiting forums regularly and place your website URL in your comment and post. As the forum will be crawled by search engines they will get links which directs it to your website.
2. You can advertise your website there too.
3. Visit various directories listing website and submit your website URL.
4. Submit your website to all manual search engines.
5. Start writing article on your website in various article publishing websites.

You are almost done. Now the next step is for promotion. First add google analytics code at the bottom of all your pages. This will help to invite google spider on regular basis. If possible try google adsense. Try to place affiliate links if it's not harming your interest directly. If you are selling any products then I will advise you to create your own affiliate program.

Once you complete all these steps, it's the time to sit back and relax. The only job that now needs to be done on regular basis is to monitor and control. Try adding new pages, new content. Replace old content with new one. I am sure with such finer proceedings you will be able to hit the bull's eyes.