Marketing Your Website

You’ve created a site – now you need to market it. If you don’t tell people about your site no one will know it is there. A website is just like a physical location. If you build a store on top of a mountain, no one will know about it. The same goes for the web. If you build a site, no one will know it is there unless you make a splash, bring attention to it, shout it out to the world.

A good way of doing this is all the usual, conventional, practical methods of advertising such as print, radio and television, as well as lesser yet effective methods such as magazines, billboards etc. That costs a lot of money however and some people just don’t have that budget. I would still recommend looking at these methods and trying at least some of them on a limited basis, depending on your budget. However, there is another method; one that is not as effective or as lucrative as other methods, but works none the less.

Search engines.

Now, if you are like most businesses you are going to have a lot of competition out there. All of your competitors want to be found under most if not all of the same search terms you do. This can lead to some pretty fierce fighting for position on the engines, especially Google as it currently holds the title of champion in the search engine arena. According to comScore Media Metrix Google accounts for 74% of all search engine traffic, Yahoo has 14%, MSN 9%, Ask has 2% and all other SE's share the remaining 1%. With the amount of searches going on every day in the world, even 2% with Ask is a large number, but no one can hold a candle to the top dog, Google.

This means you need to optimize your site, for the most part, for Google. That doesn’t mean you ignore the other engines, but with 74% of the traffic, Google is obviously the lion’s share and it only makes sense to do it with them in mind.

How do you optimize a site for the search engines, or more relevantly, Google? Well, there are a lot of ways to do it. What you do NOT want to do is what they call “spamdexing” or “spamming” the search engines. Doing so will be considered a scam and will get you banned from the search engines altogether. This is disaster and to be avoided at all costs.

More tomorrow on how to optimize and how to avoid spamdexing

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.