How to Market Your Website

If you have a website and want to sell from that site then it is important to get traffic (visitors) to the site. You could just put the site up and hope to get people visiting but unless everything is done right then you will be doomed to the lower ranks in the search engines and unless you are prominent on the front page for a search term then traffic will be a rare event.

You must then know how to market your website. This is what I will be going through in this article to get you started on the road to successful internet marketing.

The first part to marketing your website is the site itself. You could target a very large audience but to start out I suggest you concentrate on a small part of it, ie. a niche. Niche marketing is easier to get into because competition is smaller.

You need to let the search engines know what your site is all about and my recommendation is that you narrow down each page on the site in the same way. For example in the pet niche you might have one page reviewing different dog foods or even reviewing one brand only.

The name of the page would include the product, you would have headings which mentioned the product and you would include the product on the page in a way that gave it 1-3% occurrence. ie. once every hundred words. Google would then have no doubt what your page was describing. At the same time you would want the wording to flow naturally, after all you want to market your website to real people not just to Google.

This technique is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), although this article is barely scratching the surface of all the techniques you can use to further improve the SEO and the rankings. Whole books have been written on the subject but this is to give you a grasp of what is involved. Things such as the way the pages in your site link to each other are another part of SEO.

Fresh material posted regularly to an attached blog is also a superb way to market your site. Google loves new content. Getting regular readers is good because Google also likes to see people visiting and staying on a site.

To further increase the visibility of your site you then need to go out and present it to the world.

I usually go to one of the specialist pinging websites such as Pingler. where you can enter the details of the site and then "ping" it. This automatically submits it to many search engines and information sites and in effect shouts out "Come look at this". Your site should then be found and recorded by Google and become "indexed".

If you have done your SEO research well then if the competition is low you may appear in the rankings quite quickly at first but often you will drop back again as Google tries to decide just where it should put you. This is known as the Google bounce.

Google rates websites on,among other things, how important it appears and one of the ways it works this out is by how many sites link back to them and whether the links are relevant. One way of gaining back links is to write articles and submit them to articles sites such as this one here at "Street Articles". To go back to the example I gave above you might write an article about what should be present in a good dog food and in the article you would link to your brand x page with the anchor text (what you actually see in the article as opposed to the link itself). Some article sites allow links in the article and some restrict them to the bio box at the end.

To get good backlinks you need to write plenty of articles with each one pointing back to the most relevant page on your site. Another advantage of article marketing is that many people click on the link and end up on your site where hopefully they go on to become a customer.

Recently Google did a big update to the ways it produces results and many of the big article sites were badly hit and lost their place in the rankings. This was because a lot of them carried poor quality articles with a lot of duplicate content. You need to keep your article original and relevant. Again this is just touching on the subject, there is a lot more to consider.

Researching articles is one of the parts I enjoy. There are several tools to use but my favourites are the keyword tool at Google and that at Wealthy Affiliate, the idea is somewhat akin to finding a niche market where you want to find enough people searching the term but not too much competition. You want the article to hopefully end up on the front page. This is off site SEO and applies to any linking you do that is not directly on your own web pages.

Another way to market your website is to get backlinks on blogs and forum posting relevant to the subject. This is particularly good if you know something about the subject and contribute useful input. Your comments and backlinks are far more likely to get approved in that case.

Other ways of promotion include Facebook and twitter, again if you can send useful relevant information to build up a following then you will inevitably pick up traffic and hopefully customers.

Social bookmarking is another useful way to market your website. Site such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious have a huge following. one site of mine had an extra 1500 visitors in a week from Stumbleupon.

To use social bookmarking you can not only post up your website but your articles too, thus giving extra backlinks to the backlinks.

There are many other ways to market your website but I have aimed to give you a basic insight into what you can do to get started.

To summarise

• Find a niche market for low competition.
• Design your site for the search engines but make it user friendly for humans.
• Ping the site Research and write articles with relevant links.
• Join in with forums and blogs, again including relevant information.
• Use Twitter, Facebook and social bookmaking to publicise site and articles
• Last but not least do it all over again to keep it fresh

I hope that this has given you some guidance as on how to market your website for affiliate marketing Remember to succeed you need to keep working. You are aiming to build a long lasting business for the future.

Roger