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
