Web Design Ireland

There are a number of ways of promoting a site, however any webmaster worth his salt knows that search engine referrals are where you are going to win the majority of points. Link building is hard work, and it is much better to simply create content which will serve two purposes - generate search engine traffic, and act as link bait.

Like everything in life, the more effort you put in, the more results you get out. The results you achieve will also depend on the level of competition online, your audience and your subject matter, but overall you should be able to obtain a steady stream of SERP related traffic within 6-12 months.

1) Content. Content Content.

Start researching ideas for content, thats actual spider diagrams with topics, subtopics articles and anything else you think your visitors will appreciate. Get it into Microsoft Word, typed and ready for distribution on your site, and on article sites. Never forget syndication is a great way of getting links back to your site. Don’t be tempted to go for filler content, that is useless. Really bulk it out with hard hitting subject matter, and is extremely well written. If you have the budget for it consider hiring a professional copywriter. Make sure you put your best content on your own site, and distribute about 10% to others until your site starts pulling in traffic. If you are stuck for content ideas, get some keyword research tools. Overture, Google and Wordtracker all have excellent tools which can trigger content ideas. Article’s which general audience (within your sector) will appreciate always do well, particularly when combined with social bookmarking - (see later notes).

2). Brand Name. Don’t just go with the first website name that comes to mind. Domain names are everything online. You want to go for a quirky easily branded name - not keyword.com. Keyword domains are dead in the water, name recognition is in. The value of keywords in a domain name are over-rated and over time will probably die out with search engine ranking algorithms as they get more advanced.

3). Information Architecture. KISS stupid. Learn the lesson of Boo.com, a dotcom failure on all counts, mainly because its site design was so ridiculously cluttered, and bloated. Many others over the years have fallen by the wayside because of this as well. Make sure that your keywords that you have researched in step ones are occasionally dropped into page names and directory naming conventions. Hit the major ones if you can, with a site structure that has multiple sub directories, rather than a flat structure. Directory names appear to carry slightly more weight than keywords in pages, the logic probably being that it is easy for spammers to adjust page names (on free services like blogger) than it is for them to adjust directory names. Don’t take this as gospel - it’s just my own thoughts, on how se’s are likely to act.

4) Development best practise..

Again keep it extremely simple, search engine robots want your content as fast as you can feed it to them, so make sure that you have developed using CSS layouts. Tables = bloated code. Bloated code = less frequent spidering. That also goes for widgets and fancy graphics. Cut it down to a slimmer size, lose the flash banner if you can, lose the javascript, in fact trim any of the unnecessary things from your code. that includes comments, and html spacing. Google saves a shed load of bandwidth by compressing HTML code, removing comments, and generally tidying up their code. Run your site through something like Lynx to see how it performs in a text based browser. When you see what the spiders see, this can help you reshape your content. Your actual text should always outweigh your HTML content.

5) Test. Test. Test There is absolutely no excuse for developers not cross browser testing in this day and age. Whilst in makes little or no difference to Google et al, it does mean that some of your visitors e.g. the Mac and Linux users will be put off. The number of these visitors out there online is bigger than you think, and is growing. You cannot afford to ignore a certain percentage of your potential audience. This also links back to the old, KISS. Testing will be much easier the less complex your site is. Serve the visitors what they want, in as short a time as possible and they will thank you for it.

6) Repeat Visitors. Get them and keep them

If you are running an article based site, or a blog, then you better have an RSS feed for people to read your content at leisure. Feedburner provides a fantastic service for bloggers and webmaster, which allows you to track your readers, as the subscribe. It also allows you to use a friendly address (a URL on your own site) for free. You can also change the location of your feed (or website for that matter) without losing contact with subscribers.

7) Speed

Speed is extremely important, even in the age of broadband. What made Google grow so quickly overnight? They removed any fluff from their pages, compressed everything down to its simplest form, and waited for the viral marketing (word of mouth) in this case to hit. When other search engines at the time were trying to be jack of all trades. Google concentrated on making the user experience (for what was the era of 56k modem) as fast as possible. Compress your JPEG’s, if you have Fireworks, continue to use it for compressing JPEGs, its compression is much better than Photoshop’s. If you have flash banners, lose them. If your site is a complete flash site, good luck, but it will be dead in the water before you’ve even started. If you can trip a few kilobytes off a page, do it. The website should respond typically within 4-5 seconds (max) to any request. Longer than that, and you’ll lose 10% of your audience for every second of their time that you waste.

8). Location, Location, Location

You are hosting on a static IP right? And it is a country specific IP address? Good. Glad to hear it. Major search engines are tailoring searches for country specific domains, and the SERPS will differ for country to country. Just run Google through a proxy to see for yourself. If your market is local it is extremely important that you pay heed to this.

9) Old Fashioned SEO

Get out your heading tags, title tags, meta description, meta keyword and alt tags. Keyword stuffing is dead, think subtle references throughout your code to your subject matter. Come up with permutations that you can use as well, from your keyword research that you did in step 1.

10) Good Titles.

Tell me you’ve thought thoroughly about the titles of each page on your site. Remember its your title that people click on, so you are in competition with millions of other pages, and millions of other sites. Start thinking about what YOU would be most likely to click on if you see a result in the SERP. Find out what your competition have as their titles, and whip their ass with an eye grabbing headline that entices people, to click.

11) Outbound links

Outbound links are your bestest friend. From every page that you create you should, link to one or two high ranking websites under that particular keyword. Use your keyword in the link text. Google in particular seems to like sites that provide visitors with additional links that are useful. Common sense really. A good site, will always cite other relevant sites.

12) Inbound links

Inbound links are ever important, but 2007 taught us not to try and game the system, be careful what lengths you go to build inbound links, or the gentlemen who notice link buying etc at the Big G, will clamp down on your site. Hard. This applies solely to buying links. Submit to topic directories if you can, and a listing in DMOZ, is worth its weight in gold. Dave has a good article on getting into DMOZ.

13) OnSite Linking

To distribute your pagerank (and to gain trust across subdomains) its a good idea to link to other pages on your site, with link text that is relevant to that page. For example, I’ve been talking in this article about choosing a domain name, and I have a page on that topic elsewhere on this site. Help the search engines figure out more keywords that are relevant to that page, and at the same time guide your visitors through the site.

14) Social networking sites

Sites like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, have all been major players in 2007. Facebook has also opened up as a development platform, and Google’s Orkut has also jumping on the bandwagon. Start building people as well as links. 2008 will see the explosion of applications on these networks and if you are noticed, and your application is noticed you have the potential to reach a mammoth audience. And you have also started learning FBML right?

Stop just lurking in forums, get in there and get your name known, and the honour of a link in your signature. Start talking to peers online, using every available means. If there isn’t already a web forum in your chosen market sector, create one. Success on the web is all about finding niche’s.

15) Social bookmarking

A quick way to get your content noticed online, is to use social bookmarking tools. They can provide you with a quick boost in visitors and feed subscribers. Use them to your advantage, get yourself an account at the major players. Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and Reddit. Learn what kind of visitor hangs out at each of these social networking sites, so that you can best determine what to submit where.

16) Traditional marketing

Never forget the impact that a traditional campaign can have on your search engine traffic. Consider alternative ways to market your website.

Just because you are online, don’t forget that a good old fashioned advertisement in a relevant publication advertising your website address might really work for you.

17) Freebies

People love freebies, consider running competitions to give them away, in exchange for links. Even running a competition can attract links in itself.

18) Logging and Tracking

Keep an eye on your stats. I use Google Analytics, which is a great free solution. Monitor your referral keywords, and if you can, build a page of content around that. Feed the search engines what people appear to be searching for.

19) Timely topics

Google artificially inflates recent web pages, so that when a news corporation or blogger starts to post about a story, it appears closer to the top of the SERPs, because it is recent. For this reason timely topics on things that are happening at the moment in your industry are a good idea, and results in little peaks of search engine traffic.

20) Subdomains

I have my blog on a subdomain. Subdomains are a good idea for search engine marketers because they appear to be completely independant from say www.domain.com. That results (in some cases) in double the number of backlinks. They also allow you to focus in on niche areas to request backlinks from. E.g if you’re site is about flowers, and you have a valentines day promotion, http://valentines.flowers.com may allow you to get listed on valentines day websites, more easily. P.s. see what I’ve done there - with the Valentines day thing. Its fast approaching. I want to maybe capitalize on that a bit in the SERPs.

21) Blogs

Blogging provides fantastic networking opportunities with other people in your market, including competitors. Getting into the blogging scene more can do a lot for your business. You will start to participate more on other sites (building backlinks through comment love), and also gain a wealth of information you might otherwise have missed. Blogs also provide your potential customers and existing clients with a comfortable way of contacting you on a one to one basis.

If you follow the above bits and pieces, you will start to see vast improvements in both your subscriber count, and your website visitors over the next year. Continue to build great content, at least one page a day, by next year you could have on your hands around 400+ pages of quality content. That is a pretty good base to start from, as this will draw in perhaps 5-6 people for each page, giving you around 2000 visitors in your first year, from organic search engines alone.