What is the best way to promote your website

01 February 2012

Asking this question is a little like saying “what is the best way to cook food?” The answers are as various as there are types of food. But there are a few simple truths that hold for almost all websites, regardless of niche or product. For the purposes of this article, we’ll stick with websites that are selling a product. Websites that “sell” only information, like blogs, are a slightly different creature - but many of these tactics will work for those as well.

SEO

SEO is the cornerstone of online marketing, and an understanding of it is critical to promoting any website. SEO best practices change over time, and there are no hard and fast rules to how you should approach it. Generally it is made up of two things: article marketing and link building.Article marketing involves writing articles that focus on specific keywords. These articles can be posted on your own site (on-site SEO) or on web 2.0 platforms such as article directories, blogs, etc. Understanding what makes a good SEO article is key to making your article marketing efforts pay their own way.

Understanding your niche is also central to article marketing. If you’re in a highly competitive field, like selling gadgets or insurance, or adult entertainment, article marketing is a little bit like shooting a BB gun at a freight train. You can do it as much as you like, but you’re not going to make much of an impact because of the sheer volume you’re competing against. In these niches, you have to come up with more clever ways to get your website in front of internet users.

Link building is a complex, time-consuming activity that is entirely necessary for all websites, as Google considers incoming links (or backlinks, where the link is not reciprocal) as a key measure of website importance and relevance. This involves complex tactics like linkwheel building, and other simpler things like posting links to your site and your articles on social media networks like Digg, and posting on forums and commenting on blogs.

Not all links are equal, and this is important to remember. A link on a popular site is worth hundreds of times as much as a link on a nothing site, and links on websites owned by you are worth absolutely nothing.

PPC and other things that cost money

There is a disturbing mind set amongst internet marketers that promoting a website can be done for free. While this is partially true, all businesses need to spend money to make money.

PPC, or pay-per-click advertising, is a highly specialized practice that is best left to professional agencies. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you are guaranteed to spend more money than you make. Either learn the ropes or pay someone to do it for you - or don’t bother at all.

Other types of paid advertising, however, are much easier for beginners to use. One tactic that works particularly well is sponsored posts. For around $50-$500 you can pay a blogger in your niche or field to write a post about your website, using keywords, images and phrases you specify. This helps with SEO and incoming links, and also helps to build buzz about your site.

If people who are active in your “field” see a lot of bloggers talking about one thing, it tends to give that website or business an air of authority - nobody needs to know you paid for all of those posts.

$50 may seem like a lot to pay for a single link, when you can get 10 articles for that price, but remember that a link on a high page-rank blog with an active audience is worth 100 articles on article directories or 10 links on Digg. If you only have a tiny marketing budget, then this is where you should focus it.