Real Internet Marketing
Website Promotion: A 9-Step Strategy
I have put together an internet marketing tutorial, detailing some of the techniques that I use to promote my "money sites".
- Optimize the web page for at least two keywords.
- Ideally, your primary keyword will be used in your domain name. Also use it in your title tag ( preferably at the beginning of the title ), in your description meta-tag, in your keywords meta-tag, in the 'h1' main page title. In the body of your page, use it in a natural way, so that it has a "keyword density" of about 3%. Your secondary keyword(s) should be used wherever possible, but with a lower word density.
- Write three unique descriptions for the webpage.
- These will be used in the description meta-tag of your webpage, in the description tag of your RSS feed, and in descriptions for social bookmarking submissions. Many search engines use your meta-tag description on their search results page, so try to make this a compelling call to visit your webpage. It should not exceed 160 characters in length.
- Put up your auxilliary pages.
- A privacy page. This page should detail your own policy, and deny responsibility for the privacy practices of 3rd party advertisers. If your website is using Google Adsense, then you must also include information about their new DoubleClick DART cookie. If you don't have a disclaimer on your main webpage, then you should put one at the bottom of this page. Click the 'Privacy' link in the footer to see a good example of a privacy page. ( Please don't copy our page verbatim. It is only to be used as an example - I am not a legal expert. )
- A site map. ( If your website is a blog, this page and the next two pages are usually done for you by one of your plugins. ) If you are sitemap-challenged, here is a website that has a good sitemap generator.
- An RSS feed. Here is an excellent program to generate an RSS feed for your website.
- A robots.txt page. Include any folders or pages that you don't want the search engines to spider. Also tell them where to find your site map. Here is an example:
Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsitename.com/sitemap.xml User-agent: * Disallow: /foldername/ Disallow: /privacy.html
- Add these links to your footer.
- Privacy page. This link should be rel="nofollow" since you don't want to give any search engine "juice" to this page.
- Your email address. Make sure that you have set up a webmaster@website.com email address at your web server - this is not automatic. If you don't want this mailbox cluttered up with SPAM, then you can hide it from hacker spiders. In fact, I have written a short javascript function, mailTo(),to prevent the email address from being visible in the source code of your webpage.
- Links to any other websites that you have that are in the same niche.
- Set up the following search engine accounts:
- Google Analytics. Submit your website; then add the tracking code to your webpage, and any other pages you want to track.
- Google Webmaster Tools. Submit your website, verify, and add your sitemap.
- Yahoo Site Explorer. Submit your website, verify, and add your RSS feed and sitemap.
- MSN LiveSearch Webmaster Center. Submit your website, verify, add your sitemap, and ping them. ( To notify MSNBot when you change an existing sitemap or add a new one, enter the following in your browser: http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=[your sitemap web address] )
- Submit your RSS feed to feed directories:
- Bookmark to social bookmarking sites.
- The sites I have found that tend to rank quickly in Google are Digg, Mixx, Propeller, and Stumbleupon. ( Stumbleupon always causes a HUGE jump in site visits the same day I submit to it. )
- I use a free service, Social Marker, which ( after you set it up ) automatically submits to up to 160 bookmarking services in minutes.
- Put the following badges in either your sidebar or footer:
- RSS 2.0 - This is a link to subscribe to your own RSS feed. Wordpress has a good button image to use for this.
- Feedage - This is used to subscribe to the Feedage feed that you set up in step #6. You can get the code for this badge when you subscribe.
- AddThis - This is a social bookmarking widget that you use to let people bookmark your website. Register for a free account, pick your button, and you can customize it to show a link to all the social bookmarking sites you want to include.
- Write articles to submit to article directories
- This is another whole list of what-to-do's, which I will publish on another page in the near future.
NOTE: This web page illustrates most of the on-site promotional tools mentioned above. To see the source code, right-click anywhere on the page, and select "View (Page) Source".
If you have any suggestions for good ( fairly simple ) promotional tools not covered on this page, please send me an email to the address below.
