There is no point having a website if no one comes to see it. To get visitors you need to get your site noticed and unless you are very wealthy and can afford to advertise on the TV or in other publications then you only have two options:
This is a tedious task for an expert but for the beginner it can be a nightmare. I suggest that in the first instance you simply submit the URL of you home page to the various search engines. You must do this with at least Google, Yahoo and MSN. We will cover the subject of electronic sitemaps and other such technologies later in this article.
Having registered your site with the search engines be prepared for a long wait before anything happens. Very occasionally you will be lucky but most of the time this will take weeks if not months.
When you are ready to go beyond the simple search engine submission we suggest you join the webmaster services of the major search engines where you will find a lot more information on the submission process. You will have to register with each of the following to use their services.
After studying the mass of information available on the sites above along with their associated blogs and forums you now realise that marketing a site is a lot more complicated than actually building one. Many people fall into the trap of having their website built by a third party who is not responsible for marketing it by doing so they will inevitably end up with a dud. Imagine paying someone to build a car they were not responsible for selling, how long do you think the business would last?
The search engine submission process is NOT A ONE OFF activity, every time you change your site or add new pages you have to do it all again. This is why the major search engines have got together to come up with a semi-automatic submission protocol that they can all use and this is called a sitemap.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are special text or XML files that summarise the pages in your site. They have to be built to defined specifications which you can read all about on Sitemaps.org. Creating your sitemap can be a daunting task but GSiteCrawler by SOFTplus is very good. If you are serious about your website then you have to have a sitemap.
Swapping links must be handled VERY carefully. You need links only from other respectable sites. If you are seeking a link from another site you MUST first see how that site is rated by the search engines. The site must have something in common with yours in order for the link to have value and you must avoid links from sites that only seem to have links to other sites and no unique content of their own. These are called “Link Farms” and are seriously bad news.
If your site is about Butterflies and you can get links from other sites that are just about Butterflies then you will not go far wrong and you can safely link back to that site as you should only provide links to things that are relevant to your site remembering that relevancy could be page subject, location, colour, size, etc. – relevancy is rather semantic! It can depend upon how you word the link, e.g. “BLUE WORLD, another site about the colour blue”
Basically if the page you are getting the link from covers the same subject that your site covers then a link between the two is potentially a good one.
Remember it is not the incoming link to your site that will cause you problems with the search engines as you are not in control of incoming links. It is the link from your site that will cause the issue as this is in your control. If you link to a bad site it is you that will suffer.
It is vital to have as many good incoming links that you can get as it is these, along with the quality and uniqueness of your content, that will have a large impact on the subsequent ranking that your site will achieve. Do not attempt to pay or offer to pay for links as this is contrary to the rules of every major search engine and the moment they find out you will banned and dropped from the directory. You will note if you join Google Webmaster Tools that one of the tools is a reporting mechanism to facilitate the removal of anyone who offers to pay for links - BE WARNED!
For commercial sites this is a very good way, and getting better by the day, to get customers but as it will cost you money for each person who clicks then PPC is generally outside the budget on non-commercial sites.
With many marketing solutions outside the reach of the small website one has to be a bit more resourceful. Most villages and and many small towns produce a local community newsletter or parish magazine. You may be able use this to tell people that your site exists or perhaps the local shop or pub will put up a notice to the same effect. They all will be more keen to do this if you mention them on your site.
With all this talk about marketing you may be thinking about putting advertising on your site and that brings us to finance and making money with your website.