Web Site Promotion

Maybe a great site - but no visitors?
Or worse - a poor site with no visitors?

Too often the budget and resources are blown on producing a web site, with little commitment or resources left over to maintain and promote it properly afterwards.

Some of the big dot coms spent 60% or more of their funds on marketing in the big dot com boom and bust, but traditional businesses often struggle to invest just 1% of their revenues on their web presence.

Result - lost in cyberspace! It's like dressing a shop window to show off a company's wares - and then setting it up in the middle of the woods. No one knows it's there, and even if they do, they can't find it.

Promoting your web site is a vital but often neglected activity. And like any good web site, it is never truly finished. Promotion is an ongoing process. It need not be very expensive though. All it takes is a little time and thought.

Just some of the techniques commonly used are listed on the right here. But before embarking on a serious marketing campaign make sure the site is up to scratch.

Is it fully functional? Does it have the right content? It is a good idea to get a web site Health Check to identify any problems and see what can be improved, before telling the world about it.

Search engines are often seen as the holy grail for generating traffic - and there are many success stories - but be warned! They can be blunt instruments, and are always struggling to keep up with the explosion of commercial content on the net. And their rules for ranking sites change frequently - so you may do well one month, then lose it the next!

Although 85% or more of WWW users make use of search engines, they also find new sites through a very wide variety of other methods. And if your site is not in the top 30 or so listed for a given keyword, then you are virtually lost to searchers who rarely look further than the first few pages of results.

We strongly recommend that web site promotion is tackled as part of a balanced and coherent plan that hits your target customer groups in the most efficient way - using a mixture of online and offline methods.

See our detailed report on web site promotion.

The absolutely essential steps you can take once you are ready to launch a site are:

• Tell your customers
• Tell your friends and colleagues
• Make sure every item of stationery has the web address on it - including all outgoing emails.
• Make sure the Title, Keyword and Description meta tags (in the HTML Head section) are correctly coded for every web page (but note that only the Title tag is paid much attention now).
• Register with Directories and get links from other sites.

That's it, you're on the way! Now talk to Consult-X to find out what to do next.