Guide to Website Promotion

Website Promotion - Choosing your niche

Finding your discussion topic, your area of service to your readers.

I recommend: Website Promotion at http://www.9searches.org
 
Choosing a niche may be problematic for those who are experts in areas which are over-exploited by market providers and other knowledge experts, and the more exploited it is the harder it becomes to compete with others in the same are as you are.

The key to find a non-competitive niche within your area of expertise may require to go granular into a specific area of the topic which makes it less general and broad.

And here is a "for instance":
Say for instance that you are a programming analyst and would like to share your expertise with the world by creating a website. As opposed to create your website based on the "Language Programming" niche, which is broad and over-exploited, you may want to focus more in "UML Concepts or Software Architecture" or "Visual Basic 6 Embedding tools". The key is to find sub-topics pertaining the general aspect of things you know. And this is done by analyzing niche competition, which we'll talk about next.

Website Promotion - Choosing keywords

What should be in it, how long should it be, what should it project.

I recommend: Keyword Phrase - Choosing your winners

Choosing a niche has entirely to do with choosing the keywords for your website and vice-versa. You can use keyword research as your primary analysis to find which niche you want to work with. Most people would do a keyword analysis around a list of possible phrases which they consider to be an expert for and then they choose their niche based on the results.

To do a kewyord analysis, you can use the yahoo keyword discovery tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/. Which will give you a sense of how competitive your chosen keywords are. Here you can type a seed keyword such as "Computers" and you will get tons of phrases around your word, and their montly search rate. The best tool for my taste is Web CEO, which allows you to do kewyord research and also provides you with the competitiveness of each generated phrase. You can download Web CEO for free here Download WEB CEO for FREE!

Website Promotion - Choosing your domain

A very important piece of your promotion efforts.

I recommend: Website Promotion

Choosing your domain name is just as important as all the other described pieces. This is your way to identify your website and make it obviously associated to your content, so your readers as well as search engines can see what your site is about.

Once you have chosen your niche and the main concept your website will revolve around, then you can choose a domain name the goes in tandem with all that. It is important to choose a domain name that best and clearly describes what your overall website is about. For instance, if your website is about "Toys for keeds who need special education" you can choose a domain such as "toys-for-special-education.com" or "specialeducationtoys.com". The trick is that your readers should be able to easily remember your domain name and search engines can find your keywords in it. This is why many webmasters choose to separate each word with a dash. Another important aspect of choosing your domain name is to make it as short as possible, don't go over 26 characters long. The longer you make it the harder it is for consumers to remember it.

Website Promotion - Going Content HAPPY!!!

Content is king, this is what search engines and readers are looking for, give it to them.

I recommend: Writing for traffic - Content for visitors

Content is king, this is what search engines and readers are looking for, give it to them. Search Engines feed from content in order to provide relevant information to consumers, here is where you need to shine and add your expertise to each of your pages.

Here is how to do it:
Create each page with focus on one of your selected kewyords and write about it extensively and well. Use the focus keyword on your Title Tags, Meta Tags, Content Heading and repeatedly througout your content copy. This way search engines will know what this page is about and index you based on that. For more information about title and meta tags visit http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/meta_title_tags/

Website Promotion - Link Building

Backlinks are votes.

I recommend: Backlinks are votes. Every time another website links to yours it is giving you a vote for your useful content. Well, at least that is what the intended concept was but it has become more a way to please Google than anything else.

There are two types of link building. Reciprocal Links and One Way Inbound Links. Reciprocal linking became popular as web masters tried to fool search engines by building links by giving a link for a link. For a while this worked very well and participants of these practices earned the link authority they wanted. However as Search Engines become smarter, they are giving less importance to links which are reciprocated.

One way inbound links are less likely to be seem as an effort to tweak and looks more authentic in terms of honest votes for your content. Today you can obtain links simply by creating good content and as you site is seen people will link to you, just because you have amazing information to share. However, today you can also subscribe to link directories, write articles and post on blogs, all of these will give you the ability to put a link back to your pages, which ultimatly may increase your popularity and ranking.

Website Promotion - Tools for being found

XML Sitemaps and Social Bookmarking

I recommend: Read How can my Web pages be indexed quicker?

Before, getting indexed by search engines would take weeks and sometimes months. Today there are tools to make this happen quicker. Being indexed timely will provide you with more efficiency in terms of gaining page rank and traffic.
 
XML Site Map: Site maps are XML blueprints of your site, which lists all the pages within it in a particular order. You can create a site map here http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/, and submit it to google by opening a Webmaster Tools account and yahoo by using the Yahoo Explorer. This will allow search engines to crawl your site on a regular basis and discover any changes you have made.  Make sure to create content frequently so search engines crawl you often and build your ranking.

Social Bookmarking can have your website indexed by Google within 24 hours. Social Bookmarking is a way to tagg and organize your favorite articles and websites using sites such as DIGG, Del.icio.us and Furl. Google in particular crawl and discovers sites in the above mentioned networs several times a day. I recommend creating an account and tagging all your pages as you do them. Then sit back and watch how it shows in Google whithin hours.