[thelist] Website promotion - basic steps

[Bob Meetin]

Paul Bennett wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've a small site I've been charged with promoting. It's a simple site designed to get people to contact the organisation to make bookings.
>
> These are the things I've done so far:
> 1) descriptive title, h1 text
> 2) added to relevant directories
> 3) link exchanges with relevant sites
> 4) submitted to major search engines
> 5) encouraged clients to add / update content (not yet very successful)
>
> All went well at the beginning and they got a few contacts from their site, then things cooled off and the contacts dried up.
>
> At the moment they're getting < 100 uniques a month and I'd like to get them more value from their site. (They're nice people :) )
>
> Any ideas for mo' betta promotion? I'm considering a basic facebook app, but in the meantime am I missing anything obvious?
> Am I better recommending and managing an adwords campaign (or similar)?
>
> Thanks in advance for any advice
> Paul the promotion n00b.
>   
The other Paul is also right that it's more than just internet.  The 
real tough thing with small businesses is getting the principals to buy 
into the fact that electronic business cards don't solve visibility 
problems.  You've gotten them past that point.  Relevant link exchanges 
is often the toughest nut to crack.  The experts will tell you 10, 20, 
50, 100 it's never enough.  I have a couple clients who won't wage that 
war. 

Linked In and Twitter in particular are getting some good nods from the 
SEO community. 

Ensure that the key phrases are good ones.  You may need to use google's 
tools or one of the other word tracker tools to do so. You can try some 
paid advertising such as adwords, but it is a gamble and many viewers 
get turned off by having been taken down wrong trails because the seo 
person wannabe made curious decisions.

Although the site doesn't sound regional you might try occasionally 
posting to craigslist in several of the large regional areas but careful 
not violate their spam policies.  With the descriptive title make sure 
the pages support the key phrases in the title.  I experimented and 
found that although google only displays 70 characters of the title on 
results pages that it will actually index up to 100.  Submitting to 
major search engines probably has little effect as they come around 
anyway unless the site is unfriendly.  Don't forget local directories.

Fresh content is really important.  If they aren't into it themselves, 
perhaps lethargic or don't want to pay your rates introduce them to a 
ghost writer.  Take a visit to www.highrankings.com. Under the Resource 
button are FAQ and Articles.  There is a lot of common sense in what 
they say.

-- 
Bob Meetin
www.dottedi.biz
303-926-0167

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