A brief guide to marketing your website


Once you have your website, you need to get people to visit it. The easiest method is to continue advertising your product or service in the traditional ways - leaflets, press adverts etc. - but remember to include your website address on everything you produce. You should also add the address to business cards, letterheads and invoices.

In addition, there are a number of techniques you can use on-line for getting the maximum number of hits to your website. The best method for marketing your site will vary greatly depending on the content, so this it not something we can normally do for you, although we are always available to give help or advice if it is needed.

The methods below are only a small section of the advertising mechanisms available, and concentrates on advertising suitable for the smaller business or club. Hopefully, it should be enough to get you started.

Free Online Advertising

The first step is to add your site to some search engines (this will be done automatically if we are able to add your site to our portfolio). This involves sending details of the site (URL, title, relevant keywords etc) to the common websites used generally for Internet searches, such as Google, Lycos, AOL etc. The results are unpredictable, however; there is no guarantee of how long it will take to appear in the listings for that site. Once a search engine indexes a site, your site will appear in the results if relevant keywords are used as search terms.

How high your website appears in the results depends on a number of factors. It depends how many other people have websites offering the same product or service, and also what search terms people are likely to use. With search engines, you are reliant on people supplying the correct search terms - if you are advertising a pewter model of Manchester Town Hall, for instance, someone searching for 'model' and 'Manchester' probably won't see your site, as this will give thousands of results. Searching for 'pewter model' and 'manchester town hall' is more likely to result in a hit. As well as depending on the keywords, the rating of a site on most search engines depends on how many other sites link to yours. More links imply that your site is more interesting, so it will appear higher up the ratings. This is another good reason for allowing us to use your site in our portfolio.

In addition to search engines, there are many sites that will list your website free of charge if your site is relevant to their site. For instance, there are many amateur theatre pages that are happy to add links to the homepages of specific societies. Similar pages exist for everything from sporting clubs to small businesses, although pages that list business websites are more likely to make a charge. The best technique is to search for similar sites and see if any directory listings appear in the search results. An added advantage is that each listing increases the number of links to your site, so increasing your site's apparent popularity.

Paid Online Advertising

Yell.co.uk
Yell is the online version of the Yellow Pages. If you have a company that is listed in the Yellow Pages, your phone number and address will automatically appear on Yell. However, for an additional advertising fee, you can have an enhanced listing that will include a link to your website.

Go to Yell.co.uk for more information (link will open in a new window).

Google AdWords
Google (and some other popular search engines) can display specific adverts based on search terms. For instance, if someone searched the internet for 'pewter models' and 'pewter' was one of your search terms, your ad would be displayed in a separate box on the right hand side of the screen. You are charged by the number of times your ad is clicked on, and this charge can be anything from 1p upwards (you can choose how much) per click, depending on the keyword itself. You can also set a daily limit to make sure costs don't get out of hand - Google suggest prices per click and daily limits based on your keywords when you register with the service.

Go to Google.co.uk for more information (link will open in a new window).

Banner Advertising
Many websites display a banner at the top (or elsewhere) on their page which advertises some product or other. You could have a banner designed that gives a brief description of the product, and if a user is interested, they click on the banner to get through to the website. Banners can be very eye-catching, as they can use graphic images and simple animations as well as text. We can design banner adverts for you for a small additional fee.

There are a lot of companies that will host a banner advert, and your ad will then get displayed on potentially thousands of websites. Alternatively, you could directly approach relevant websites (the Pewter Model Manufacturers Association website, for instance, if one exists) and find out how much it would cost to have your banner displayed on their site.

Spam advertising
Spam advertising involves buying a list of email addresses (or acquiring email addresses in some other way), and sending an email to potentially millions of people around the world advertising your product or service.

SWD do not recommend Spam as a legitimate form of advertising. As well as being both annoying and intrusive, Spam advertising is now illegal in many countries, and sending Spam from your email account may result in the account being closed down by your ISP.




Content updated: Jun 13 14:44