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Ok, we get emails every week asking for tips and tricks on how to make their websites a success. Time to answer that question publicly. While there is probably hundreds of tips/ticks to do, we're only going to comment on what worked for us. SEO (search engine optimization):
- make your website tableless and XHTML standards compliant
- short descriptive title tags (long keyword heavy title tags don't do anything, remember the title tag is what users see in Google search results, so short concise titles are more likely to be clicked)
- meta descriptions, to be honest these aren't really neccessary anymore, have one on your homepage but thats it. If your webpages have lots of text then I'd recommend not bothering with the meta tags as google always returns excerpts and snippets of your content in the search results, never the full meta description
- put in a blog or some article manager on your site and write new articles daily. Unique content MAJORLY compliments your site
- deep link your own pages, put lots of descriptive links inside your content to other pages of your site
- if you have other established websites, link them to each other BECAUSE THIS HELPS! Do not put links on every webpage, put a link to your other sites on just the homepage and maybe your contact page as this will weigh much heavier than links on every page (especially if you have thousands of webpages on a single site!!)
- submit your site to dmoz.org, if you get listed it will help out! takes months - years though
- do not submit your website to dozens of free link directories, this could even hurt your ranking Marketing:
Unless you have a sizeable budget, don't even bother! If you can afford $3500 - $5000, I'd definitely suggest using a company like PepperJam as they guarantee results. We were once contacted by another company who wanted $15,000 a month for marketing, but they guaranteed major results (we didn't do it though). Paying for ads through Google etc is great for minor promoting, but keep in mind that for $5 you might get 10-20 visitors, not really worth it as you aren't going to earn money unless you have decent traffic (500-2000 a day). Buying text links, does it work?
Short answer, yes! It depends big time on what links you buy and how relevant they are. Buying a link on a hotel site for a business directory is not going to carry weight at all and is a waste of your money. Buying a link on a photo site for your company portfolio on the other hand would help out big time. Quick success story:
Folling the tips I mentioned above, we launched ZipLeaf.co.nz in mid-december 2008, it was a brand new non-marketed site. Within 4 weeks it jumped to PR4, 50,000 pages indexed, and over 15,000 unique visitors. Within one month? This was one of the fastest launches we have had. Though to be honest traffic dropped shortly thereafter, but we're hoping it can pick up again in February. Be prepared for the long haul. It could take 1-2 years before your site actually picks up and starts getting traffic. One of our old projects ZipCanada.com, we launched in September 2007 and never spent a dime on marketing. Now over 1 year later it is consistently receiving 1000-2000 unique visitors a day (30,000-40,000+ a month). We're hoping to see that double/tripple this year. Once you have one well-established website with great traffic, launching new sites is a breeze for marketing. Put a link on your website to a new one you built and within a few days the search engines will go to town on it. These are my thoughts on what worked for us, some may disagree on some things but it works for us. |
