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Create your own website PR campaign

Put your website address in your email signature, on bookmarks, business cards, postcards and in your articles. Give people maximum exposure to your URL, a reason to look at it and look at it yourself.

Add your site to any directories that are reasonable for your material.   Swap links with other people who have complementary content.  Make sure to look in the independent, human-run, DMOZ directory: www.dmoz.org  (DMOZ is an acronym for Directory Mozilla, reflecting its loose association with Netscape's Mozilla project.)  DMOZ powers the core directory services for search engines and portals, including Google, Netscape Search, AOL Search, Lycos, and more.  There are many categories - add your domain(s) to the most appropriate one.  Sub pages with specific information could possibly be listed in another category.  (It would help if you bought a different domain to forward to that sub page.)

There is no substitute for a human spending the time to find good, relevant places to get listed. There are professional organizations in your field. There are directories that specifically cater to your most likely potential clients. Get listed there and write articles that link back to your on-line content.  Try to think like your customers and make sure that you and your website can easily be found.

Getting indexed by Search Engines for your keywords and keyword phrases

85% of surfers find information through search engines: Google is the most used right now. But, like the weather, if you wait a minute that may change. Yahoo dropped Google and developed its own engine; MSN (Bill Gates) has jumped into the search engine fray; and more buying a selling of searching technologies will keep things hopping.

What does this mean to you?  It will become even more difficult to use trickery or deceptive methods to be found in the first few pages of a search engine result for keywords that describe your business.  So here are a few action items to give your business the best chance of being found:

Provide good titles for all your pages. Instead of "ABC Company homepage" use more description, "ABC Company: sales and service for lasers, scanners, and other cutting-edge technology in Baltimore, MD".  For a sub-page, instead of "NewPage3", again, use more description, "ABC Company: Mid-Atlantic supplier for Midget Scanner-Model-4a by Mo-Jo Tech."

This way the search engines will find some keywords right in the title and that title will be listed in the search engine results.  It should be a headline for your content on that page.  Surfers will make a snap decision whether they will link to your site based on your title - MAKE IT DESCRIPTIVE.

• Provide metatags to supplement your content. Use both the "keywords" and "description" metatags. To be most effective, your metatags should be typical words (including misspellings) people might use when searching for you or your business.

• Your company name and location
• Services you provide
• All of your officers, partners and salespeople
• All of your products by type and by manufacturer
• Professional memberships or organizations you belong to

(For specific meta tag examples and instructions: www.sky-bolt.com/metatags.htm.)

• Search engines cannot "see" a graphic. Use the alt tag (text) for each graphic whether it's a photo or a logo. This is also another opportunity to provide keywords and phrases to further enrich your content.  And if a surfer is sight impaired and is using a reader, the alt tag provides some clues.

• Make sure your content is available on the homepage.  The metatags and the title (as discussed above) are in the header at the very top of the HTML code and will be found by the search engine spiders first. If your site has flash and java code or if it uses frames, your real content might not be easily found even though the human surfers can see it.  Look at the source for your site to see what the spiders see.  Ask your web designer about this if you don't know.

• Search Engines use your site popularity (the number of links to it) as part of the ranking calculation.  Do the work to be listed on directories and swap links with relevant sites.  Just find one or two a day.  It won't take long to have a fair number of websites linked to yours.  

Now once a surfer (who is a potential client) has landed on your page, it is up to you to hold his or her attention. Make sure you have good headlines, relevant content, easy navigation, no errors, no dead links, etc.  Also, make sure that the content is more about the client than about your company or you.  When you do this you've created a sticky website and that's a good thing.

An effective website is one of the most useful marketing tools a business can have.  The Internet has changed the marketing landscape.  Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity. You don't have to be a technical wizard or rich to have an effective business website, but you have to pay attention.

Ginny Stibolt has a mission to help small businesses maximize their web presence through practical design and good marketing and PR.  She's been known to contact perfect strangers with ideas for their webpages.  www.sky-bolt.com

This was originally published on Digital Harbor On-line.

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