Web Site Promotion Technics and Tricks
Posted: Wednesday, June 30, 2004
by mario ogas
artandata.com (Artandata Group)
The most important task to properly promote a web site (or any other product or service) is to reach top quality design and content before promotion is targeted. In the following article is explained how to perform step by step the requirements on the subject. Tips are based on the product/service to target audience relationship for the web site development.
So I left apart some work to become, once again, an ezine writer.
As I promised this issue deals with web site promotion, perhaps the hardest thing to accomplish even for a web site or for & any development, let say enterprise, books, events, etc.
I must say that I’m not a web marketing guru but I’ve been in the field for so many years that I surely have some experience to share.
So if you feel like some benefit can be obtained reading this ezine fold your shirt leaves and let’s start promoting your own site !
To start let’s imaging that we do not have a web site to promote ! how ? yes ! you’ve read well !
Forget all about your web site ! we are going to build an estrategy right from zero, nothing, nada, niente !
Why? Just becouse I want you to enter the broad view, the broad way before start thinking on how to promote your site Ok ?
Well…so we have nothing. That’s good! Isn’t it ? what do you think about ?
Well, what I meant is having nothing to promote! Not even the need to promote anything.
Let’s go one step beyond:
Now, suppose you’ve got ‘something’ in your mind…shapeless…dark…confuse…but you feel like that ‘thing’ could become something great, wonderfull, unknown, wanted… But you don’t yet know what’s that ! your creature is just on it’s birth time…you have to feed it, caresse it, let it make it’s first step, build it up, etc. soon you’ll find that you’ve got a project your creature became a project !
Rule #1:
To successful promote a product that product MUST BE well formed and attractive for the target audience .
This first rule is the essence of all promotion works, because if your product isn’t good enough you are probably wasting your time because the target won’t be interestet on it. I will explain later in this ezine some good technics to promote but it’s absolutely necessary get understanding of the first rule.
The next step is to imaging that your product NEEDS a web site. I’ve tried to imagine a producto or service that doesn’t need a site but I can’t figure it. This leads us to a very different point of view on how to create the web site under a PRODUCT OR SERVICE to TARGET relationship.
By the way : is your web site developed under this approach ?
Rule #2 The product need to reach the target. The target wants to get the product.
Two nice postulates conform rule #2. Here is where promotion fits. By promoting the product reachs the target. By promoting, the target knows the product and may be wants it. That’s all. Simple! Very simple! In theory at least.
The keyword of rule #2 is WANTS. We must focus on this word when building the web site for your products or services. If we cannot reach that the target wants the product we are lost. There won’t be any
effort we can do to promote our producto that can lead to any benefit if the product isn’t enjoyed by the target. If so, we need to redesign our strategy or our the product or both, or forget the project.
I can’t tell here how to get your product/service to be wanted by the audience, that’s your job. The most I can say is that you have to jump into the target roll and watch your product on that point of view.
Also you need to make surveys on the product and ask for others to help you on the task.
What I do try to explain is how to build a web site for benefit. Let’s start viewing the mening of promote. You’re reading this ezine to get tips and tricks to wisely promote your web site, so it’s very important to understand what is to promote for our porposes.
As you probably guessed promote is action. Promote are the ways and estrategies we perform to COMMUNICATE TO OUR TARGET (or targeted audience). But here is the point: once the communication channel is established you are definitively communicating. Showing your identity and image to others. So when promoting you can also reach a negative impression at your target.
Think about ! how many times you clicked onto an attractive link (attractive becauso you expected nice information beyond the link ) just to find, some seconds after, that the site wasn’t worthy your time becouse had nothing interesting, looked like designed by an ape or just displayed our well known “site under construction" animations.
So here is the valued key:
To sucessfully promote your site you must develop a killing design site filled with attractive information or/and resources that the target surely wants.
At this point I recommend the lecture of my other job “the creative process" that can be usefull to get ideas for the site development estrategy.
The communication process
As said, promote is communicate so let’s remember the ‘actors at stage’ into that process:
This is a simplified diagram of the communication process. Basically you have an identity to be shown and you develop messages that are fired to the target. The communication channel always have a given amount of noise that modify the messages before they are reached by the target. Then the audience give feedback to you (even the lack of feedback is a kind of response to be evaluated). Zero feedback may indicate that your messages must be odified.
Then your product/service identity must be adequate to the target preferences. This identity must be properly shown at the site’s home page. Main inside links must be placed to give access to interest
contents. All this tasks have to be done by a professional web designer to warrant a functional site from the visual point of view.
By last let’s talk on the different ways to promote your site. Basically you probably think that reaching top ten position at the main search engines will give you all the benefits but this is not always the truth. Top ten position can be very much expensive and surely there are other ways to promote that can compliment a not so good ranking at search tools giving you additional promotion that can also be so beneficial resources to your needs. Some examples of these other ways are:
- Media advertising campaigns
- Viral marketing presence
- Free publications
- Panphets
- Promotion at the signature of your e-mails
- Public relations
- Events
- Stationary set
- Commercial printing
- Merchandising
- Other
Now starts the technical stuff…
A well formed web site to promote
If you search the web you can find zillions of pages and sites explaining how to build a well formed web site to make it ‘search engine friendly’. I’ll try to synthesize those knowledges and write them easy for you:
About meta tags and page contents.
Meta tags are special html tags that are used by search engine crowlers and robot to get information on site or page contents to rank them at engine’s data bases. The most importan tags are:
Description : Is a brief sentence providing information of page contents
Syntax for description tags is like:
<> meta name="description" content="your_text_goes_here" </>
example:
Tips: Limit to 150 characters in length, inclusive of letters, numbers, symbols, punctuations, spaces, and carriage returns. Avoid keyword stuffing (random listing of keywords). Use complete sentences and good grammar. Be as descriptive and enticing as you can, since some search engines will use this summary in your displayed search results.
Keywords : are words of short phrases that designer think that people should use for searching information porpouses.
Syntax for keywords meta:
<> name="keywords" content="your_keywords_list_goes_here" </>
Title tag and heding
Other importan elements to be placed into the page are title and first level heading because search engines look at them comparing if words present in the meta tags are repeated in these tags.
Title syntax:
<>title<>"your_title_goes_here" <>/title>
Example:
<>title<>"all about tango <>/title>
Heading syntax:
<>h1 > "your_heading_goes_here" <>/h1>
Example:
<>h1 >all about tango <>/h1>
Tips: if you find that font size for heading tag is tooo large you can control the size using the font tag.
Content of page It’s also important that your page have text enough and to include most appreciated keywords repetead into that text. The best place is the first paragraph. Avoid using framed pages or flash pages on those prepared for search engine tools.
Name the images present in the page with relevant keywords linked by hyphens “-“.
Example:
<>img src="img/logo.jpg" alt="tango-dance-classes"/>
all the examples above were taken from the site tangomia
If you want, you can subscribe to artandata monthly ezine for free to be delivered to your e-mail box every time a new issue is warmly taken out of the oven for you.
Thank for your time! I hope that these tips are helpful for you. See you at the next issue.
Best regard,
Mario Ogas
www.artandata.com
About the author:
Mario Ogas is designer graduated in Argentina having much experience on cad systems, multimedia, graphic design, web design and programming Worked almost 24 years at O.R.T.Technical School and O.R.T. Institute of Technology teaching those subject at high school, college levels. He also was professor (universitary level), webmaster and Multimedia Lab Director at I.T.B.A (Buenos Aires Institute of Technology). At this moment, Mario Ogas owns his design company (Artandata Group) in Sao Paulo Capital – Brazil.
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)i liked this article !thank you !
These tips really helped me. thanks mario.thanks to you (who ever you are) :)
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