101 Tips to Improve Your Web Presence

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mattk

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Dec 5, 2005
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  • #1
    I like making lists - and I like promoting Web sites. So it was an obvious thing to do to create a list of ways to improve and promote a Web site and online presence. Some are obvious, some are bizarre. Some are old, some are new. Many are well know techniques, some are my own personal rambling. Nothing is a statement of fact, merely my own opinion.

    1. If you're launching a new site, or new content, write an introduction and submit it to share sites like Digg, Reddit and Now Public.
    2. Create a Yahoo Group in the niche your site sits.
    3. Create a MySpace account and use it to publisise your site.
    4. Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and if you're really keen, add a Del.icio.us button to your homepage.
    5. Create a Technorati account and "claim" your blog.
    6. Submit your site to free, search engine friendly directories. An excellent list can be found here.
    7. Conduct a survey. This is an excellent way to generate offline publicity.
    8. Place a free ad for your company on Gumtree.
    9. Syndicate your site's content by using an RSS feeds.
    10. Submit your RSS feeds to agregator sites like FeedBurner, Squidoo, Feedboy, Jordomedia, FeedBomb, FeedCat, rssmad, feeddirectory and feedfury. Stolen from DigitalPoint
    11. Write an article related to your site and submit it to article sites.
    12. Sign up to StumbleUpon and get your friends to Stumble your site.
    13. Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone encounters an error on your site, they are re-directed somewhere nice.
    14. Set up a 301 redirect to take traffic from your non-www address to your www address. See here for more info.
    15. Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums you post on.
    16. Tell your friends about your site. It's free advertising init.
    17. Speel cheek ur stie. Nothing appears more amateur than a site with typos or spelling mistakes.
    18. Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers.
    19. Buy enough hosting. No one likes a slow site.
    20. Don't worry about PageRank - worrying about PageRank is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.*
    21. Offer something for free. Free is good. People tell their friends about free stuff.
    22. Tell your neighbours, you never know what contacts they might have.
    23. Offer your users as many ways as possible to contact you. MSN, Skype, Yahoo etc all complement email, phone and a real address.
    24. Advertise your site on Craigslist. It's free, relevant and localised.
    25. Do NOT use frames.
    26. Submit your site to DMOZ.org. It may take time, but it's worth it.
    27. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google.
    28. Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often.
    29. Ask a large breasted lady to wear one too.
    30. Sign up with an affiliate programme to sell your product, or if you're a publish, make some cash!
    31. On your Contact Page ask people if they mind receiving your newsletter.
    32. Send out a newsletter!
    33. Go to a free seminar for Website owners. You might learn something.
    34. Find quality and relevant blogs and leave a comment (with a link back to your site of course).
    35. Don't pay people to submit your site to search engines. It's a waste of money.
    36. YouTube and Google Video are excellent portals on which to launch a viral campaign.
    37. Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.
    38. Sponsor a Wordpress theme or a phpListDirectory template.
    39. If you sell products that are advertised on television by the manufacturer, add "As Seen on TV" to your site!
    40. Avoid proprietry technologies like Java and Active X.
    41. Put downloadable content on your site, but make sure it's not manufacturer specific - so mp3 rather than wma.
    42. Learn about CSS. It's the new HTML.
    43. Contribute to related subject areas on Wikipedia.
    44. Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.
    45. Have user friendly page names - most tools comes with some way to avoid www.yourdomain.com/pgInfoPages.cfm?...5A3A10A4FD4F64E511ACB0E020C9048CFE3AEDAF8DD9D
    46. If you must have a Flash homepage, make sure you have a "Skip Intro" link.
    47. Tell your local rag about your site. These newspapers are desparate for stories and you may well even get a pic of your ugly picture published.
    48. Become a leading authority on your chosen subject.
    49. Donate money to a charity and most will place a link on their site back to you.
     
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    M

    mattk

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    Dec 5, 2005
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  • #2
    And breath:

    • Abide to W3C standards - it will help your site in the long term.
    • Your local community sports teams offer cheap, but highly effective sponsorship opportunities.
    • Publisise your site on related forums - but don't spam!
    • Ask bloggers to write about your site or product - in return for a link of course.
    • Offer a competition related to something in the news - so football around the time of the World Cup etc.
    • Add a "Tell a Friend" function to your site, so people can easily recommend you to their mates.
    • Have a Sitemap on your site to allow users to navigate around quickly and to aid the search engines.
    • Have a nice keyword rich title at the top of each of your pages. Users and search engines both like descriptive titles.
    • Include a Feedburner button on your site so people can easily subscribe to your feed.
    • If you use PPC then create a landing page for each of your AdWords - it'll boost your conversations no end.
    • Appear on Dragon's Den.
    • Create a Press section on your site where can you store all your press releases, logos and banners.
    • Add a link to your site from within your eBay profile.
    • Ask your friends to give you honest feedback on your site.
    • The best way to find someone to do any kind of work on your site is through personal recommendation.
    • Gain exposure by submitting photos and pictures to Flikr.
    • Share your banners on banner exchange sites.
    • Make sure it's easy for your users to subscribe to your RSS feed.
    • Create a "lense" for your site on Squidoo
    • Ask friends, collegues and associates to "Favourite" your blog on Technorati.
    • You can add a Bulletin to your MySpace account promoting your site that all your MySpace Friends will see.
    • Response to your customer's emails promptly, even if it is with a simply auto-responder. No one likes to wait 3 or 4 days for an acknowledgement of their contact with you.
    • Get a professional Copywriter to give your site a once over. If you are on a tight budget, limit to the just the homepage.
    • Make a list, "Top 10"s work well. Update it regularly to give your visitors a reason to return.
    • What did you learn today? Tell other people and they might learn something too.
    • Do you have really hot content on your site that geeks would love? If so Slashdot will bring you a mass of traffic.
    • Deep link directories are an excellent way to promote inner pages of your site.
    • Meta tags might carry less weight than previously, but you should still have them on every page.
    • Ask your Gran for feedback on your site. Never ignore the silver surfers.
    • Include a "Add to your Technorati favourites" button on your site.
    • Google Analytics is free and will tell you all you need to know about who's visiting your site.
    • Search engines will find you. Don't pay money for your site to be "submitted".
    • Don't be afraid to link to other sites, especially if they are relevant and to highly respected sites.
    • Keep It Simple Stupid: use CSS to control layout, style and colours and use HTML text rather than graphics to represent text.
    • Validate your HTML and CSS. It'll help ensure your site displays well in all browsers.
    • Small pages sizes and optimised graphics will give your site a snappy feel and won't require users to wait around for it to load.
    • If you plan to submit your site to lots of directory or article sites - create an email especially for this. Delete it when you're finished to avoid spam.
    • "Link baiting" means writing some killer content that people will want to link to. Like a "101 Tips to Improve Your Web Presence" list!
    • If your chosen field is technology related then write a "whitepaper". That's a posh name for an article.
    • Google receives roughly 50% of all search requests, Yahoo 25% and MSN just 10%. That's a good rule of thumb as to how much emphisis to put on each.
    • Make sure you have a robots.txt file in the root of your Web site. You can use this to control search engines, but if nothing else it'll reduce the number of 404 errors in your Weblogs.
    • Free online games, a forum or chatrooms will give your users a reason to come back to your site.
    • Ebooks with re-seller rights make an excellent "free gift" for your site.
    • Upload your product feed to Froogle. It's FREE!
    • This is an excellent list of Top 25 Social Bookmarking Sites
    • Search out unanswered questions on Yahoo! Answers and add your site as the "Source".
    • PageRank is vanity, ranking is sanity.
    • Yahoo are catching up with Google with an excellent set of webmaster tools called Site Explorer.
    • Don't buy traffic. It's un-targetted and won't convert.
    • Pay Per Click advertising gets you fast results - and if it's handled well can be very profitable.
    • Upload a favicon.gif file so that your users have a nice icon when they bookmark your site.
    • And that's it!

    I was inspired to write this by superflytrainer who posted an excellent 101 ways to get more traffic thread on DP. Alot of the tips have been posted on various forums and blogs, so I make no claim that they are all my own. I have simply tried to collate them into a list and expand where possible. Feel free to plagirise this list to your own ends, but please link back to (I'm no) Search Engine Optimisation Expert if you do.

    I've tried to be as accurate as possible with my links, but feel free to point out any glaring ommisions!
     
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    CarolineICE

  • #6
    Hi,

    What a great post. With no experience I have no idea what you are talking about but as our website is due to go live soon (when we have finished with the typos) we will be going through your tips and badgering our website designer and host.

    Thanks,

    Caroline

    (incidentally my business partner might be able to help out with no 29:D )
     
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    netidme

  • #11
    thanks, an excellent selection of tips.
    Re. page rank - I've heard that a higher page rank might mean that google will crawl your site more frequently - therefore if you add frequent keyword rich content, it can help your ranking? On that basis, maybe page rank does help your ranking?
     
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    M

    mattk

    Free Member
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  • #12
    Thanks to everyone for their feedback on this.

    I am currently working on an eBook, which expands on each of these ideas. If anyone has actually tried out any of the tips I would be very grateful if they could write a one or two paragragh case study of what they did and I will include it in the eBook. Full credit will of course be given, so it's a good opportunity to gain some exposure!
     
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    Just_a_bloke

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    Sep 10, 2007
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  • #35
    Spiderden said:
    That's more like business suicide than good marketing
    Click to expand...
    Tell that to Ling Valentine!
    Click to expand...

    There was some one in one of the broad sheet papers the other day who went on Dragons Den and got slated. Anyway he went somewhere else for funding and got twice as much as what he was asking on DD without any hassle. Consequently the guy's idea took off big time, and now he's worth x millions.
     
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    Q

    quikshop

    Free Member
    Oct 11, 2006
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  • #36
    Just_a_bloke said:
    There was some one in one of the broad sheet papers the other day who went on Dragons Den and got slated. Anyway he went somewhere else for funding and got twice as much as what he was asking on DD without any hassle. Consequently the guy's idea took off big time, and now he's worth x millions.
    Click to expand...

    I listened with interest to a US entrepreneur at our local Run the Gauntlet fund-raising competition as he told the audience a story about raising funding for his first business. He ended up presenting to 36 sets of venture capitalists and got 35 NOs before the last one said yes and gave his business the money... needless to say he became very wealthy and had a very successful business :rolleyes:
     
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