Anyone able to help me promote my website on the internet?

[CIulian]

I'm knowledgeable in terms of how to market a business, but not so proficient in terms of online marketing and social media. A friend requested I would help her promote her new charity online. the charity supports people looking at undertaking plastic surgery, or have undertaken surgery and now face difficulties. so, this would be our market...

i pulled off a list of the net on how to promote a website online. there are loads of things on there that I didn't even know existed and I've never done SEO before. Until I reach out to a SEO specialist to help me out, can anyone recommend anything I can do myself to promote this site online? we have opened a facebook and twitter account.

what I wish to know is where to start now, and what to avoid.
thanks.

 

[Sara windsor]

If you read SEObook by Aran Wall you will be able to do a lot of the SEO yourself.

 

[webgeek]

If you're wanting to spend 10 hours to do what a pro can do in 10 minutes, then you're on the right track.

Learning enough about SEO to understand the jargon, approaches and things to avoid is a great thing. WebCEO university and Hubspot Inbound Marketing university are good starting points and are free.

Don't think that because you read a book on how to drive a Formula 1 car that you can give Button a run for his money. Do what you do best and pay an expert to do what they do best.

 

[Ecler]

Hi there

If you want good SEO work done then you'll probably have to get expert help as mentioned in the posts above.
However there are some things that are not directly SEO related that should help you promote the site:

- Create social media profiles for the website: facebook page, google +, twitter...and talk about the charity activities there as well as related topics. The trick here is to maintain and update these profiles on a regular basis and engage with your target market.
- Find forums and blogs relating to plastic surgery and see if there are ways for you to get involved in conversations, just like you're doing here when asking for advice. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there looking for advice before undertaking surgery...and you or your friend could be there to advise them.

This should allow to get you started and should drive some relevant traffic while starting to build link popularity for the site.

Hope this helps

Etienne

 

[SEO Lady]

Hey have you read the sticky in this forum?
http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=32162

 

[hayfj]

I list 49 practical online tactics here on my site



The secret is to try and implement just 2 of them
so you can prove to yourself that a) you can do it
b) they work, then try 2 each day.

Hope that helps

regards


Fraser

 

[Websitehandyman]

I'm knowledgeable in terms of how to market a business, but not so proficient in terms of online marketing and social media. A friend requested I would help her promote her new charity online. the charity supports people looking at undertaking plastic surgery, or have undertaken surgery and now face difficulties. so, this would be our market...

i pulled off a list of the net on how to promote a website online. there are loads of things on there that I didn't even know existed and I've never done SEO before. Until I reach out to a SEO specialist to help me out, can anyone recommend anything I can do myself to promote this site online? we have opened a facebook and twitter account.

what I wish to know is where to start now, and what to avoid.
thanks.

On a more practical side link your site to both twitter and facebook. Also register on LinkedIn and start a discussion group. If your site is not already a wordpress blog add that too and this will link to all 3 of those social networks via a plugin. So anything you say on the blog is promoted on those networks too at the same time.

 

[Ninja Commerce]

Hi CIullian

Firstly, going from knowing nothing about SEO/IM to being able to advise someone on it is a hell of a learning curve. Here are a few tips though:

Pick one topic:
You could look at social media, PPC, SEO and others, but I would suggest you just start with one. It is much better to do SEO well and just ignore social media et al for the time being than try to do everything. And contrary to popular belief, social media is only a pretty small part of SEO right now, so I honestly wouldn't worry too much about it.

Assuming you go with SEO (which would be my recommendation, although I am an SEO so I may be biased)...

Start by doing some keyword research - this is a whole topic in it's own right, but start with the Google keyword tool (use exact match) and try to pick keywords which are relevant and get a decent number of searches, without going for any super high volume terms as these will be too competitive.

I would start by targetting just a couple of phrases to your home page, don't over complicate things.

On page SEO
Don't worry too much about the minutae. On a basic level all you need to do on page is:
use the following tags correctly; page title, meta description, h1 tags

Make sure you include your target keywords in those tags and in your general content; don't overdo it though, read through the site afterwards to check it all makes sense from a human point of view.

Link building
You will need to do a lot of this I'm afraid; don't be tempted by any software shortcuts; the way I build links can take up to 3 hours per link, but it is effective. Anything that seems like a sneaky shortcut might just get you a Google penalty, not what you want.

Build yourself a handful of links a month and keep going until you start to rank for those keywords, and then branch out into other keywords.

Learn the more technical details as you go along, but honestly the biggest 'secret' to it is putting in the work.

Hope that gets you on track. You will hear a lot of conflicting info as you go on your way to learning SEO, figuring out what to ignore and what to follow is a real challenge...

 

[hayfj]

...as a Free member you're allowed to add them and they're being
included to hopefully help people posting the threads..


Pick just 2 of the tactics below, and implement them today.
1. retweet your networks posts, blogs and status updates
2. Submit your site to www.dmoz.org
3. Submit your site to Google, MSN and Yahoo
4. Checkout ukbusinessforums.co.uk
5. Get registered on freeindex.co.uk
6. Add a PING list to your wordpress blog
7. Ask a question on Linkedin Answers
8. Ask a question on Yahoo Answers
9. Answer a question on Linkedin Answers
10. Upload one of your digital assets to slideshare.net
11. Connect a video to your linkedin profile
12. Add keywords to your “positions” on your linkedin profile
13. Use marketplace on Ecademy.com
14. Add a live link to the description of your videos on Youtube
15. Include a url in your videos you upload to dailymotion
16. Create a blog on worpress.com and link to your site
17. Create a squidoo.com lens
18. Create multiple social bookmarking accounts with http://ping.fm
19. Update all of them via ping.fm with your latest blog, post etc
20. Write an article and submit it to ezinearticles.com
21. Offer to be a guest blogger on other people’s sites
22. Use anchor text on backlinks from comments on relevant blogs
23. Use anchor text on backlinks from comments on relevant forums
24. Create a free ebook and upload it to docstoc.com
25. Submit your ezine to ezine directories
26. Do ad swaps with your ezine and other ezine owners
27. Create your own group on Linkedin
28. Upload relevant photos to Flickr or Photobucket
29. Start your own affiliate program/network
30. Convert your existing articles into podcasts
31. Create an RSS feed for your site
32. Fine tune your meta tags with http://www.thedowser.com/
33. Update your status on your social networks and link to your site
34. Ask fans, friends and followers to retweet your posts
35. Ask thought provoking questions in your blog titles
36. Offer testimonials on sites after you’ve benefited from their products
37. Write a press release and syndicate it with prlog, prweb or pressbox.co.uk
38. Permit re-branding of your ebook and other digital assets
39. Join [Prospect Networking] on facebook
40. Submit to online directories - www.directorycritic.com
41. Create a podcast reading of your blogs and submit to itunes
42. Create a PAD file of your software demo and submit to shareware sites
43. Create a webinar with gotomeeting, eventbrite etc
44. Link your wordpress blog to your Linkedin Profile
45. Do a search on google for expert sites, and get listed.
46. Add your skype address to your business card
47. Consider creating a phone app
48. Find “guest blogger” opportunities on google with “Add blog post”
49. Take a closer look at Google+

...then maybe consider implementing another 2 tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that..

Hope some of these help - if you they're still there for you to read

regards


Fraser

 

[AndyOwl]

I read "50 ways to make Google love your website". It's full of common sense, implementable ideas (and no, I'm not one of the authors and have absolutely no link to them).

However, as everyone else says: SEO is addictive and VERY time-consuming. And "plastic surgery" will be a competitive term, I would have thought.

Every SEO expert will tell you - the way to drive traffic to a site is to put good content on it, but it can take an awfully long time for this to pay off.

Good luck!

 

[SEO Lady]

On a more practical side link your site to both twitter and facebook.

Sorry, I didn't read anything you said. I was too busy spluttering my coffee on my monitor over your sig

 

[millerg78]

It's better to take the services of a specialist when you are not comfortable or your knowledge is limited in a particular area.