If you build it, the will come … while a nice thought, this does not apply to websites! If you build it, you’d better have a good website promotion strategy in mind in order to get the visitors that are the lifeblood of any site.
But just what is website promotion?
Promoting your website simply means to “get the word out”. On the internet this is done in a variety of ways, writing articles, commenting on blogs, exchanging links, press releases. No matter what you do, though, the more you do of it, the more traffic you will get. In fact, it is highly recommended that you don’t do just one of these techniques but use as many different techniques as possible in order to get the word out about your site to as wide an audience as you can.
On the left side of this site, you will be able to learn about a variety of ways to promote your website so I won’t go into detail about any of that here. What I will do, though is give a little bit of info on backlinking which is the basis of website promotion.
Backlinks
Backlinking is simply getting links back to your site. It is a link that you leave on someone elses site that points back to yours. It is important because the search engines use these links to get an indication of how “important” your site is.
In general, the more backlinks, the better but not all backlinks are created equal. You want to strive to get links from sites that are related to your topic and have a lot of links themselves – good quality sites that you would be proud to be associated with.
Stay away from link farms (networks created specifically for the purpose of linking) and low quality or offensive sites (porn, gambling etc..) when seeking out links.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the text in the link that points back to your site. In this code:
a href= “http://www.mysite.com”>My Website </a>, the anchor text is “My Website”.
Anchor text is important because the search engines use this to figure out what your page is about and to rank your site. So, if you are trying to rank highly in the search engines for a particular keyword, you will want to use that as the anchor text in the majority of the backlinks that you get.
Notice that I said in the majority of the backlinks – you don’t want to use it in all of your backlinks as this would appear unnatural. Use different variations and related words, but use your target keyword in about 70% of your backlinks.
Proper website promotion is key to sustaining long term, targeted traffic to your website. Take time learning and perfecting the lessons on this site and you will have a set of skills that will last you a lifetime of website building.
