Promote your Web Store

By Nowshade Kabir
Posted Friday, July 23, 2004

After spending substantial time and efforts the big day came when you finally published your website on the Internet. You are now ready to show your website to the world. But, with over a billion pages vying for traffic how do you make people visiting your site?

Web promotion is an on going process. There are many methods of promoting websites, but, the first and foremost step that you have to take to generate traffic for your website is to submit your site to major search engines and directories. For most of the sites search engines are the primary source of first time visitors.

How important are the search engines? Data show that more than 80% of Internet users find the sites they’re looking for through search engines. Over 57% of Internet users search the Internet everyday. Up to 450 Million searches take place in a day and most interestingly, 55% of all Internet purchases originate at a search engine.

Before you start submitting your website to the search engines, you have to understand that you want your prospective audience to find you when they search for a site similar to you using specific keywords. Now, you know that when a person runs a query on a search engine for a website, usually he looks no further then first three pages of relevant results. You have to figure out a way how to get within those three pages. Better even if you can get yourself within top ten search results. Considering that a query usually delivers millions of pages — this is not an easy task!

As the search engines want to deliver most relevant pages at the top, they use highly sophisticated and complex algorithms to rank websites. But the main aspects, that they consider in order to optimize your ranking position, are your targeted keywords, relevancy of the site contents and value of the links that are pointing to your site.

Keywords

Target the wrong keywords and either you don’t get any visitor or you get the visitors that you really don’t need. How can you figure out which are the right keywords for you?

If you are confused about the words that you should target to get the best result, start your search from one of your successful competitors’ website. Check the source codes of the Index page of the website. It should not be difficult for you to figure out what are the keywords that they are targeting. Since a broad keyword like computer, textile etc. generates millions of search results, you have to try to find words as specific and as segmented as possible.

For example: if you are a textile company that sells fabrics and one of the best selling items of yours is jeans fabrics let’s see what should be your targeted keyword. A query on Google shows that the word “fabric” brings 5,640,000 results. Way too much for you to even try get at the top! The next search of “jeans fabric” gets 148,000 results. Still a lot! If stonewashed jeans fabric is one of the items that you sell, let’s see what we get from a query on it. Just 602 results! Well, this is a number you can deal with! Now if you use a few proper optimization mechanisms, chances are there that in no times you may get yourself on the first ten of this search result.

If you know the broad keywords that you should target but don’t have any idea how to make it more specific, use this little tool from Overture to show you what queries people make relevant to this keyword. Click here for the tool.

Place keywords in right locations

For search engines the page title is the most important part of the page. Make sure that you use your targeted keyword over there. For the previous example your title may look like: ‘Supplier of Quality Stonewashed Jeans Fabric’.

Use your keywords in different forms in Meta tags and Description. Use singular and plural variations of the words. Since search engines also look at the content of your page, try using keywords in your headlines and don’t forget to mention them in the first paragraph of the page.

But do not over do it! If the search engines feel that you are over using a word to lift your ranking, they may consider it as spamming, and block your website from their listing.

Content is the king

According to research, the primary reason for people to be on the Internet is information. People want information, quality information, lots of it and in most of the cases for free! This is the reason why the search engine spiders are created to look for good, relevant textual contents. If you are looking for a top position on a specific search, your website must have quality relevant content.

If yours is a website that only sells product or services, you may ask, how can you possibly have enough content? Apart from detail description of the products or services that you provide, you should also emphasize on the benefits of the products. If you have related to your products articles, whitepapers etc. you must post them on your site as well. It’s important to post quality information related to your products or services as this also position your website as a knowledgeable leader in your respective industry and create interest among your audience to revisit the site.

Try renewing information on your site on a regular interval. This, as well, will increase repeat visits from people and the search engine spiders.

Submission to search engines

Once you are ready to submit your site to search engines, all you have to do is to go to the relevant search engine site, fill up the form there and submit. You can do it manually for each search engine separately or you can use programs to do it automatically. If you miss a search engine, you don’t have to worry about it much, as the search engine spiders or “Bots”, as they are also called, constantly look for new websites to index. However, it’s a good idea to submit to the major search engines and directories regularly. You should also resubmit your website to the search engines in order to expedite the process of indexing after each significant change you made to the site.

About The Author
Nowshade Kabir, Ph.D., is the founder, primary developer and present CEO, of Rusbiz.com, a global business to business e-commerce portal with feature like storefronts, aggregated catalog, e-marketplace, trade leads, internal messaging system supply chain solutions, etc. With a doctorate in Information Technology, Dr. Kabir has worked an advisor to government projects and has over 12 years experience in International Trade. An author of many B2B and business related articles; he publishes a bi-weekly E-zine for online business community. You can subscribe to his newsletter free of charge from (http://www.rusbiz.com).
nowshade@rusbiz.com