How To Advertise Your Website In 5 Easy Steps

Setting up a new website, buying the domain name and launching it onto the World Wide Web aren’t difficult. Getting people to visit your site once it’s up and running is, unless you’re getting a lot of direct traffic (people typing your URL into the address bar and coming straight to your site), then getting your new website noticed by the search engines will be crucial. Link building is one of the first steps in improving your SEO, so if you’ve just started out, here are some initial ideas to get your site working.

# 1. Internal links

Before you get any outside links coming or going from your site, you should get all of your internal links in order and fully optimised for the web.

The most important thing that you can do when organising your internal links is to ensure that the highlighted text – the part that contains the hyperlink – is relevant to the page that it is linking to. For example, if your link is ‘click here for wedding services in the Brighton area’, don’t highlight ‘click here’, make ‘wedding services in the Brighton area’ into the link.

This will tell the search engines that this is what your page is about and show that the keywords Brighton, wedding and services are all important.

# 2. Social networks

Once you’ve got your onsite SEO in order, you can move on to getting more external links to your site.

A great place to start with are the social networks. These are especially good for start up websites as it doesn’t take too much work to get your profile up and running and it can have some great results.

Make sure that whichever site you sign up for has a relevant target audience for the products or services that you’re offering, and then try to ensure that you post relevant and interesting content that people will look at and engage with.

Apart from just the links from the site itself, if your content is interesting enough, people should share or ‘like’ your page, leading to more brand awareness and more traffic to your website.

# 3. Directories

Directories are another easy way to get some links pointing your way. There are a number of directories across the web who will offer to include your listing either for free or for a small charge.

Do a bit of research before you sign up though as some of these directories are seen as spam sites by the search engines, so a link from them won’t be seen favourably.

# 4. Blogs

Blogs have always been a great way to drive traffic to your site, especially if the blog has good page rankings itself.

Have a look round for relevant blogs and then contact the owner to see if they offer guest posts or if they’ll include your website in an article.

Some will do this for free, but it’s equally likely that you’ll have to pay a small fee.

# 5. Branching out

Once you’ve got some traffic coming to your site via the social networks, blogs and directories you should see your page rankings start to creep up. This will give your site more authority and make a link from it to other sites much more desirable. This means that you’re now in a stronger position to approach other websites to offer reciprocal or 3-way links.

Reciprocal links are where you include your site in their listings and they do the same for you. This can be a great way to build business connections, as well as get more people clicking through to your website. So now you’re armed with the basics of website SEO and link building, it’s time to put your knowledge into action, and get linking, blogging and socialising your way to success.

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