Promoting your site

nce your site has been finalised and uploaded to the web, the work of promoting the site begins. Unless you promote your site, nobody will come. And this is where our unique promotional service comes in.

Each month we check your position on the major search engines, check that links from other websites are still active, search out new websites to be affiliated with and explore new promotional avenues. This keeps all your current links up to date and helps determine which promotional tactics are working best.

What we don't do are large marketing plans. Marketing companies will design extensive, but expensive, marketing plans to boost your company's profile over a short period of time. And if it doesn't work, you are heavily out of pocket. Worse still, it works too well, and you can't expand quickly enough to meet demand, or you do expand only to find business drops off after the promotional activity ends.

Our plan is more gradual, more persistant. Just a couple of hours a month making sure that you are well placed in the major search engines & directories and appear on the right websites, has real long term benefits. The web is a continually changing place; search engines change their rules, new websites appear and old ones disappear, advertising opportunities come along and unless you keep on top of current trends, you may find your site getting less and less hits.

And our plan is very affordable and flexible. The cost is on a 'time spent' basis, so you can buy as much or as little as you require. And of course, this is in addition to any other promotional work you do, either online or offline. So if you want someone in the background beavering away, keeping an eye on your website, then this is the plan for you. One of our customers who took out one of our plans is Sean Bell of NYPD and his website is now listed in the top 3 position on the top 5 search engines.

Lycosa offer a highly effective promotion service, available from £25 per month. This includes the following strategies:

• Keyword investigation
• Web site optimisation
• Submission to major search engines
• Research reciprocal links
• Monthly reporting
• Email newsletter
• Viral marketing
• Online promotions / competitions

Keyword investigation

Reports show that some 85% of all ‘traffic’ (people looking at your web site) comes from the use of search engines and directories such as Google, Yahoo and Lycos. The keywords and phrases that people type in to these search engines are recorded, giving useful data to work with. Finding keywords that would attract paying customers to your site is crucial; finding keywords that are also heavily used, but have little competition provide you with an important niche. Targetting the wrong keywords will target the wrong people, bringing to your site at best people who have no interest in your business, at worst no-one at all.

Keyword investigation is something that Lycosa specialise in; we can find the right keywords for your business, and hopefully we will find several healthy niche keywords where you can dominate the search engines.

Web site optimisation

Search engines use highly complex algorithms to try to ‘understand’ the text of web sites, and then rank them logically so that users get relevant and useful results from their searches. To help search engines understand your site, and hence rank your site nearer the top spot, there are a number of modifications that can be done to the content of the site. Once we have established the keywords that are relevant to your business, it is then important to place these strategically throughout the site (not too often, not too few). The number of pages, the number of words, correct document formatting and good image descriptions all help to give your site a winning position.

Submission to major search engines

All search engines need to know your web site is there, and, although they will follow links from other web sites to yours, a new web site will not have any of these ‘inbound’ links. This means your web site is effectively invisible to the search engines. Submitting your web site for free to the major search engines – Google, Yahoo, Lycos and the Open Web Directory – will ensure your site gets listed. Timescales for listing are sketchy, unless you pay for inclusion, where your site can be listed within days, or even hours. Pricing varies from engine to engine, and there are plenty to choose from. Yahoo charge £200 per year, Mamma charge a ‘cost per click’ where you only pay if someone clicks on the link, hence arriving at your site. Paid inclusion is increasingly common, and is a great way to kickstart your online presence. Once the free ‘organic’ results start appearing, you can drop or reduce the paid inclusion. It all depends how quickly you want to be doing business. Without paid inclusion, it typically takes 6-9 months to see real traffic from organic results.

Research reciprocal links

A reciprocal link arrangement is where you provide a link to another web site in return for a link from their web site to yours. Search engines look closely at the relationships between linking partners. Links from relevant, high quality, respected web sites to yours will have an extremely beneficial effect on how search engines rank your web site. We will research linking partners for you, and will make the necessary arrangements upon your approval. We will also check these links periodically to ensure that they are still active, and chase them up if not.

Monthly reporting

It is important to know how many people visited your site, how they got there, what keywords they used and so on. At Lycosa, we can provide all this information and more on a monthly basis. The free listing will show you basic traffic details. Power Reporting is a comprehensive and detailed series of reports on how hard your web site is working; eCommerce Reporting provides additional reports on sales, revenues, referrer efficiency, activity by keywords/search engines.

Email newsletter

Providing a regular update to your customers can prove enormously effective in retaining customer loyalty. Lycosa have an easy to use, dedicated newsletter creation tool. If you have regularly updating content, great, it is easy to tell everyone about it. If you don’t, or you don’t have time to write something each month, don’t worry, there is another way of doing this. Write a dozen articles that your customers may be interested in, and add them to the newsletter queueing system. When someone signs up, they will get the first article. A month later they get the second one, and so on. So long as the articles are not time based in any way, this gives every single customer who signs up a years worth of articles, and continues to re-inforce your brand, whilst demonstrating your expertise in your field.

Viral marketing

Nasty as it might sound, this is actually an extremely effective tool in brand awareness. There are a number of ways of doing it, but the most straightforward is to prime the viral marketing tool to send emails to everyone on your email list with a simple message. This message simply offers an incentive for the user to provide you with as many email addresses as they can. The emails they provide are then sent the exact same message. Bingo! You get an exponentially growing number of email addresses. Eg you send out 100 emails, who each provide 10 email addresses. 100 x 10 = 1000 emails, who provide 10 each – 1000 x 10 = 10,000 etc. So long as your incentive is attractive enough, and the email is well written, there is every chance of grabbing several million email addresses, which increases your newsletter distribution disproportionately. There will always be dop-offs, but you can still increase your newsletter distribution, and hence your branding potential.

Online promotions / competitions

These are essentially like any promotion or competition, except that it takes up less of your time. A simple online quizz with a prize of one of your products creates a media photo opportunity. Providing information about promotions (sales, discounts, etc) on your web site, using the email newsletter system to invite people to look at it, is a great way of capitalizing on the above techniques, and can provide a valuable sales stream that costs virtually nothing, and takes up very little time. A simple to use competition module will be available soon for around £50.

Essentially the price you pay per month dictates how long I spend on it. The more you invest in this, the more time I can spend promoting your business online. Once the tricky business of effective keyword identification, site optimisation, submission and establishing quality reciprocal links is in place (typically 6 months to one year), the promotion service focuses on viral marketing, email newsletter distribution, online promotions and selling advertising for an additional revenue stream. Typically, I recommend £50 per month, which gives me time to do all the necessary items each month, instead of spreading them across 2 or more months (which lessens the effect and will take longer to push your business forward on the web).