Friday 8 January 2010

3 Steps for Promoting Your Website

Creating and promoting your own website has never been easier. This blog focuses on tips for people with a product related to the property market in Thailand.

In the old days making a website was a complicated and expensive affair involving mastering HTML code, Flash, php, Javascript and a host of other technical jargon. Chances are that if you have paid someone to make you a website then you are feeling held to ransom by your website designer. He or she probably wants money off you to update your site. They probably want money to Search Engine Optimize your site, they probably want money from you to get links to your site. In short, it is a bottomless hole you have committed yourself to.

That`s why more and more people are shunning using web design companies and doing their own websites. And as this route becomes more popular so the resources available to the amateur become more powerful. All you need is the ability to re-size photos and a bit of patience.

The biggest help comes from www.wordpress.com. They offer free websites if you are willing to have the phrase ‘wordpress’ in your domain name e.g. hotpropertyinphangan.wordpress.com. Just sign up for free and start fiddling around. Wordpress offers a variety of website templates called ‘themes’. You can customize a theme by adding your own header (this is why you need to be able to re-size pictures). You can add as many navigational tabs as you want, you can add your own links, you can set up a gallery page and you can add video clips (hosted free on youtube or daily motion). At first it will be frustrating but you will be surprised how quickly you get the hang of using wordpress. Once you are on the wordpress path you will start to notice how many people are adapting wordpress themes to make their sites. By using the tags function you can pick keywords and do your own basic SEO. It`s all there. And what`s more, the wordpress dashboard for your site also provides stats about how many people are visiting your site, what pages they are looking at and how they got to your site (i.e. through a search engine or through a link).

After you have got the hang of using wordpress the next step is to find a hosting company that will let you register your own domain name and has the feature called ‘fantastico’. Fantastico is fantastic because it allows you to put up your own website using the wordpress interface, which makes the process the same as making a normal free wordpress site. Once you have done this you can easily update your site, change the site look and improve on your tags and links. This is step two completed.

At this point you might want to abandon your expensively designed site or you might prefer to use your wordpress sites as linking vehicles to your main site. Remember that one way links are more powerful than reciprocal links.

Resources 


1) www.wordpress.com (great looking free and paid for websites. Big selection of 'themes' (templates) to choose from.
2) www.blogger.com (free blogs which allow you to monetize with adwords)
3) www.netfirms.com (the cheapest place to buy domain names).
4) www.google.com/analytics - by far the best web stats program. It's free to sign up and you simply paste in a bit of code into your site or template to get comprehensive information about your website's visitors.
5) www.adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - Another great tool by Google. You simply put in a keyword or phrase and find out how many searches were made using that word/those words. And how much advertisers are prepared to pay for those keywords. This gives you a good idea of your market and what keywords you should be aiming to get high rankings for.
6) www.freewebsubmission.com - A good place to start promoting your new website.

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