An Ethical approach
Search engines bring you most of the traffic to your website and of all the search engines out there google will bring, roughly speaking, about 80% of the traffic. So it’s very important to have very good standings in google if you want more people to come to your website. Google’s page ranking will show you your website’s ranking, based on which your website will appear accordingly in the search result in google. For example if you are searching for “htc red triangle”, in order to find resolution to a red triangle like sign that has appeared on your HTC phone, google will list you a few sites when you hit enter. Now which of the hundreds of links will appear as the first and second and so on and so forth. That google’s search algorithm will decide based on the ranking these websites might have and how relevant are the links to the search term. This ranking is done from 0-10.
I registered a domain almost 3 months ago and started a wiki site on it. I had content ready for it so i started posting it on daily basis and was updating the mediawiki site with extensions and skins and after a month brought to a very competitive place in terms of its looks and content as well. After three months google panda has updated its ranking and my site is ranked with 5 points, which is a great achievement I believe. Here’s a few things that I have been doing consistently in order to market my website.
1. Submit sitemaps to Google Webmaster tools, Bing Webmaster Tools & Yandex webmaster tools.
2. Facebook page (or group): I have a Facebook page for my site and I invited people to like it. I only have over a hundred people in it but it’s still a good start. You can have a Facebook group or page for it or you can use twitter or any other social networking tool. I post one link from my wiki site on my Facebook page every day, bringing traffic to it on a daily basis but not over dosing them at all.
3. Digg, Delicious & Stumple upon: Using digg is very easy and I found it very influential to bring traffic to your site. Probably this traffic might not come back but it’ll benefit in one way or the other.
4. DMOZ: Consider me lucky but I managed to add 2 or 3 links from my website to dmoz.org. It’s not an easy job to get into dmoz but it still matters as most link directories are still using it and most major search engines are using it as well.
5. Link Exchanges: Link exchanges are very important for backlinks and also bringing regular traffic to your website. Exchange links with fairly reasonable PR sites, using buttons or links. It could be temporary for a month or so or a long term but if it’s very important.
6. Backlinks: The easiest way to get backlinks to your website is to use discussion forums. Just post on those forums regularly and normally as you did before. Have your site’s link in a text or button format in your signature and see the traffic coming to your site. You don’t have to annoy people by posting nonsense and using large bright colours in signature or banners or buttons. Just normal link is fine as long as its catchy.
7. It’s very important to constantly talk about your website to your family, friends and on social media. But make sure you are not marketing for your website but for the content that’s inside it. But don’t rely on your friends, some people find it hard to click on “share” or “like” (weird) but that’s true. Some people just don’t do that but that is the power of marketing. If you share your website with 100 or 400 of your Facebook friends and they re-share, you can reach many people. And make sure you do that at different time of the day since people use social networking tools at different times of the day so you want to reach to them when they are right on their computers. But the important point is that you do not annoy your users if you want them to come back.
Good luck and if you have any questions or concerns use the comment section below.
