Marketing, Promoting and Publicising Your Website

 Unfortunately this is another important consideration which is usually left to last. It should be one of the first considerations. We have drawn your attention to this all-important issue in various places earlier on. We are now going to look at it in depth. The question "How are potential customers going to find my website?" determines to a very large extent what the content of the site is going to be, because it is the content that is indexed by search engines. If it is not important that people find your site through search engines, then this is less important, but we always recommend building a site with search engines in mind to start with, because it can be so costly to rectify this at a later date (perhaps thousands of pounds!).

Many businesses spend a fortune on a website and then find that practically no-one ever sees it! It is not often appreciated that internet promotion is quite unlike traditional forms of promotion such as newspaper, radio, and billboard advertising. In the latter, someone somewhere will see your promotional material. You might only book a dozen bus shelter adverts in your locality, but these adverts will be seen by at least some passers-by and some bus travellers. The internet is not like that. People can only arrive at your website by a very limited number of means:

• Via a search engine
• Via a web directory
• Via a link from another site
• Via an advertisement on another site
• Because they have seen your URL in a newspaper, leaflet or whatever

Now, being found on a search engine is not easy if there are many websites that are already coming up for the search phrases that people are employing. The odds are that no-one will ever find your site this way unless you use "search engine optimisation" (seo), which itself is highly unreliable - don't be­ lieve the so-called guaranteed promises of "No. 1 Rankings in Google" that are often offered - more later.

Web directories are not as useful as they originally were from the purpose of being found on the internet. Keyword-based searches are the norm these days. Surfers will find you via links from other sites only, of course, if they already know these sites, and if the links are relevant to their reason for being at these other sites. It is also quite hard to get other websites to link to you - your friends who also have websites may promise to exchange links, but often they simply don't have the time or know-how to give you links which are really ef­ fective. More on this later...

Advertisements on the Internet tend to be ignored by the vast majority of users. Your adverts therefore have to appear over a very wide range of sites for them to have any chance of success.

Strangely enough, the most effective form of publicity for your website may well be via traditional means - if your market is relatively local. You place an advert in a newspaper, for example, with your URL. Problem here is that your URL must be memorable otherwise people will get it wrong when they come to type it in to their browser. If you are selling to a market over an extensive geographical area (such as the world!) placing newspaper ads in multiple coun­ tries would be hugely expensive and impracticable. You would need to use an advertising agency and the costs would be obviously prohibitive for a small business.

Therefore you can see that you need to understand how to make your website visible, compared to making a physical piece of promotional material available. We are now going to look at how to make your website visible on the internet via search engines - not because this is always the best method of publicity - but because there are so many misleading claims and bogus companies (or even legitimate companies resorting to desperate 'unethical' measures) in this field. It is important therefore that we demystify the whole process so that you are not conned into spending a lot of money on something which appears to offer great promise but is actually a cunning trick that leaves you nothing! As we shall see, a carefully blended combination of search engine optimisation (seo) and what is called "pay per click" (ppc) advertising can work very well. However, as we shall see, a SEO / PPC campaign requires careful management to be effective. Skye Website Services and TOPS Software are two providers of the latter kind of ser­vice in the Highlands & Islands of Scotland.