Most websites need marketing. Just because you build it doesn’t mean people will come. Maybe you’re a business and you want to sell products on the web. Maybe you have a personal web site and you’re thinking about advertising so you need traffic. Maybe you just want to learn how information proliferates throughout the web.It’s more than just you and Google. True, you need to address the “web at large” and pull in random searchers, but your efforts can be more targeted by finding networks where your market is likely to congregate. These are sites with a lot of like-minded people. They’re all there for similar reasons, like media sharing, link sharing, product reviews, whatever. There are social networks, bookmarking networks, link sharing networks, networks with bloggers, podcasters, artists, people doing home improvement. You name it, there’s going to be a network for it. Identify who your market is and what network they’re likely at. If you sell a painting product, browse the paint section of the home depot web site. See if people are leaving comments with links to external sites. If they are, look for a way to chime in on that page.All of your friends are on Facebook. If you think they should care about what you’re doing, then post an item whenever you have something they might be interested in. They are very likely to check out your recommendations as long as they’re not feeling spammed. Eventually they may remember you when they need your service.

You may also have an audience on Twitter. That site allows you to post just a one liner that might say “go check out this new content that I’ve produced”. Users expect you to post frequently about anything, so do just that. Another site, FriendFeed is like Twitter on steriods. Nice service. Just started exploring that one. It ties together a lot of the networks I talk about here.

http://friendfeed.com/vanturtle

There are different ways to figure out what the popular sites are, or how popular a given site is. Alexa.com ranks the top sites in general. Compete.com can compare any given sites and tell you how much traffic they have received over time in comparison with other sites. There are bookmarking networks like Delicious which lets you see how many people have bookmarked a given site on that service. There is Digg, where you can browse by category and see which stories on a topic are the most dugg.

Once you find a relevant site, maybe you discover that it has a links page which is likely loaded with even more relevant hand picked sites. The site finding goes on and on. Keep going back to compete.com to see how popular they really are. Remember you want to be on sites with the largest relevant audiences.

Keeping content fresh on your site is a good way to satisfy search engines and visitors. You may consider blogging, or in other words, having regular news releases about what’s going on with you or your business. Blog sites like blogger.com or wordpress.com are networks of users. When you post content, you may get hits from that community as well as your direct visitors. My blog at wordpress.com, which is vanturtle.wordpress.com, gets a lot of community hits. I tag my posts and wordpress.com visitors search by those tags and find my blog. If you know what your keywords are, you could go to wordpress and search by those words and see what blogs are relevant.

You could load the blog software directly onto your site, but then you’d miss out on these community hits. I try to maintain as many communities as possible instead of trying to load isolated software onto my comparably hidden domain. I want the community’s larger marketing effort to benefit me.

I also don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Popular sites may be popular because they do a single thing really well, and I’m best served by just being a part of that network anyway. So I use wordpress for blogging, Flickr for photos, youtube for video, and deviantart for art. Where they don’t do everything I want them to, maybe there is an API and I can program any missing features, or if I’m looking to integrate them into my domain I can. I could continue using wordpress.com for my blog, and also have my site pull my wordpress RSS feed and redisplay the posts there.

Something common in these sites is the ability to put snippets of code into another site to display your content from that service. So on my central domain I have a snippet for Flickr, a snippet for del.icio.us, and so on. That way people can see what I’ve got going on all in one place.

People have come to expect a search field on a site. Don’t think your menu is their first preference. Studies show half of site visitors go to search boxes before they try to figure out the menu. So if you can have a searchable site you’ll be making those people happy. Database driven sites are searchable. Content from wordpress is searchable. When you’re planning your site, don’t forget the search field, and make sure to store the content in a way that is searchable. That brings me to another point. Don’t use art for headlines or body copy. Don’t use Flash unless you’ve got a multimedia presentation or a video. I love Flash, but search engines don’t, so I want to make all my text actual text and not art. When people search, I want to be found.

Besides being searchable and search engine friendly, blogs are also subscribable. It’s a good thing if you are broadcasting your updates to people who care. Being subscribable means your content is putting out an RSS feed. This is an XML file that keeps your fans connected to your updates. So it’s a good way to pull in hits.

Sometimes when bloggers end up with more important things to do, as if that was possible, people don’t need to sleep, blogs start to go a while without updates. This can happen to podcasts as well. Not this one of course. Actually I have been less frequent than weekly, so I apologize. But back to topic. Don’t let it happen to you. Figure out a daily or weekly or monthly routine so you keep that feature alive and working for you.

How do you know if you’re getting hits or not getting hits? Use Google Analytics. That a fantastic free tool from google that lets you see where people came from, what keywords they typed to find you, what pages they came in on, what pages they left on, how long they stay on the site, how many unique hits you get a day. Definitely set up an analytics account.

If you actually have a respectable user base, consider a couple other things. One would be a user forum. This is where your visitors can produce content for you, and keep your site alive with maybe less content production effort on your part. The other thing would be to allow comments on your pages. Maybe you don’t want comments on your “About Me” page, but you should definitely consider them on your blog entries. Allow people to contribute. You can usually make it so you can approve comments before they go live on your pages. This is the case with wordpress. Comments are awesome on news sites and software documentation pages. Comments can expand a topic and make the page more valuable for visitors.

Something you need for your content, your blog tags, your titles, your advertising is keywords. So figure out what you’re about, who you’re targeting, what your market’s keywords are and put them to use. I put some keyword tools in the show notes.

Once you have keywords and a little cash you might consider Google Adwords. You make a three line text ad, attach a bunch of your keywords, and Google will drive hits to your site. You might try a monthly budget of $50, and Adwords won’t ever charge you more than that. It’s safe and easy to advertise there, and it’s in yours and Google’s best interest that you get clicks with the ad and hits on your site.

Before you start advertising, make sure to get lots of incoming links by posting comments on relevant networks. The more incoming links you have the higher you’ll show up in search results. That’s not easy, but I never said it would be. It’s a lot of hard work to get traffic on your site. You have to have something of value. We have to work the web with our contribution of quality targeted content on our sites and on relevant networks.

SEO and Keyword Tools

Articles
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/02/04/how-to-herd-organic-search-traffic-to-your-blog/#more-5307
http://www.toprankblog.com/online-marketing-blog-resources/

Google
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
http://labs.google.com/sets
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

Other
http://adlab.msn.com/kts/KCAT.aspx
http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.cgi
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/