Promoting Your Website - the Guru's Mantra

Using Search Engine Optimization

Well, so you have decided that you are going to develop a website and want to do business with it. And the questions which are tinkling in your mind are how you can promote it? Or how people will know about your website?

The first step obviously your decision to go for it, which you already have taken. The next step is to build your website and here these things you must consider. If you are developing it of your own, you must take care of these. Or if you are developing it through any vendor, you must specifically ask for these features.

1. Website title: Your website title must be dynamic, so that it can address the content of the page. Or in other words in every page a part of page title should change. Like the contact us page can have title like your 'company name - contact us' while about us page can have title like 'company name - about us'.
2. Website URL: All URL shall be search engine friendly. Avoid query string in URL. If you are using Linux-Apache, then a simple htaccess file can do the trick. It is called mod rewrite. If you are hosting in windows server, the same thing exists there too. I must give you an example for better understanding. Say you have a product listing page and when anybody clicks on the product listing page then the detail page appears and the URL which carries the product number for the identification of product. Using mod rewrite you can easily omit the query string part to pass it internally.
3. Try to make the URL always in lower case.
4. Put as much as text content as you can. All images of the page must have descriptive alternative names.
5. Avoid flash as much as you can.
6. Try to minimize number of images.
7. Avoid background pictures.
8. Use Meta tags and Meta keywords and Meta description should have higher density keywords. You can judge the keyword density using many online keyword selector tools.
9. And last but not the least. The content of your website should be rich enough to address the context. Mind it, content is what will help you to retain potential customer.