Tips for Writing Effective Web Copy

Promoting Your Website

Section A:
Stage One - Submit Your Site to Directories

You should start your website promotion efforts by listing your site at the most popular Internet directories. Because they can send you traffic that you didn't expect and also affect your ranking in various search engines, it is wise to make sure that your site is present in all of the major directories before doing anything else.

Submitting to directories is easy and doesn't require much effort. It's ensuring that your submission will be accepted that makes this task a hard one.

Stage Two - The Open Directory Project

Start with the Open Directory Project. While your site has to offer good, unique content to be accepted to the ODP, its editors usually review sites quickly and won't reject them without a good reason for doing so. This, along with the fact that submitting to the ODP is free of charge, makes it a perfect starting point.

Stage Three - Submit your Site to Google for Free

Submitting your site to Google is very easy and absolutely free. All you need to do is submit your home page URL to Google and your whole site will be indexed.

Click to Submit your site to Google
(Please note that for a new site Google can take upto 3-6 months to improve your ranking after it initially indexes it, so instead of worrying about why your ranking is low, you can use this time to optimise and promote your website).

Section B: - Search engines

Now that your site has been included in ODP and Google, you should already be receiving clearly more traffic than before. The next task is to get to know search engines and use them to bring even more people to your pages. Because you have completed phase one, you have established a good foundation for making your site perform well in the search engines.

Step One - Search engine optimisation, basics

In order to gain good rankings, you'll need to learn the basics of search engine algorithms (ranking systems) and adjust your pages to meet their criteria as well as possible. This will take some time and effort, but doing some work now will save you from a lot of trouble in the future.

First, make your site search engine friendly.
Next, you'll need to do some keyword optimisation by choosing the correct keywords for your pages.
Unless you have already done so, read about Google's algorithm. Google is among the most popular search services of today, so it is wise to take its requirements into account.

Step Two - Keep tinkering

This is a never ending story. Changes in search engine listing criteria, use of keywords, placement of key paragraphs etc. We could keep going on and on. The main thing here is that unless you are at a number one position; and that's today but not guarenteed tomorrow, then we'll never be happy with our position. The only thing that we can keep doing is 'Keep Tinkering', updating, adding fresh new stories, new copy, new keywords and become important to the search engines.

It is important to have an overall media policy that looks at all aspects of your marketing and promotional material whether online of off line, above or below the line. Fancy advertising words I know, but essencial in todays competitive market place.