SEO: Promoting your site

Note: This article refers to the legacy version of the Website Builder. If you signed up to the HostPapa Website Builder after March 11 2020, you’re on the new version of the Website Builder. For help, go here.

Site promotion
Site promotion should always form part of your SEO strategy. It can help improve your search engine ranking and get your site indexed faster. Promoting your site is the best and easiest way to increase traffic. Site promotion includes using keywords that are picked up by search engines to enable people to find you, using social networks to gain fans, and listing your site on local directories.

Here are some popular ways to get noticed by search engines and potential customers:

1. Use Google AdWords
Google AdWords is one of the most popular ways to advertise on the internet. Since it works on a Pay-per-click model, it’s ideal if you’re just starting out or you simply want to have a very focused advertising target market.

2. Submit your website to the three major search engines We publish your sitemap by default when you publish your site, letting search engines easily know what has changed without them having to crawl every page.

Submitting your site to a search engine doesn’t mean you will be automatically included in the search engine’s index. By doing this you alert the search engine to your website’s presence and are added to a list of sites to be crawled. XML sitemaps make it easier for search engine crawlers to see the depth of your website and keep track of things changing like new pages being added and deleted.

You can also submit your sitemap manually. Here are links to submit your site to Google, Yahoo and Bing:

3. Consistently add more content
Building up more content on your site is an extremely important part of search engine optimization. When you add more content to your site you are:

  • Providing a great reason for visitors to your site to come back.
  • Giving search engines a reason to visit your site often. Search engines want to keep the most updated version of sites in their index and they also want to consistently add new and improved information to it as well.
  • Adding to the searchability of your site. The more pages your site has in the search engine’s index, the more possibilities your site has of being found.

The type of content you add to your site is up to you. You can add a blog to your site, run promotions, upload images and more. Publishing your site to your Facebook Page is also a great way to increase your visibility and attract more visitors. Take a look at our article about Facebook Page publishing.

4. Get involved in social networking
Becoming active on social networking sites will bring traffic to your site as well as develop back links. There are many options including niche focused social networking sites to get involved in.

With HostPapa Website Builder, when you click on the Publish button, you will be able to click on the Facebook and Twitter social networking buttons to post your update to your preferred social network. You can also add social networking widgets to your website which allow visitors to your site to share content quickly and easily.

Take a look at these tutorials for more information:

5. Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and submit a sitemap
Please see our Google Webmaster Tutorial for instructions on verifying your site and submitting a sitemap.

6. Do link exchanges
Link building is an extremely important part of SEO. Search engines will look at the amount of links that come into your site as well as the status of the sites that link to you. Although the search engines look more favorably on links that are not reciprocal, exchanging links is a great place to start.

  • Find other websites that have the same topic as your site and send an email to the webmaster asking if he or she would like to do a link exchange.
  • Ask local organizations such as your Chamber of Commerce or Visitor’s Bureau if a link exchange could be done.
  • Ask your friends, family members and social networking contacts if they would like to exchange links.

7. Write a blog
Blogging allows you to consistently add new content to your site. We recommend taking a look at Tumblr. Once you’ve set up your blog, you can add it to your site using the Tumblr Widget in the website builder. Read this tutorial for more information: Using the Tumblr Widget.

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