Search Engine Optimization Service

A brief guide to marketing your website
Once you have your website, you need to get people to visit it. The
easiest method is to continue advertising your product or service in
the traditional ways - leaflets, press adverts etc. - but remember to
include your website address on everything you produce. You should
also add the address to business cards, letterheads and invoices.

In addition, there are a number of techniques you can use on-line for
getting the maximum number of hits to your website. The best
method for marketing your site will vary greatly depending on the
content, & though time consuming, is something we can normally do
for you. The methods below are only a small section of the
advertising mechanisms available, and concentrates on advertising
suitable for the smaller business or club. Hopefully, it should be
enough to get you started.

Free Online Advertising.
The first step is to add your site to some search engines (this will be
done automatically if we are able to add your site to our portfolio).
This involves sending details of the site (URL, title, relevant keywords
etc) to the common websites used generally for Internet searches,
such as Google, Lycos, AOL etc. The results are unpredictable,
however; there is no guarantee of how long it will take to appear in
the listings for that site. Once a search engine indexes a site, your
site will appear in the results if relevant keywords are used as search
terms. How high your website appears in the results depends on a
number of factors. It depends how many other people have websites
offering the same product or service, and also what search terms
people are likely to use. With search engines, you are reliant on
people supplying the correct search terms - if you are advertising a
pewter model of Manchester Town Hall, for instance, someone
searching for 'model' and 'Manchester' probably won't see your site,
as this will give thousands of results. Searching for 'pewter model'
and 'manchester town hall' is more likely to result in a hit.

As well as depending on the keywords, the rating of a site on most
search engines depends on how many other sites link to yours. More
links imply that your site is more interesting, so it will appear higher
up the ratings. This is another good reason for allowing us to use
your site in our portfolio. In addition to search engines, there are
many sites that will list your website free of charge if your site is
relevant to their site. For instance, there are many amateur theatre
pages that are happy to add links to the homepages of specific
societies. Similar pages exist for everything from sporting clubs to
small businesses, although pages that list business websites are more
likely to make a charge. The best technique is to search for similar
sites and see if any directory listings appear in the search results. An
added advantage is that each listing increases the number of links to
your site, so increasing your site's apparent popularity.

Paid Online Advertising.Yell.co.uk
Yell is the online version of the Yellow Pages. If you have a company
that is listed in the Yellow Pages, your phone number and address
will automatically appear on Yell. However, for an additional
advertising fee, you can have an enhanced listing that will include a
link to your website. Go to Yell.co.uk for more information (link will
open in a new window). Google AdWords
Google (and some other popular search engines) can display specific
adverts based on search terms. For instance, if someone searched
the internet for 'pewter models' and 'pewter' was one of your
search terms, your ad would be displayed in a separate box on the
right hand side of the screen. You are charged by the number of
times your ad is clicked on, and this charge can be anything from 1p
upwards (you can choose how much) per click, depending on the
keyword itself. You can also set a daily limit to make sure costs don't
get out of hand - Google suggest prices per click and daily limits
based on your keywords when you register with the service. Go to
Google.co.uk for more information (link will open in a new window).

Banner Advertising. Many websites display a banner at the top (or
elsewhere) on their page which advertises some product or other.
You could have a banner designed that gives a brief description of
the product, and if a user is interested, they click on the banner to
get through to the website. Banners can be very eye-catching, as
they can use graphic images and simple animations as well as text.
We can design banner adverts for you for a small additional fee.
There are a lot of companies that will host a banner advert, and your
ad will then get displayed on potentially thousands of websites.
Alternatively, you could directly approach relevant websites (the
Pewter Model Manufacturers Association website, for instance, if one
exists) and find out how much it would cost to have your banner
displayed on their site.

Spam advertising. Spam advertising involves buying a list of email
addresses (or acquiring email addresses in some other way), and
sending an email to potentially millions of people around the world
advertising your product or service. site-write do not recommend
Spam as a legitimate form of advertising. As well as being both
annoying and intrusive, Spam advertising is now illegal in many
countries, and sending Spam from your email account may result in
the account being closed down by your ISP.