5 Ways To Market Your Site

A great way to market your Internet business is to please your visitors with excellent content and make them stay & browsing your site.

Duh! Nothing new, right?

Still, up to now some of you may have only been concentrating on pleasing mainly the search engines spiders. If yes, well, then it’s time to adjust your strategy. Why? Because no matter how many search engine spiders visit your site, not one of them is going to buy anything, or click on any of the monetization links on your site.

Don’t neglect spiders, though. You do need both people and spiders finding your site. Yet you’ll want to increase word of mouth and have visitors come back for more over and over again.

The way to attract both is to have great content on your pages. Duh! (again)

So, here are five ways to market your site using content…

1. Include high quality content that’s relevant to your site.

Content is king!

You’ve heard that before, haven’t you? Of course… because it’s true.

The job of search engines is to locate relevant content. They love plain text and videos that are of high quality. They can’t read image or flash files. So add lots of text and videos.

In addition, visitors will only stay if they are interested in what you offer and begin reading and/or watching.

If your site is about business consulting, don’t have content about environment conservation. This only repels visitors, as they get upset that they aren’t getting what they came for, information about business consulting.

Stay focused and on topic.

2. Ensure your content is easy to understand.

To interest visitors, your message must come across in your text and/or video. If in a conversational style, all the better. Just don’t try and use fancy, intellectual terms within your writing if you’re not used to that lingo. How many times have you visited a website and found the content is so difficult to understand that you simply never returned?

Websites are really all about people. You not only want to make a good first impression, but you want to engage visitors, entertain them, and/or enlighten them. You do this with real communication, not just words thrown out there, trying to impress. If you’re not communicating on the level of your audience, it will turn them off.

Your marketing message should come across as believable, convincing, and “you.”

3. Write exciting and creative content that makes visitors want to stay and explore.

If you want to completely turn off all visitors, just add content that is totally boring and dull.

Don’t drone on and on… saying the same thing over and over again. If you can say it in 300 words, say it. Don’t add another 200 words just to meet any questionable “posting guideline.”

Get creative in your copy. Write in an attractive style and stick to your own individual attitude and style. If you write some interesting articles to include on your site — topics that you know would be of interest to your visitors — you’ll find they will stay and browse longer, and will be more likely to purchase or click on those money making links.

And remember, the content must, must, must be original. If it’s copied & pasted from other sites, or you post an idea that’s initially from another person or site and you don’t attribute it in your copy, both search engines and visitors will click the back button in their browser and won’t return.

4. Avoid typos.

Avoid typos and errors in grammar and punctuation as best as you can.

Certainly you’ve visited a site or even received some type of advertisement in the mail that contained spelling errors or was written badly. It can be distracting to your message.

I mean, I myself have typos all the time as English is my second language. Though I think I’ve learned & improved quite a lot over the years. Still, if in doubt, use one of the many spell checking services available online. (Can’t find the one I used to use though.)

5. Ensure keyword phrases flow naturally within the content.

Take whatever extra effort needed to limit the use of keywords in your copy. If tons of keywords are randomly thrown in, it will seem obvious to readers that you are not writing for them but for search engines. As a result, the text usually doesn’t flow or read well.

Make sure all keywords and keyword phrases fit into the text so they are hardly noticeable.

As for keyword density, about 1 to 3 percent should suffice.

If I write content myself, I let my creativity flow and write the whole content up first, all the while dismissing any rules and formalities. When I’m done I go through the text two more times to do my spell check and then my “SEO check” (or vice versa).

Bottom line?

Use exciting and targeted content on your site in plain text and/or video format to attract both humans and search engines.

Stay focused. Be cool. :-)

—Marcus Hochstadt