Monday 18 November 2013

The Best Ways To Market Your New Website

The Best Ways To Market Your New Website

By CJ Virtual PA

How can you ensure your new site rises above the competition to be discovered by potential customers when there are thousands of new sites launched every day?


Content, content, content!

Domain Name



This may sound obvious but your domain name should be easy to remember and be unique to your business. Choosing a name is becoming an increasingly challenging task as most easily remembered names which trip of the tongue seem to be registered already. It may well be worth your while purchasing multiple domains which link to your main site – you could even consider buying names that contain keywords for your website to gain a higher ranking with the search engines.


Page Titles


Page titles are crucial if you want your site to appear near the top of search engine results. Each page of your web site should have a page title under 50 characters whilst still being as informative as possible. The titles should accurately reflect the description of each of the pages on your site and be unique enough to encourage viewers to choose your site over your competitors. You could for example, instead of using an intro page title such as “Sports Shorts”, rename it to “Sports Shorts For Men”.


Meta Tags


Metatags influence the way your site appears in search results.  They should therefore be well-written. The most important two metatags to encourage search engines to index your site are the ‘description’ and ‘keyword’ tags. If your site is called Sportswear and you have a header which states “Mens & Womens Sportswear”,  you can add to your titles by having a meta description tag which says: “A range of mens and womens sportswear including shorts, shirts, tracksuits and swimwear”. The Meta keyword tag may include some of the following words: “shorts, shirts, tracksuits, swimwear”. Meta tags are particularly useful when wanting to attract attention to pages with little text.


Advise Your Customers


Tell your customers about your new website. Send them an email or newsletter where you could include a promotion to encourage them to visit your new site and don’t forget to include your new website address on your business cards, letterheads and all your promotional material.

 

Launch A Press Release


When your new site is ready, mail, email or fax a press release to editors of local papers and magazines who will be interested in your message. If you have a sport related site you could  focus on sports journalists and even target your release to niche sports journals.


List Your Site


There are many business directories online which enable you list your business and allow you to provide a link to your website.  Ensure you choose a relevant directory and beware of free offers to list your site to multiple search engines – they are not always the most discerning and you may end up with a lot of unwanted spam email and phonecalls.

Friday 1 November 2013

Twitter - Trending & Hashtags


Twitter – Trending & Hashtags

 By Cindy Jalovaara CJVirtualPA

Trending

Trending topics are the top 10 subjects being tweeted about on Twitter.  They are identified by a keyword in the “trending topics” bar at the side of your Twitter home page. These can be useful to discover breaking news stories and reactions to the topics.  Some of the tweets will include hashtags (for example #SocialMediaManagement) which is way of highlighting the most popular conversations on Twitter.
 

Sorting the Topics

You can often narrow down the trending topic data to view only tweets in their specific area. If you  log in to Twitter and click "change" at the top of the “trends list” you can choose to see worldwide trending topics, by country or city.

Top Tip: You can see the top trending topics without having to log in by going to the Twitter homepage. If you want to see all the messages from Twitter users relating to that topic, just click on the topic and the most recent will appear at the top.


Hashtags  #


A hashtag is a word or phrase prefixed with the hashtag symbol ( # )
Not only Tweets, but also short messages posted on Tumblr, Instagram or Google+ to name but a few, can be tagged by including the hashtag and then the word or words. For example #VirtualPAblogs can be used to search for the messages which appear relevant to blogs about Virtual PAs or written by Virtual PAs which may contain more tips to help you enhance your social media management.
 Top Tip:  Create a hashtag for your business: ensure you include your business name or initials but do remember to run a search first to check no-one else has already used it and don't overdo it - remember to keep things relevant if you want the best results.


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