Introduction
The most successful online businesses are those with the most effective web marketing. You may have a well-designed website with easy to use e-commerce features, but without customers your site is worthless. At the most basic level online promotion means getting your website listed on search engines and directories. Search engines have the potential to provide your business with a truly independent sales channel, providing a mechanism through which people can find your business and purchase your products or services. This article focuses on this aspect of an online marketing campaign.
After applying the principles outlined below your site should start appearing in all the major search engines and, crucially, generate more sales. The Open Directory Project Once you have a website the very first thing to do is to submit it to the Open Directory Project. The project represents the largest human edited website directory on the web and most of the leading search engines (Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit to name a few) use its directory to identify and review new sites for inclusion in their own listings. Due to the involvement of human reviewers it can take up to 8 weeks to get listed with the ODP, so patience is required. You can find the ODP at www.dmoz.org: follow the add a site link and instructions to add your site. Your site can be included under as many relevant categories as you can find; each has a different editor so you may find that some get listed before others. A word of warning: by using human editors the ODP is able to filter overt marketing hype or misleading information from the listings, so you may find that descriptions that are too sales orientated are rejected. Take care to ensure that your descriptions simply define what your company does in way that would be helpful to someone browsing the directory. (See the 'just the facts' side box for examples on writing acceptable descriptions). Specific submissions As well as getting their information from the ODP a lot of search engines have their own submission pages for site owners to get listed on the specific search engine. Again, the review processes employed and the sheer volume of submissions mean that there can be quite a delay between submitting your site to a search engine and your listing finally appearing. By submitting to both the ODP and the search engines themselves you should be ensuring that your site gets listed as quickly as possible.
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Paid listings So far all the search engines and directories that you should have submitted to are free. However, a couple of important directories only support submission for commercial sites. Whilst you will find your site appearing on them eventually using the methods already outlined above, if you want to get more highly ranked then paid submission is an option. The Yahoo directory operates a fee based system for commercial sites, details of which can be found at www.yahoo.com. Yahoo is one of the most-used search engines and whilst it is now integrating results from Google it may be beneficial to your company to get listed in its own directory.
Looksmart (www.looksmart.com) provides results for MSN, About.com and AltaVista, and again operates a fee-based system for submitting your site. If your site is non-commercial you can get listed in the LookSmart directory for free by following this link: www.zeal.com/users/become_a_zealot.jhtml. Whether to pay to submit your site is a difficult choice and depends entirely on circumstances. Paid submission ensures quicker results, but if you are prepared to be a little patient then the same rankings are possible.
Other Directories Beyond search engines it is also beneficial to be listed in more specific business directories such as yell.com (www.yell.com), where users may frequently search for businesses of your type. It is worth using a search engine to find local business directories and specific trade directories relevant to your business. Many of these will offer free submission and can potentially push more customers in your direction.
Conclusion Once you have submitted your site as directed, sit back and relax. After a period of around six weeks you should find that your site begins to get listed across the search engines. The easiest way to establish that your site is appearing is to search for your company name. Well done, the first stage of your online marketing campaign has been completed. Now that your site is listed it is time to start refining it to ensure that your customers can find you when they want your products or service
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