Building a website is not a tough task now a days. Marketing the same such that it reaches the target customer is the next level. Customer retention or making the visitors to stay as well as return several times would be another big part of a making a successful website. The design of the site including use of animations, graphics and extraneous fonts should all depend on the message to convey.

Bringing every internet visitor to a site which sells electrical conduits will not serve much for the site as the bounce rate would be very high. Considering a portal, the lure can be from various sections or channels, thus getting those people who have the interest in corresponding channels would keep coming back. Visitor freshness depend heavily on search engine results, as well as references. With the current trend giving equal importance to both the techniques. Search engine optimization should not be a one time event. Search engines may change algorithms regularly, repeating last years methods may not to work now. This requires a long-term outlook and commitment.

Optimize sites by making site-maps, seo friendly urls, content for users instead of search engines, unique content and linking internally with keyword anchors. Create quality inbound links through related blog comments, community microblogging, article submission. Avoid paid or free to all automated directory submissions, keyword stuffed pages, redirector pages with heavy keywords, reciprocal linking, hidden stuffed keywords. Do market research using PPC tools, Keyword Discovery or WordTracker or Google AdWords. Use intermittent press releases with emphasis.

Site maps will help search engines to find otherwise complicated and hidden links. Dynamic menu or animated menu with flash elements may make it difficult for search engines to find all or those important links from your site. This is where a sitemap will help out. Though if there are more links in a sitemap, try to build multiple sitemaps, and link together using a single sitemap, keeping 60 to 75 links per sitemap and to a maximum of 100 in special situations. Making SEO friendly urls does not mean to wholly avoid the query strings from the url, but to have the proper related title in the url. This will help the search engine as well as end user to identify the target page as relevant to the information.

Getting your site listed in quality directories like Yahoo, DMOZ, Business.com, Aviva, and Best of the web, would be good though should never submit to every other site submission systems. The community at wordpress.com will help greatly, and creating a blog there with just a virtual domain is more than enough to get quality links back to your site. Though you will need to post activities and achievements as a blog to the wordpress.com community page. Linking this as the official blog on your permanent site is also reccommended. On social media marketing sites like Flickr, YouTube and Google Videos try not to spam. Posting a video clip or interview of the Company CEO, or a satisfied customer about a product on social video sites would help in reducing bounce rates. Since visitors coming to the site will already know about the product and are interested.

Article submission is accepted as a great method to get quality backlinks. The articles would be reusable on any website. Repeated publshing of the article would bring in more back links from related sites and content pages. Submit your articles to various free article sites. From where others will reuse your articles and there by replicating your backlinks from those articles.

Developing a relationship with media covering your industry or your local region can be a great source of exposure, including getting links from trusted media web sites. Distributing releases online can be an effective link building tactic, and helps for exposure in news search sites. Please issue a release only when you have something worthy to report. Don’t waste journalists’ time.

By: Eric Thomas Jr
Marketing Consultant, Select Articles
http://selectarticles.info