Old question - best ways to promote brand new website and maximise SEO.

[gizmondouk]

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I know this is an old question but time for a new thread and new responses.

Please can people post advice on promoting and advertising a brand new website. Any tips on getting it high on search engines and maximising SEO.

Cheers guys , all advice appreciated.

[MikeCronnie]

I Think the only real tips are to make your content original, high quality and a good combination of links and catching to the eye. Attracting search engines will get you so far, but then your website needs to have that person click through to your merchant.

This means, Make it legible and easy to read and also not just made up from a bunch of copy and pastes from your merchants sites. For an example, I Checked someone's site on this forum that he put up for review and he just copied and pasted the same body of text that had been used on around another 180,000 pages on the web for that particular product. Nothing in that text would make it stand out any better than the other 179,999 for that page or product, even with a good choice of meta keywords or descriptions.

I Am currently looking myself at getting relevant outbound links to my page and also getting links to my site from other relevant sources. Maybe write a few articles on an article publishing site to see how that does. It's all trial and error really but whatever you do, don't cheapen your site by posting around and appearing to spam people with links.

[dc000000]

The only answer is that there isn't an answer. A good idea, hard work and a fair amount of luck might get you there eventually but if you're looking for fast success you'll need a time machine that takes you back to 10 years ago.

[cjm1982]

Just to add another angle into the mix - has anyone had much joy with offline promotion? Not necessarily to the extent of TV adverts which some of the big boys are using, but maybe local newspaper, trade publications or magazine advertising, or flyer drops for example?
I come from a print background so still have a certain amount of loyalty to the value of print and think it lends a certain degree of 'authority' to an online project. There's obviously a lot of scepticism as to the value of it though and it's difficult to really trace the impact when compared to being able to analyse the exact clicks from an Adsense campaign for example, but be interested to know if anyone has had any joy with this sort of tactic...

[dc000000]

Just to add another angle into the mix - has anyone had much joy with offline promotion? Not necessarily to the extent of TV adverts which some of the big boys are using, but maybe local newspaper, trade publications or magazine advertising, or flyer drops for example?
I come from a print background so still have a certain amount of loyalty to the value of print and think it lends a certain degree of 'authority' to an online project. There's obviously a lot of scepticism as to the value of it though and it's difficult to really trace the impact when compared to being able to analyse the exact clicks from an Adsense campaign for example, but be interested to know if anyone has had any joy with this sort of tactic...

I can think of a few small ecomerce businesses who do fairly well despite not showing anywhere in search results. They spend mostly on magazine and specialist press ads. So yes it obviously works and is something a lot of e-businesses overlook.

[opensesame]

It's all about planning, plan, plan and then plan some more.

Research into the keyword you want to target, use MozBar, keyword tool, google insights etc, even run adwords for a few weeks to see what impressions you get. This will indicate a rough estimate of search queries you could be exposed to.

The search volume is there? And your not up against the BBC website?

Then pen and paper, wireframe the site and look deeply at the UX design, step into the mind of a visitor, make sure nothing puts doubt or confusion into the visitors mind and sell that product as much as possible before the visitor leaves to the merchants site, if the merchant offers free delivery, actively tell the user before they leave.

(Personally myself the UX is the most important thing)

SEO wise, have like 10 articles already written in a folder, have 5 tutorials, 5 top tips as much as you can ready for launch.

Personally myself I like to hold back on products on the site and just have loads of useful information with social buttons, I tend to try and make the site look like a resource rather then a shop and gain as much social exposure as possible (gathering social signals), I might even run ppc from some cheap terms just to get the likes and tweets rolling.

Well I do a lot of other stuff as well but I could go on all day, im sure some will disagree with the above but if it works then im happy.