Brisbane Business

Getting your business online

Publicising your web site

The value of a web site depends on your target audience seeing it. Here are some ways to draw the attention of existing and potential clients to your pages.

Traditional advertising

• Include the address in all of your traditional advertisements.
• Print your web site and email address on your business card and other stationery.
• Leave out the "http://" - it looks better without it, and is no longer needed.

On the Internet

• links from related web sites, suppliers, distributors, customers etc
• encourage people to bookmark or add your site to their favourites - if appropriate
• include your web site address in your email signature
• submit the web site to major search engines once
  many search engines no longer take free entries
• submit the web site to relevant web directories once
  many directories no longer take free entries
• submit to trade directories for your industry
• paid web promotion, listing and banner ads
• affiliate schemes - 

If you have a virtual web server, your web statistics will show you which search engines, directories and other web pages send referrals to your page.

Caution: Treat all offers to get your site in the "top 10" of the search engines - or to submit your site automatically to thousands of search engines - with caution. 

Don't buy an email list: Laws prohibit the unsolicited sending of bulk commercial email in many countries and penalties can be severe. Reputable businesses do not sell lists of email addresses.

Good Web Design helps...

• Good web design will maximise the number of ways your web site can receive links.
• Good web design will make it easy for your audience to bookmark their preferred page - this is often not the front page of a web site.
• Word Tracker It's all very well being in the top 10 of the search engines if you search for what you know is on your website - but are you using the same search terms that your customers use? Word Tracker provides a service to help you target the keywords people actually use. They offer a free trial.