If you are thinking of setting up a website or are have just done so, how will you promote it? Here’s a quick run through of a few steps you must take to make your website’s presence felt on the web.

SEO Step 1

You have to submit the website to directories. This is an important and vital step where SEO is concerned and the links that lead to your site are helped along by listings in directories. So you could look at DMOZ or Yahoo Directory and when you are listed here, it tends to weigh heavily in your favor when it comes to search engine results. You just have to be patient though because nothing happens in a day with most of the directories – you’ll have to wait a while to get ‘credit’ to be listed on these online directories.

SEO Step 2

Submit articles to article directories. You could write about your business or the industry you are in. This is a great way to promote your product or service without it being blatantly hard-sell. The great thing about articles is that they somehow seem more informative than selling so a reader’s guard is down most of the time.

These articles will have to be submitted free to article directories and e-zines. People who want to pick up these articles and put them on their websites will have to include your byline as well. So your name and link to your website travels far and wide by sheer virtue of you having submitted a free article. Of course, it goes without saying that the more articles you submit, the more links you’ll get to your site. In your byline, you could have yours or your company name and a short description. This should be followed by a link to your site.

SEO Step 3

A bit of PR helps. So you could write a piece about your product, service or site in one of the local newspapers or magazines. You could weave a story around it. However, don’t bite off more than you can chew. If you do a big story in the major newspapers or magazines, you might just be inundated with calls and emails or even visits and it would be pointless if most of them were irrelevant to your business.

SEO Step 4

Support your site with a blog. It is incredible how a blog can talk a reader through something. Somehow, it seems a lot more human than a website. So it would be a good idea to start a blog about the company or industry that is featured in your website. What you could do is to start it as a subdomain of your website.

A blog really is a great idea because you can build a lot of unique content within it. What’s more, it sort of makes the company to be viewed in a more human light. You can let the customers peek into this warm, softer side of the business through a blog.

You could also host your blog in so many places online and quite a number of them are free. Too lazy or too busy to start your own blog? Then go to popular blogs and write comments there, making sure that you get a link back to your site. Do these backlinks work? Well, if the blog is very popular, they do!

SEO Step 5

Promote that’s what you need to do for your site. Tell everyone you can about it – let the whole world know online and offline. Don’t be shy but shout it out loud from the rooftops. If you get traffic to your site that is what you need. Who knows? You might suddenly create such a huge interest in your site that your company gets onto the business map.

What you need to do for basic SEO is to sit down and think about it with a common sense approach. Isn’t that how you would promote your business if it were offline? Well, an online business is pretty much the same. You need to get exposure – and positive exposure. So ideally if you could do your promos both offline and online, you should have a good thing going!