Hitfirm.com

You have made a great site, you have metatags correctly inserted and you have submitted to the top 10 search engines and are waiting for Google to find your site, what else can you do? You can do plenty! In fact this is often a great time to turn to after optimizing and submitting to search engines. The search engines may take from a week to a month to have your site visible in listings. For some sites like Google, there may be some other delays if your site appears to be stalled in its rankings by the Sandbox. These are good projects to do while waiting for good rankings and the traffic that will bring, and are good to do on an ongoing basis.

We usually suggest jump starting your site to help traffic right away. In this section we will talk about ideas on getting visitors through other methods than those we have already discussed.

1.         Firstly it is a nice idea to analyze what your competitors are doing. This hopefully was done when you were deciding on keywords, but you might want to change your scope some. What do they do for sales, advertising, multiple sites, etc. Are those techniques that you should do and do better? It is great to understand how your industry is changing. Knowledge is power and knowing what other companies are doing can help you design your site, make promotions, ask for links, pay for advertising, and acquire customers.

2.         Make a Newsgroup Posting about your company and/or products. This is a good way to spread your message to a focused group with an interest in your message. Make sure to observe newsgroup for a few days to notice if commercial messages are approved. This is also a great way to show your knowledge with thoughtful comments to readers. A member of your company that is knowledgeable about your company and the internet would make a good choice for someone to make these posts.

3.         A new way to inform others about your company is through Blogs. These are informal message boards where people can post there daily thoughts through an easy to use interface. This is similar to a journal with paper but is online and is a page or a separate website like www.blogspot.com. The person who makes this record or journal could be an employee and could be a low, mid-level person or even the CEO. Several companies have CEOs that wish to communicate with customers in this way. Sun Microsystems, GoDaddy.com, and the list goes on.

4.         Affiliate Program Building - Many websites have built their traffic from nothing to millions by giving referring sites a percentage of sales gathered from that referral. This was first done by Amazon.com and it went from being an obscure book company with a strange name, to being a household name that the vast majority know about and use! This can be done in-house with server based software or can be helped with companies like Commission Junction. You can visit them at www.cj.com

5.         Make sure your staff has an email address on the new url that is working properly. Have them learn to use email if that is new. Then have your company personnel create a signature for their emails. This is a name, email address, website address, and marketing message on each email message they send. Your employees should be spreading knowledge of what your company does to all the people they meet on the web. All the companies you write to, all the newsgroup postings you make, all the forums you post to will have a unified message with no mistakes, missing info, or other distractions.

6.         This is a great time to change offline collateral. This can be business cards that need the new email addresses and website addresses. It could be brochures that point to the web for more information or to get coupons or get more information. It could be clothing or promotional items that now need the website address. The possibilities are endless.

7.         Let employees, customers, and all interested parties know about the new website, its features, and what it will do for your business. The first to know should be employees so they can master the new resource, inform customers about how to use it, and for sales and marketing to see the new marketing messages. Employees are a great area for feedback and quality control as well.

8.         And finally the most important activity to do while your site is getting indexed and the rankings are normalizing is to get as many high quality sites to link to you as possible. This is listed last but this might be handled well by people other than the above activities. It is good to get these as quickly as possible. If you get a lot of high quality links the time it takes to get listed will decrease. You will want to consider directories like Yahoo and the DMOZ Directory. Both are extensive and high quality. Look for more directories and possibly industry specific websites. You can search for other companies in similar but not competing industries that might be interested in linking to you. Review your competitors links.  How do you think they got them? Can you do the same technique?

These are all changes you can do after your site is designed, the SEO is done, and you are waiting for results. Good Luck!