When it comes to Internet marketing for plastic surgeons or for any other business, simply creating a website is no longer enough. Because there are millions of websites out there on the Web, it’s important that you also promote your website. If you don’t, it can be difficult for visitors to find you or to even know that you exist.
So, how do you go about promoting your website? The following is a step-by-step guide to website promotion:
- Prepare Your Website. The first step is to prepare your website for the search engines. This is basically referred to as search engine optimization and involves elements like selection and use of targeted keywords, creating effective meta tags and so on. When your pages are well-optimized, this increases the chance that you’ll rank well in search engine results.
- Gather Links. Most search engines use algorithms that take links into account when ranking sites. They basically view an inbound link (a link from another site pointing to your site) as a sort of popularity vote in your favor. The more inbound links you have, the more votes and thus the higher your rank. Because of this, it’s important that you gather plenty of inbound links. However, you must make sure that they are quality links that are relevant to your site’s theme. That means that you want links from sites that are related to plastic surgery as opposed to, say, gardening. To gather links, you can approach websites within your industry or consider a link exchange program.
- Submit Your Website. Once your website has been prepared and optimized, it’s time to submit it to the major search engines and directories. Make sure that you submit your whole website as well as individual pages within your site, if not all of them at least the most important ones. You can manually submit your site and pages or use an automatic submission tool or service. You may need to submit your site and pages several times before they’re listed, which can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.
- Advertise Your Website. You may want to consider other forms of advertising like pay-per-click campaigns, website ads, newsletter ads, and so on. There are also free ways to promote your website, such as writing articles and submitting them to e-zines, participating in forums and message boards where you include your site’s URL, and so on.
- Monitor Your Progress. It’s important to keep an eye on your website and how it’s performing in the search engines. Part of this includes reviewing your visitor logs. By monitoring your site’s progress, you can see which keywords and pages are working and those which are not. This will help you to determine any changes