Advertizing new website

mrtoybox

Been spending ages developing our new website but it's no use if nobody can find us. Have submitted it to the major search engines for trawling but just wondered if there were any suggestions for low or no cost advertizing.
We sell toys and games (mainly Thomas the Tank Engine) only sell official uk and are based in Wakefield.
Any help appreciated.
Paul and Christine

rick@findthatfuchsia

mrtoybox wrote: »

Been spending ages developing our new website but it's no use if nobody can find us. Have submitted it to the major search engines for trawling but just wondered if there were any suggestions for low or no cost advertizing.
We sell toys and games (mainly Thomas the Tank Engine) only sell official uk and are based in Wakefield.
Any help appreciated.
Paul and Christine

Register your URL at dmoz.org

All the major search engines index from DMOZ and will pick up your site a lot quicker.
Also make sure that you have your meta tags done.

martindow

rick@findthatfuchsia wrote: »

Register your URL at dmoz.org

All the major search engines index from DMOZ and will pick up your site a lot quicker.
Also make sure that you have your meta tags done.

Good idea but dmoz can be very slow (it's done by human volunteers and can take years). Meta tags are worth doing but have limited effect (there was a post here recently on this, maybe on the Techie board).

I would concentrate on relevant page titles, H1,H2,etc tags and good keyword rich text on your pages. Getting other sites to link to yours can be helpful but make sure they are relevant sites, not paid for and are not dodgy link farms

Have a look at the google webmasters section - lots of helpful advice
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
A sitemap is a good idea with robots.txt to direct search engines to it. This is a common standard for Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google Analytics is good and free to give you stats on your site which can be helpful.

Search engines like changing and additional content so keep building your site. It is a never ending task but you can get there. Age of a site seems to be a factor so with time things should get better. Good luck.

richt71

I agree with the above post. In addition I'd post an ad on craigslist wih your web address in it. Google likes criagslist. Also set-up a blog about your business. I'd also run an online press release ($19 via prweb.com). I'd consider making a video and uploading it to youtube with your url embedded into the video - use camtasia free trial.
If you have a offline shop change your reciepts to offering a discount if your customer registers on your website - you'll need an autoresponder to collect emails legally - aweber or getresponse work best.

nickswift

Craigslist is now 'nofollow' http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=696429 so no pagerank love been passed anymore.

I do website promotion for a living and could talk to you for hours on how its all done.

Adwords works really well and you dont really need to know that much to get it working for you.... this is an email I got from a client tonight...

Hi Nick,

Sorry, it has slowed down a bit!

Really impressed with your work, we are getting 2-3 calls a day through the website.

Can you give me you bank account no. and sort code and the amount for the rest of the year and I will pay it.

Also if you need a refererence do not hesitate to give out my number.

Keep up the good work!

[FONT=Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif]Regards[/FONT]



Gumtree - free and good, i get a lot of enquiries through it.... i have a guy in india who posts for me for £10 a month - he maybe does 7 posts a day to all the different 'Gumtrees' which is against gumtree TOS, but its not really a problem - I have him doing it for a few of my clients as well.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ this is a great site to learn stuff about internet marketing, although there are a fair few scammers so watch out.

richt71

nickswift wrote: »

Craigslist is now 'nofollow' http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=696429 so no pagerank love been passed anymore.

I do website promotion for a living and could talk to you for hours on how its all done.

Adwords works really well and you dont really need to know that much to get it working for you.... this is an email I got from a client tonight...

Hi Nick,

Sorry, it has slowed down a bit!

Really impressed with your work, we are getting 2-3 calls a day through the website.

Can you give me you bank account no. and sort code and the amount for the rest of the year and I will pay it.

Also if you need a refererence do not hesitate to give out my number.

Keep up the good work!

[FONT=Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif]Regards[/FONT]



Gumtree - free and good, i get a lot of enquiries through it.... i have a guy in india who posts for me for £10 a month - he maybe does 7 posts a day to all the different 'Gumtrees' which is against gumtree TOS, but its not really a problem - I have him doing it for a few of my clients as well.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ this is a great site to learn stuff about internet marketing, although there are a fair few scammers so watch out.

Hi Nick,
There's a way round the no follow rule but I admit criagslist are amking it harder each month to advertise and you have to be careful not to get banned.

nickswift

richt71 wrote: »

Hi Nick,
There's a way round the no follow rule but I admit criagslist are amking it harder each month to advertise and you have to be careful not to get banned.

Thanks, I will look into this... I once purchased a product called Blogger Generator or something... it makes loads of blogs with backlinks and also removes the nofollow attribute - it was blackhat though, so i only used it for sites which i knew where going to get banned.

save-a-lot

Hi

Directory Critic has a brilliant list of UK directories...
http://www.directorycritic.com/uk-directory-list.html
get listed all over the place.

Also, PM me, I have a UK focussed directory too

LittleC_2

save-a-lot wrote: »

Hi

Directory Critic has a brilliant list of UK directories...
http://www.directorycritic.com/uk-directory-list.html
get listed all over the place.

Also, PM me, I have a UK focussed directory too

Good link thanks!!

baby_fuzz

In my opinion, you should slow it down a bit in case google thinks that you are link-spamming and black-lists you or something. I'm not a pro like the other people posting, but I would suggest that you feed your site map to the big search engines (google, yahoo, msn), and work on word of mouth. If you have great customer service, people will link to you. if you have a good product offering, people will link to you. If you have lots of useful and descriptive information on your website, search engines will rank your pages as more important. Also, I would sugegst phasing any work you do to improve your product descriptions etc, as I personally believe that this will keep the search engines thinking that your website is constantly updated - again, making search engines think that it is a more relevant page for searchers.

Finally, blitz some cash on Adwords (google). It isn't cheap, but at least you only pay for the people who click on your advert. make sure you read all of the help, so that you can target your ads carefully - otherwise you will go through your budget really quickly!

trl002

nickswift wrote: »

Craigslist is now 'nofollow' http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=696429 so no pagerank love been passed anymore.

I do website promotion for a living and could talk to you for hours on how its all done.

Adwords works really well and you dont really need to know that much to get it working for you.... this is an email I got from a client tonight...

Hi Nick,

Sorry, it has slowed down a bit!

Really impressed with your work, we are getting 2-3 calls a day through the website.

Can you give me you bank account no. and sort code and the amount for the rest of the year and I will pay it.

Also if you need a refererence do not hesitate to give out my number.

Keep up the good work!

[FONT=Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif]Regards[/FONT]



Gumtree - free and good, i get a lot of enquiries through it.... i have a guy in india who posts for me for £10 a month - he maybe does 7 posts a day to all the different 'Gumtrees' which is against gumtree TOS, but its not really a problem - I have him doing it for a few of my clients as well.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ this is a great site to learn stuff about internet marketing, although there are a fair few scammers so watch out.

Any chance i can get that indian guy to post some ads for me?