5+ Best Ways to Promote a Website Online

Social media, e-commerce, magazine, and video streaming sites can all be your competition when promoting your website online. Everything on the internet is vying for the attention of your target audience. How do you make sure that they’re on your website and not on your competitors’? 

Assuming you’ve built a website that follows all the best practices of design and usability, it’s time to take stock of your content. Content is king, and as in chess, it’s indispensable to the game, although it can’t do much on its own. You need the rest of the chess pieces to do the heavy lifting of promotion. 

Below are the five plus best ways to promote your website online. Best of all, they’re free!

1. Link Building

You went through all the trouble of getting people to come to your site. What should you be doing to get them to stay there?

There are two ways you can do this.

  • Internal-linking. It’s technically a part of SEO as it influences your website’s ranking factor. The goal of internal-linking is to encourage continued interest and more clicks within your site, which will result in a good bounce rate. This means you link your new posts on your website to your old posts.
  • Inbound Linking. You can get other websites to link to your website if you build a reputable connection on the internet. This would help online users a lot to determine whether your website is reliable or not. The primary goal of inbound linking is to expand your means of getting people to your site, aside from search engines.

Link building requires having built a substantial content bank so you can promote older content on every new content that you publish. This will appear as anchor text or clickable hyperlinks that should blend seamlessly to the text.

Start your link building by posting your site into the following sites:

Furthermore, include only relevant links and use appropriate anchor text as you don’t want your website to look spammy. In this way, you attract more visitors while maintaining a reputable connection with various online users. It keeps them updated, and possibly on the trend, just by clicking these simple links.

2. Optimize On-Page SEO 

You can’t control how your website will rank in organic search, but you can give it a fighting chance with good old on-page search engine optimization or SEO. 

Identify relevant keywords to use on your title, meta descriptions, tags, and in the body of your content in a natural way. Write for people, not crawlers. The age of gaming search engines by keyword stuffing is long over. 

Have an SEO basics checklist and make sure each page on your website ticks all the boxes. It can get tedious, especially since it will take a while for you to see the fruits of your labour. SEO is a long game.

3. Go Social

The importance of social media as a content distribution channel cannot be overstated. Case in point, some brands and businesses choose to focus their digital marketing efforts on their social media assets and forgo having a website altogether.

Begin with being where your target market is. You don’t have to have a presence everywhere. Choose only the appropriate social media platforms and focus on those. Is it on-brand for you to be on Tiktok, or should you be sharing content on Linkedin instead? 

When it comes to promoting your website, do more than share the URL. Repackage your content to fit the platform best. What works on Twitter will not necessarily work on Instagram. Last but foremost, link back to your website often. The ultimate goal is to drive web traffic to your website. 

4. Tap Your Network 

While a nod from a celebrity or an influencer is excellent for generating online buzz, you should not forget to seek support from your sphere of influence, whether it’s for your website or for a site you’re managing for a brand. Networking doesn’t have to be a dirty word. When done right, you can turn friends and acquaintances into staunch advocates. 

Be confident when reaching out to contacts, but draw the line at sending mass emails and messages. You don’t want to spam them. When able, send personalized messages with a link to the website or a link to a particular piece of content from the website that they may find relevant. Finish it off by asking them to share it with their network if they find the content worthwhile. You’d be surprised at how many people will respect your hustle and will want to help you out.

5. User-Generated Content

People appreciate being recognized, which is why businesses both big and small love running user-generated campaigns, or UGC. It drums up engagement, it helps create brand advocacy, and your audience and customers create content for you for free. 

It could be as simple as asking your followers to post a photo on Instagram using your campaign hashtag. It doesn’t always have to be visual or artistic. Testimonials and product reviews are also UGC.

UGC campaigns are more popular on social media, but your website can still reap the benefits of a good campaign. You can create a simple slideshow of the photos from the campaign and publish it on your website. If you’re running a business or if you’re advertising your services on your website, you can dedicate a section for testimonials or reviews from past clients. Always encourage UGC participants and respondents to share the content from your website on their social media accounts. 

6. Stay Fresh

For a variety of reasons, not all websites make it. Some are abandoned even before they’re given a chance to take off. Some are shut down after the business folds or after a project has run its course. The internet is littered with defunct websites. You want your website to “look alive” for search engines and your target audience. 

Your website needs regular updates and fresh content. More quality content also means more keywords, which could increase your website’s value to a search engine. 

The Bottom Line

If you want more traffic on top of the organic traffic, you are already getting, and if you have the budget for it, consider paid promotion. It’s very useful for driving traffic to time-sensitive content, like seasonal campaigns or events. But ultimately, if you’re going for sustained web traffic, you’d want to pay special attention to your website’s organic marketing efforts, such as the six mentioned above. 

Build it, promote it, and then they will come. Consistently offer something of value, and they will keep coming back.