What are the most important and reliable ways of marketing my website?

[Pascal]

Alfamale,

I've take a look at your site to make the following recommendations.

The first and important part of the equation of reliably marketing a product is to have the right product (i.e., your web site). So you need to ensure your site has strong foundations—to that respect, your site is weak—otherwise, the building will collapse one day or later.

In order to build long-lasting traffic from search engines, you need to do your homework, as follows:

—1. The minimum you can't ignore—

First, fake sure search engines are fully aware of your site and pages by managing proactively the relationship with them (see my answer to "How to add your webpage to search engine?" in the source section below).

Second, you cannot improve something you don't monitor. So I strongly suggest you create a Google Analytics account (http://www.google.com/analytics/, it's free) and embed the tracking code iin your pages to monitor vital signs of your site (e.g., number of visits, referring sites, keywords searched).

—2. Building good foundations for global search—

Implement search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to meet demand (visitors' searches) with an offer (unique content) (see the source section below for the link to the self-explanatory "Google's SEO Starter Guide"—a resource I strongly recommend to read). This mainly includes:
—Identifying relevant topics through analysis of searched keywords
—Leveraging the right keywords in your pages (e.g., title, description, and keywords metatags)
—Writing content on identified relevant topics

IMPORTANT NOTE—I've take a closer look at your website to find out a significant margin for improvement (take a look yourself at how Google sees your pages at http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=chr...obe.co.uk. So help search engines see each page as unique from the page info (e.g., page name, page title, description, headers [h1, h2, etc.], and content) by fixing the following issues—among others—that search engines may have with your site—you will find information on what to do in the Google's SEO Starter Guide (see link in the source section below):

—all pages except the home page have the same title "Cleopatra", which is not only meaningless but harmful (this doesn't help search engines differentiate pages from each other).
—all pages except the home page have no description or keywords metatags populated
—the average number of words (i.e., page content) is around 200, which doesn't give much meat for search engines to qualify your pages for high rank in search engine results pages (SERP). You should target 500-800 words at least—because your pages are mainly a catalog of items, you could easily write item descriptions that could contain legitimately relevant keyords.

These are the major issues I've noticed at a glance—you will be in the right track by studying and implementing the Google's SEO Starter Guide as aforementioned.

—3. Ensuring local findability—

Create a profile for your business in search engines' local business directories (this one is also part of the "How to add your webpage to search engine?"). You should provide info for ALL the fields to have your profile flagged as complete, and most importantly a link to your website.

—4. Connecting with your audience directly where it is—

Leverage social media. Create an account in platforms like Facebook and Twitter, start a blog, and keep up the good work by making all of them grow. Search forums—the most overlooked social place—for post related to your business. Bookmark your site for specific topics/tags in sharing platforms like Digg and Delicious. You can also add the ShareThis widget to your site as a wrap of all the social features enumerated above.

—5. Taking your initiative to the next level—

Start a Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaign—like Google AdWords or Yahoo Paid Search. It's really affordable for local businesses. Indeed, it may cost you—a strong suggestion from my own experience—a max daily budget of $5 to generate 5-10 clicks a day, which coupled with a coupon-based ad campaign—e.g., 15% off your next purchase of equipment—would allow you to measure accurately your campaign return on investment (ROI). And furthermore, you'll have fun. Because you're selling items, ROI will be easy to track and helpfull to tweak campaigns).

You're lucky: you have a nice catalog of items and it will take only some work to make it search engine friendly and start reaping benefit from it.


—Pascal
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