If You Add Content, Will They Come to Your Website?

Just saw this blog post (Great Content - The Secret to Success? Maybe) from Pete Hollier at SEO Wizardry.ca.

I love how he calls attention to the theoretic divides between the inbound marketing strategists who put a stake in the ground around PPC (pay-per-click), social media marketing, search engine optimization, or content development.

As an inbound marketing strategist and a small business owner, I read A LOT of articles about all these varied school of thought and have generally concluded that there a mix of all strategies is the best way to go.

Pete makes that point in his article, too, and I found it rather validating.

Each inbound marketing strategy has its own pros and cons, its own business requirements (guidelines, costs, management, care & feeding) and its own audience. The strategies that will work best for your small business are the ones that:

1. you can implement
2. you can follow through with and maintain
3. you can afford
4. reach your audience

Want to know more? Just ask me.

Top 10 Free Sites to Add/Submit Your New Website

After you design, program and populate your website with content, you want to get it found online.

If your website was produced by a professional, s/he probably submitted it to the search engines for you. But if you built your website yourself, here are the next steps.

Submit your website URL to Google.

Submit your website to Yahoo!

But what about MSN—I mean, Bing? And what about AOL, Lycos and Ask? Bing may be coming into its own, but the rest of the search engines partner with the big ones above to get their feeds. If you're searchable on Google, you'll be searchable on AOL.

Just listing your URL with the search engines doesn't mean you'll get traffic, though. Nor does it mean that the search engine spiders will spend any time crawling through your pages of brilliant content. They may just hit the home page and run.

To get the crawlers to come back, and to start the process of building inbound links to your site, list in free directories. To assist you, here are:

Tara’s Top 10 Free Sites to Add/Submit Your New Website:

1. Craigslist.org (create a classified ad in the business services section; this isn't a permanent submission, as it comes down after 7 days, but it helps get things jump-started)
2. Local.com
3. Aboutus.org
4. OregonLive.com Business Finder (Not from Oregon or SW Washington? Look for a similar service at your local newspaper.)
5. Weblistings
6. Open Directory (Good luck with this one; I've been trying for two years to get Maternitique to appear here.)
7. DirectoryM/Business Journals (national network of business journals online)
8. MerchantCircle.com
9. Biznik.com
10. Hotfrog.com

Questions? Just ask.

And yes, I know it’s been a while since I posted. Okay, a long time since I posted, but I’ve been busy!