Hello Everyone! I need your expert advice on the following: We are in the phase of launching a garment site (made to measure | bespoke), and hopefully the site should be live within next 4 – 5 weeks. As everyone, I would like to market the site as much I can, but the problem here is that budget here is tight, right now I am planning to do marketing in phases, i.e. 1. Free Promotion, when the site will have a fairly better ranking, then I will start with paid promotion. I would like to seek advice on the following: 1. How can I market it for FREE? 2. What are the ways for doing it? 3. Is it a good idea to promote it for free? I would be really obliged for this help. Regards TechFundoo
Since you have a new site, then you will be in the "Google Sandbox" for a while (6 months). So don't expect great thing for a while. Many new sites are forced to go with a Google AdWords PayPerClick marketing plan during this time frame. You will find that you will to. What will help you in the long run is Link Building (see http://www.catanich.com/link-building-services.asp) and internal link navigation. Make sure that every page has a "absolute" link back to the domain URL and bread crumb navigation. Last, make sure that every page has a unique <title> and description. *********** Put up today a page on your website. Then submit it ONCE to google. (See http://www.catanich.com/search-engine-submission.asp at the bottom for the URL). This will minimize the Sanbox Effect (time). Make sure that you set up Google's Webmaster Tools and create and submit an XML Sitemap to Google the day after deployment. Recreate the XML Sitemap weekly.
None of my (customers) new sites have suffered the "Google Sandbox" since 2003. I strongly believe it's a myth caused by some penalties. Just launced a new one 4 weeks ago, ONE inbound link and # 8 & 9 against 9,820,000 competition (searched without quotes). Anyway they always need 3 - 6 month to rank well for all desired KWs.
Hey Techfun, try targeting social bookmarking sites. Another way is you can try to sign up for orkut and join "targeted" group and try to post something relevant to the forums to gain more exposure.