TIP - In Website Promotion Every Page Is An Island

How do you plan to be found? If your business were on a deserted farm road in the middle of nowhere, how would you be found? Chances are, you wouldn’t be.

Your web site and the pages within are the same way. Just because you’ve published a web site doesn’t mean it will get found. And even if it has been, just because you have a page on your site doesn’t mean it will be too.

This is why it’s so important to have links, coming into your site and between the pages on your site. If you have a page to which nothing links, there is no way for the search engines to find it!

TIP - Search Engines Only Read Text

A big part of the way a search engine decides how to give you a good response is by looking at how closely what you type in to their search box matches the words they have in their database of web sites.

For this reason, it’s critically important you use enough text on the page to assure your web site is seen as a reasonable match to those phrases people really type. And of course, it’s not just as simple as creating compelling copy on the page, you have to also be sure that when you describe items in the code of your pages such as links to other pages and images that they too have text versions for the search engines to adequately understand what they mean.

TIP - Key phrases ARE search

Perhaps THE most important part of any search engine marketing campaign is key phrase selection. You can have the most optimized, organized, accessible web site on the planet, but unless you can be found for the key phrases for which people are searching you’re out of luck.

In my opinion, for small and medium businesses the best way to develop key phrases for your web site is by brainstorming with your staff and customers – particularly those staff who are in direct contact with customers. Unless you know what language your customers use when talking about what you do you won’t be able to effectively get found.

TIP - Don't Slow Down the Spiders

In addition to being text deficient, a web site that relies too heavily on images or flash has another very serious problem to overcome.

There are billions of web sites on the Internet and the search engine spiders (the pieces of software that crawl the web in search of new information) only have so much time to spare.

In short, if your web site loads slowly when you are looking at it in a web browser, it probably loads that way for the search engine spiders. This means that in a world of limited resources you’ve used up much of yours before they even get to the important stuff your text-based content.

Website Promotion Blogging

I just claimed this blog on Technorati.

I must say, the more I learn about the ways in which a blog can interact with blog search engines the more I’m convinced of the value of blogging for website promotion.

I was shocked when I discovered that Alexa attributes 12% of the traffic for Search Influence (revenue generating website) to this here blog.

Interesting indeed. Standby for more.

Update: 200609042037 (that’s 9/4/2006 8:37 PM)

Website Promotion Through Link Bait

Link Bait is such a fun phrase which really means: creating compelling content in the hope that people will link to it.

We created for Search Influence a very simple search engine ranking analysis tool . It’s simple, but covers the basics. Our contention is that many of the techniques and tools used by top SEOs aren’t really applicable for small business (unless the small business has lots of time and/or budget).

There’s a great post analyzing the ROI of link baiting over at SEO Book.

My question is, how do you achieve similar ROI given less traffic.

Website Promotion is Good PR

So, we’ve established that website promotion is not voodoo, right?

I’ve always been a big fan of killing two birds with one stone (metaphorically of course), and realize that sometimes we can all get a little bit of tunnel vision around one issue or pursuit. Web site promotion is a good example of this.

I have some colleauges who have much more experience than I in promoting web sites and they tend to look at the tools of promotion in a very single minded way – write content to attract engines to increase ranking. Increased search engine rankings = website revenue.

Small Business Expert Website Promotion - You're the Expert

I take part in a few online forums and I think they offer a great place to learn and interact with others in the community.

Just today I picked up on a thread which offered some great advice for small businesses in regard to more traditional marketing I’m re-posting my contribution because I think it offers some more good advice from our portfolio of website revenue building techniques. We believe in the value of articles to both prove the value of your service and, to generate quality inbound links and pass-through traffic.

Ultimately, there’s no greater expert in your business than you.

Is Website Promotion more valuable than design

Or, as a subtitle: Who’s afraid of the big bad template?

Ok, all of you design / aesthetic purists get your typing fingers ready.

I believe in the project management triple constraint – there is always a trade-off among time, quality and resources. So put simply, in a world of infinite resources you can do anything by tomorrow.

If however you have limited resources (hint: everyone does, it’s just a question of how soon they’re over the limit), you will have to choose between, sometimes, competing needs. In which area of website development do you invest those limited resources? Is it in design, or website promotion?

Is Website Promotion Just Good Salesmanship?

I’ve recently become enamored of the long sales letter – here is one of my favorite examples from the last couple weeks. He’s selling the hosting, he’s selling his money-making website, but mostly he’s selling the dream “Internet Riches” for next to nothing.

The long sales letter speaks to a number of issues that I think are often overlooked – and some might say if they looked at our website by us too – much of website promotion is just good salesmanship. Let’s look at some elements of the long sales letter as an example of things which, if done in in a slightly less vulgar way, would actually benefit any revenue generating website: