Website Promotion is not Voodoo

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.

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.

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 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.

I just claimed this blog on Technorati. Technorati Profile

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.

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).

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 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.

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.

I’ve recently become enamored of the long sales letter - here’s one of my favorite examples from the last couple weeks “www.plug-in4profit.com/pips.html”. 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.