web promotion, search engine optimisation
(seo) |
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| Published:
17 Dec 2009 |
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Website promotion is an essential part of
running a website when you're hoping to attract new visitors
via the search engines or by referral from a linked website.
Web promotion is a long term strategy towards raising the
visibility of your website within the search engine results
pages, relevant directories & other popular sites that
are related to your subject or have visitors that would be
interested in your products. It involves targeting the right
search phrases for your business, optimising your website
design, your site content & your advertising to these
phrases. Then monitor your ongoing visibility & contribution
for each phrase & discover new ones. |
We'd strongly encourage you to conduct your own online promotion.
There are opportunities for you to spread the word & try to
get new visitors to your Home page from within relevant forums,
social networking communities, blogs & product review sites.
All of these have the potential to send you traffic & some will
add weight to your site's search engine ranking if they're linked
in. Be prepared to contribute some original content, give then an
overview, link it back to your full story. Concentrate your efforts.
Don't forget about offline promotion either. Apart from word-of-mouth
(a memorable domain name
helps) are there website's that need to be approached in a more
formal or traditional way? A well written letter to the editor or
even a face to face meeting, could lead to a very well targeted
link to your website & it'll improve the experience for their
site visitors too.
website optimisation
Website promotion is not an exact science, more of a art really
based on experience, research, testing & observation. Search
engines have to protect the rules they use to decide the rankings,
so there can be no guarantees as to what will be achieved. We practice
ethical promotion methods in the way we optimise our websites, which
is as much about improving the visitor experience as it is about
making the website perform better in the search engines.
If you're relying on drawing traffic from the search engines then
your website has to be search engine friendly in the way that it's
designed, the site architecture & the various technologies that
you use to deliver your message. Pages that are accessible to visitors
may not be to a search engine robot that's trying to get a profile
of your website to calculate the important keywords in your pages,
plus you need to assess the overall quality in terms of keyword
usage, duplicate content, broken links etc. Most search engines
publish guidelines for designers & webmasters & they're
worth a read.
Factors that are known to influence your ranking are the position
on the page (in the source code, rather than the displayed page)
of various keywords or phrases, the number of times this phrase
appears (keyword density) & the way these phrases are written
into the code. The use of correct markup in your HTML code is important,
such as the "H" tags which define headers & carry
a hierarchical level of importance. The more sophisticated search
engines such as Google use numerous measures such as these, with
varying degrees of influence, another reason why your rankings can
slip over time.
It's very hard to gain good visibility on a single website that
has a diverse range of products. Consider channeling your online
presence through separate domains, interlinked where relevant. It
should improve each website's usability by being concise, improving
your conversions & helping search engines to better determine
the relevant keywords for each website.
Website optimisation is an ongoing & long term strategy. It's
about giving a website the right shape & structure from the
off, based around the right group of targeted search phrases. It's
also about creating topical key pages in your site whose address
is constant over years & accruing "history". There
are growing indications towards the idea that "old" domains
with a clean history are awarded a higher level of "trust".
If you have to change things there's definite do's & don'ts
to follow, so don't leave this to guesswork or it may cost you in
traffic or ranking that could take many months to recover.
search phrase analysis
For most subjects there are obvious short phrases, or single keywords,
for which we'd all love to be able to find our site on page one
of the search results. The majority of search engine visitors will
probably use these phrases, but to reach them using a Pay-Per-Click
campaign could be very costly & ranking well in the free
results (also called organic or natural results) on these popular
phrases will be reserved for only the best performing or most established
website's.
The upside is that many single word search phrases are so broad
in their meaning that even if you reach this traffic you'll need
a lot of it, because it's likely that it won't convert very well.
The more specific a search phrase is the better qualified it is,
& whilst the number of visitors is much lower per phrase, the
rate of conversion will tend to be much higher. Working on the basis
that your website should only have a single theme per page there
are limits to the number of phrases that can be targeted successfully,
not to mention the need to monitor their performance. What about
those other factors too, such as "typos", common misspellings,
& the popularity of singular versus plural versions of any given
search phrase.
Search phrase analysis is used as a way of identifying a relevant
group of search phrases that suit your products, that are within
a realistic SEO strategy & that also are known to be in popular
use. This group of phrases will then form the basis of your whole
online presence. Over time phrases will become obsolete & others
will be added as new products come on-stream or as you are able
to highlight other searches that are proving popular or converting
well.
link building strategy
The original concept of the internet, before search engines came
along, was that website's found their visitors through inter-linking,
pointing their visitors on to other related sites & receiving
some themselves. When Google introduced their PageRank™ system
site owners began to look at the their external links much more
closely, as now links have more than one meaning & are currently
a major way in which search engines assess your site in terms of
it's value to visitors & it's credibility within it's subject.
PageRank™ values for any site are still visible through the
Google toolbar & whilst shouldn't on their own be given too
much emphasis, they do still offer an indicator of a site's visibility
& hence likely traffic levels.
Inbound links (links to your site from others) are generally seen
as being a vote of confidence so tend to score well, particularly
if the other site is closely related to yours on subject. One of
the best ways of getting inbound links is to provide great content
on your site, so other website's will naturally link to yours over
time. Reciprocal linking may be seen as something less in SEO terms,
it's a more natural way for websites to partner & is likely
to be seen as collaboration. Find a balance; if it helps your visitors
then reciprocal link.
For some website's external link building may seem as problematic,
as it's not always obvious where to attempt to achieve getting a
link placed that will have any benefit. Usually there are opportunities
& a bit of creative thinking will help. Getting a paid listing
in the right directory, or posting comments on relevant forums or
blogs are often useful links. Using a small group of your own micro-sites
on related generic domains
is another way of creating valid inbound links, providing the content
used on them is original. Offline approaches work too, letters to
the editor making someone aware of something of relevance may carry
enough weight that it wins you a link from an "authority"
site. With links like these a few of the "right" ones
will be worth more than a bunch of links from low visibility website's.
On the other hand, link to a "bad neighbourhood" &
you could end up being penalised by search engines, or worse, being
dropped!
Link building is a long term strategy for your website that currently
provides a significant contribution to your overall website visibility
& therefore it's ability to draw traffic, both through improved
search engine ranking & from the linked site too.
monitor, improve & protect
Over time you can expect to see the visibility of your website
rise, but you must guide your site there & don't sit back &
enjoy the ride too much when you do, or you may get a nasty surprise
at the next major search engine update. Monitoring a website's performance
is possible through any number of measures, taken either directly
from the server log files, or through the use of analytical software
which provides a more complete picture. There are indeed very complex
systems available for providing visitor analysis & tracking
which products or pages are doing well, or not. These are mainly
reserved for busy high profile website's due to the cost to implement,
but some level of analytical reporting should be used on all websites
to help understand how well the site is working & to get a measure
of its ROI (Return On Investment).
faq: web promotion questions
Q : what is website promotion?
Promotion covers a range of activities, all of which are aimed
towards raising the visibility of a site (or group of sites) to
help increase the number of visitors & raise the brand or company
profile. Activities may include keyword analysis & testing,
reciprocal link programs with other websites, search engine optimisation
& banner or PPC advertising campaigns.
Q : why is website promotion so important?
It's one thing to produce & publish a website, but no-one
will know it's there until it gets visibility, particularly on the
search engines. This is a specialised activity, which to be effective
needs search marketing skills. Visibility improves over time, not
overnight, so mistakes can delay your site's contribution quite
seriously, particularly if they attract a serious penalty from a
major search engine.
Q : can you tell how a website's performing?
The use of some form of analytics tracking within your web pages
will allow you to see over time how various pages in your website
are performing, what search phrases have been used by visitors who
reach your site, which website they arrived from, the average time
visitors spend on your website & numerous other similar measures
of performance. These reports will help you get a measure on your
ROI & let you see which pages in your web are contributing.
Q : what is a search engine robot?
Search engines use automated "robot" software to read
the internet. They use this software to visit the sites they already
know about so they can update their index. They also use links in
existing sites to help them discover new ones & index those
sites too. Robots are not restricted to use by search engines, they're
also used to index images & other resources around the internet.
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