Website Promotion for BeginnerDate:
The vast majority of website traffic is driven by the major commercial search
engines, Yahoo, MSN and Google (although AOL gets nearly 10% of searches, their
engine is powered by Google's results). If your site cannot be found by these
search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you will
miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via
search – you get people who want what you have visiting your site - for
free. Whether your site provides content, services, products, or information,
search engines are the gateway to the web for most internet users. With the
amount of free traffic available it is obvious that the top places on any of
the major search engines are very lucrative pieces of internet real-estate.
So what do I need to get started?
The days of throwing a few pages onto a website and immediately driving traffic
to it by doubtful means are over, the search engines are now much cleverer than
they used to be, and their techniques for finding bogus sites are improving
all the time. In this article I assume you are not looking for a “quick
buck” return on your website, but are looking to build a business that
will provide a regular income for years to come. First let’s look at some
internet history.
A brief history of website promotion
In the early years – pre 1999 what was on the pages of your website
pretty much determined where you ranked on the then dominant search engines
Yahoo , AltaVista, Lycos and MSN. By placing your keywords – those words
for which you wished to be found – in certain places within your web page
you could persuade the search engines to place you at the top of their listings.
As the content of your own web page is totally under your control, this was
obviously open to widespread abuse, and abused it was. At one time just by repeating
your keywords multiple times on a single page you could get to the top of the
listings by giving the search engines what they were looking for - a high keyword
density.
Then in 1998 Google was formed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students
from Stanford University in California. The nature of the internet is links,
and Google’s new idea was to use what other websites said about your website
in their text links, to decide what your site was about. In addition, in Google’s
view, the more websites that had links pointing to you, the more important you
must be, and therefore the more worthy you were of a top place in their listing.
You gained your top place by the number of “votes” you were given
from other websites.
So the introduction of Google began a new direction for the way search engines
awarded their top places, and - with a few variations, all of the major search
engines now use a similar method to determine their order of merit for listed
sites.
Incidentally this is probably a good time to make a statement: There is no
“natural” measure of the merit of a website. Each search engine
marks a website up or down by it’s own set of rules, but those rules are
an artificial creation of the search engine’s algorithm. Evidence for
the preceding statement has come from research by Netrazer.com, where we found
that 6 out of 10 results produced by each of the major search engines do not
overlap with any other search engine. To put it another way 6 out of 10 answers
to any question are different depending on which search engine you ask! What
do the other 4 out of 10 have in common that makes them rank so well in more
than one engine? More of that later.
The history of ink building
So the stage is set for the great link building race from about spring 2000.
As with keyword “stuffing” before, website promoters soon found
that the more links they had, the better they did in the search engine results.
More was better and much more was even better. Websites were created with the
sole intention of using them as sources for links, and until about 2004 this
was a strategy that worked well.
However Google is not loaded with PhD’s in information theory for nothing,
and from the spring of that year several changes to Google’s algorithm
took place to weed out the more obvious “link farms”, as they are
called, that had led , in Google’s view, to a degradation of its search
results. Increasingly the only links that counted were those that looked “natural”
and “organic”. That is to say a link between websites whose main
purpose is to inform or educate rather than one which had been placed solely
with the purpose of increasing the link count to boost search engine rankings.
Life was getting more difficult for those wanting to make a living from the
‘net. One thing is certain though, good quality incoming links to your
website will be important for the foreseeable future in getting and maintaining
top search engine rankings.
So how do I promote my website now?
From our research we have found a few things that will promote your website
in the search engines for the longer term. Theses are not fads, but basic rules
that should keep the free search engine traffic coming to your site for years
to come.
Create good content. You will need at least five or six good pages of original
content to start with. Add pages over time, but always ask yourself “would
an ordinary person interested in the subject of my website be genuinely interested
in what I’ve written?” If the answer is no then the search engines
either now or in the future will also be similarly disinterested. Apart from
that put your keywords in the title and once or twice near the top of the page,
but no more!
Create good “organic links” from a large number of external sites
by offering link swaps to other webmasters.
Offer a three or four way swap between two or three websites rather than just
a reciprocal link as search engines apply a discount to those now. Use a semi-automated
system like Netrazer to take out most of the hard work, but avoid “one
size fits all” e-mails.
Vary the landing page of your links. Point some of the links you swap to pages
in your site other than your index page. Sites with links only to their index
page look very artificial.
Don’t use artificial tricks such as “cloaking” or “re-direction”.
If you are asking yourself if you should use a technique or not, pretend that
Google has phoned you up asking for an explanation. Could you give then a straight
answer? If not don’t do it.
In the next article we will cover link building and how to get the most for
your money and effort.
Ben James
Senior Analyst
Netrazer.com
Ben James is a senior analyst with Netrazer.com
ben.james@netrazer.com
http://www.netrazer.com
|
