Web Site Promotion
Web site
promotion is becoming the talk of the town with every
passing day. The reason is very obvious, the gap in internet
sales figures to offline sales are decreasing day by day.
As per prediction, web sales will soon become comparable to
offline sales in terms of the profit margins. For a web sale
to happen the most important spend is on website promotions
& web site marketing.
Web Site Promotion entails search engine
submissions, strategic links, strategic copywriting, banner
ads, opt-in email, client retention marketing, affiliate programs,
press releases, sponsorships, strategic domain purchasing
and much more. Read below an interesting article about the
soaring web site promotion market.
Web site Promotion - The stakes
are rising – and so is the cost. by Tony Cooper
Over the past couple of months it has been
quite noticeable that the amount of time and effort that is
going into web site promotion is rapidly rising and therefore
so is the associated cost of keeping ahead of the competition.
More and more people are devoting more and
more time to web site promotion and it is becoming a feature
of nearly all website promotion campaigns that they are embracing
all known search engine promotion techniques instead of exclusively
relying on one or two methods.
What we are seeing at the moment is a landshift
change in promotion techniques. Only a year or so ago it was
thought enough for a search engine optimisation company to
optimise the pages (on page optimisation) and submit the website.
However now that the competition is becoming
ever fiercer off page optimisation is becoming a necessary
requirement of any respectable web site promotion campaign.
Let’s examine these two terms and
see what we mean my “on page optimisation” and
“off page optimisation”.
On page optimisation is the process of tuning
the page for a search engine or more usually trying to make
it rank highly on a selection of search engines. It’s
no wonder that many search engine optimisation engineers focus
on google exclusively as it certainly produces the most traffic
of all engines, but will that always be the case? Things can
change quickly in internet land.
Page optimisation strategies generally consist
of using your keyword or keyword phrases in all of the pages
known “hotspots”. The page title, meta keyword,
meta description, alt tags, first heading and the body text.
Subsequent “tweaks” can include bolding the keyword
phrase, using the keyword phrase in a hyperlink and more.
To a point there is only so much that you
can do to search engineer a page before it starts to look
spammy, repeating the keyword phrase over and over. Of course
some “optimisers” still do this but it’s
quickly becoming a frowned upon practice as it detracts sharply
from a website wanting to produce a professional image, not
to mention your chances of being banned from the search engine
altogether.
This is where “off page optimisation”
takes over.
Both Google and Yahoo use a system of “ranking”
websites dependent on several factors - one of which is how
relevant the content appears to be to the keyphrase searched
for (on page optimisation).
The second important criteria that your
pages are judged on is how “popular” those pages
are in comparison with your competition. Broken down into
it’s basest form it means that the more quality votes
(links) that your page has then the more popular it must be
and so is promoted higher up the search engine results.
In google parlance this feature is known as “pagerank”
and pagerank is a vitally important part of your web site
promotion campaign. If you don’t have any then you are
standing naked in front of everybody and that’s not
a nice feeling!
Google pagerank is based on a scale of 1-10
where 10 has the most influence. The algorithm is configured
on a sliding scale so that you only ever gain pagerank as
a percentage of the full amount. As those with the highest
pagerank are constantly adding more “votes” for
their pages it makes sense that those at the bottom end of
the scale are going to have to work ever harder to play “catch
up” and that is where the extra cost is being factored
in to web site promotion campaigns.
However it becomes more complicated.
Not all links are equal.
Blindly rushing off and trying to get as
many links as possible is not going to help you much. In fact
it’s one of the reasons why people are spending so much
time and effort in their link exchange campaigns and finding
they are getting nowhere.
Savvy online marketers have established
that links from pages with a low pagerank are not as valuable
as links from those with a higher pagerank. But also in paradox
to this it is possible to get more value from linking to a
page with lower pagerank than the higher one!
Confused! No wonder “off page optimisation”
is becoming such a sought after area of expertise.
The paradox occurs because built into the
pagerank algorithm is a method of transferring the amount
of pagerank “boost” a page gets by dividing up
the total pagerank of a page by the number of links present.
So a high pagerank page with 100 links on it is not going
to give as much “voting power” as a low pagerank
page with only one or two links on it.
Trying to make sense of this is at the heart
of any “off page optimisation” campaign. Sifting
through links, setting up reciprocal link campaigns (the site
you link to links back to you) getting links from directories
and so on is a time consuming task, even when using some of
the more advanced tools that take a lot of the manual drudgery
out of the job.
Link exchanges are springing up all over
the place offering to bring together people willing to exchange
links and the humble text link is becoming one of the most
valuable pieces of internet property. Costs for placing text
links on higher ranked sites are escalating and it’s
becoming ever more important to network closely with other
sites offering useful services to your visitors.
Throwing up a links page and asking all
and sundry to link to it is not going to work – all
that’s going to do is give you an administrative headache
and make your visitors wonder if they are making the right
choice. Choosing quality link partners is a time consuming
and therefore expensive business.
What this all means is that the cost of
web site promotion is constantly going up. And those companies
with well networked sites and strategically placed links are
in a much better position to help their customers than those
who rely solely on pay per click campaigns and other expensive
forms of advertising.
A web site promotion campaign is still the
best value for money form of advertising that there is in
my opinion, it’s just that the costs are rising and
will continue to rise. But the rewards for those that get
it right are greater in comparison.
To sum up, search engine optimisation is
becoming a more and more labour intensive exercise. There
are more pages to be made search engine friendly and to gain
top spots each page has to be tuned for a particular search
engine. Gone are the days of “one size fits all”.
In addition there is a large amount of work
involved in linking strategies and building the “popularity”
of a website so that it has a chance of making it into the
top 10 results.
It’s this combination of work required
that is forcing up the costs of a search engine optimisation
campaign.
About the Author
Tony Cooper is internet marketing manager for:
http://www.keywordmarketing.com
Building results driven websites.
