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Don't Put All Your Promotion
Eggs In The SEO Basket
The Author's Background: Gary McHugh is
co-author of HonestLinks.Net,
a website dedicated to teaching webmasters how to exchange
links that bring targeted traffic. He also runs his own web
design and hosting company 2001web.com.
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Don't
Put All Your Promotion Eggs In The SEO Basket By Gary McHugh
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Webmaster Tips, Hints and Resource Articles
Archive - Click
Here
One of the most frequent questions I get asked by my clients
is "What is the best way to promote my site?"
If a brand new webmaster asks me that question, then I will take
as much time as I can possibly muster to answer their request, before
they learn about and put on the SEO and ranking blinkers so many
webmasters wear with pride.
Allow me to state the obvious, the success of any website is in
direct proportion to the amount of visitors it receives. If success
is about visitors, then why on earth would any intelligent business
person devote 95% of their promotion time and budget to a single
method of advertising their site?
Imagine for a moment you are the advertising executive for a large
automobile company. Your company has just released the most economical
car ever and your job is to make sure everyone knows about it.
Which of the following would you do?
1. Place a full page ad in one or two car magazines,
then spend the next year rehashing and tweaking the wording of that
ad, because it wasn't creating the salës you wanted.
OR
2. Advertise in every magazine and newspaper you
can find, start national TV advertising campaigns, make sure you
have slots on every commercial radio station in the country, advertise
on billboards, in cinemas, sponsor sporting events and what ever
else you could think of.
It doesn't take a genius to work out the second
idea is a much better plan. This may come as a shock to you, but
the major search engines are not the only source of visitors to
your website. Many SEO gurus are quick to point out to you that
search engines are the only way to achieve substantial traffïc.
That is simply not true. One disturbing idea promoted heavily by
the SEO world recently is that "Links are dead". My answer
to that idea is, if links were dead then there would be no web.
Links are how people travel the web, whether they
are text links, banners or email links. To visit any site you need
to clïck a link. Google itself is one enormous searchable link
database.
Let's states something even more obvious. Google
is not the only site on the web that links to other sites. There
are directories, there are banner exchanges, and the big one there
are hundreds of millïons of other websites. How many of those
carry a link to your site?
For any keyword or phrase on the major search
engines there are millïons of sites vying for just 10 first
page places. Are you really devoting all your promotion time to
SEO with those kinds of odds?
There is also much talk of the value of links,
and nearly all of it is based on the value of links in a search
engine's eyes, and how that will or will not improve your rankings.
Stop!!! You need to get this!!! The value of a link is how many
times it gets used, clicks and visits, NOT rankings.
While many will object to this statement, SEO is nothing more than
educated guesswork. Why do I say that? Simple, because Google, Yahoo
and MSN do NOT tell SEO experts how they order their results. Just
the opposite, they regularly change how their results are ordered
to stay one step ahead of the SEO experts. Why do they do that?
Because they do not want their results manipulated, period! They
want one thing, to deliver accurate search results.
Don't take my word for this, go and get the words from the horse's
mouth here.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
Notice that all the advice is geared towards building your
site for visitors not for search engines.
If you really want to build steady long term traffïc to your
site, then advertise your site in every legal way you can. Yes,
it requires time and a consistent effort. As a wise man once said
" The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary".
In closing, how many of the following have you used to advertise
your site? If you haven't done them all maybe you need to.
Have you?:
- Listed your site in a couple of hundred directories?
- Exchanged quality visible links with at least 200 sites?
- Exchanged banners with sites in your genre?
- Started a small pay-per-click advertising campaign?
- Written articles to do with the genre of your site and offered
them to other sites for free inclusion in their newsletter or on
their site?
- Had your site reviewed by a review site?
- Donated a product or free membershïp to a competition on
another site?
These are only a few promotion methods that will bring visitors
to your site. There are many many more, if you use your imagination.
This is also advertising that will not be undone in one minute by
a Google algorithm change.
Am I saying don't optimize your site? NO, I am saying don't rely
totally on SEO for your traffïc.
Are you putting all your promotional eggs in one basket? If so,
isn't it time you stopped and gave your site the best chance of
success.
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