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Don't Put All Your Promotion
Eggs In The SEO Basket
by Gary McHugh
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 now 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
sales 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. Now
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 traffic. 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 click 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 millions 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 millions 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 traffic 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 membership 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 traffic.
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.
Gary McHugh is co-author of HonestLinks.Net (http://www.honestlinks.net), a
site dedicated to teaching webmasters to exchange links that bring traffic. He
also runs his own web design and hosting company 2001web.com
(http://www.2001web.com).
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