3 Ways to Promote your Site in 2006
3 Ways to Promote your Site in 2006
Promoting your site is not a “static” business. The web changes and renews itself about every 6 months, with new services, algorithms, and technologies coming out all the time.
For you to “stay on top” or to “get on top” you need to be up-to-date with the industry. It is easy to continue using old-school internet marketing techniques, and then wonder why your site isn’t performing better.
What’s the answer? Bring your internet marketing techniques up-to-date. This may include tuning in to new internet trends, or simply revisiting old concepts with a fresh view.
How? Read below and you will get 3 ideas to add to your internet marketing campaign for 2006.
Media Buys
SEO is still highly reliant on link popularity – for your site to rank you must have relevant, powerful links pointing to it. This is a no-brainer, right? But, the catch-22 is, if you are selling a product or service, how can you naturally gain these links?
If you are an already established brand, if you are a large corporation, or if you have a product that is “newsworthy”, this article is not for you. If you have a small website / product that you are trying to promote, and don’t have all the benefits of a large, branded corporation behind you, read on.
Let’s use the example of traditional advertising. When people want to promote a product “offline” they have to rely on magazine, newspaper, tv ads, and other forms of advertisment, to gain exposure for their site.
The difference on the web is, it’s difficult to identify the best places to buy links. Are the sites penalized? Will they bring you buyers? Will the links improve your rankings?
Knowing where to buy advertising from is very important. Here are some of the things you should consider:
* The site MUST be relevant. This will ensure that you will get buyers from people who see your links. Additionally, Google and Yahoo (and soon MSN) look for links that are relevant to your site and boost your rankings for those. Non-relevant links may even be DETRIMENTAIL to your SEO efforts .
* Where is the site ranking for popular keywords? Look at the meta title of the site, type a few of the words from the title in the major engines – is the site ranking in the top 20? How competitive are those keywords? If it is ranking well for your target keywords, it is a good chance that site has a good reputation in the engines and would be well worth paying for links.
* Will the links be identified as paid ads? If so, they are worthless in terms of boosting your search engine placement. The engines can easily identify these links and will NOT give you credit for them. Make sure your links are not identified as “paid” or “sponsored”.
Buying links from relevant, high ranking sites will have many benefits. Make sure you do it correctly and it will help to bring you customers, both from other sites and from the engines.
Social Bookmarking
As the web has grown and become more commercialized, new tools / services have appeared to allow people to have more participation in their web surfing experience.
Social Bookmarking allows people to “vote” for the sites that they like and keep records of them for themselves and others. This is a form of referrals that doesn’t require meeting people face to face.
For example, if you wish to find an SEO, you may ask your friends who they’ve worked with before, and what their experiences were. Then, you are more likely to go with someone that others recommended instead of someone totally new about whom you don’t know anything.
Social tagging allows you to receive virtual referrals from others, so if you don’t know anyone that’s used an SEO, you can see what other people have picked and who they recommend.
There are many objectives for social bookmarking; we’ve only given you one example of how it may be used.
So to stay on top, you need to learn about how social tagging works and how you can integrate it’s principles into your site promotion campaign. Feel free to read our Social Bookmarking and SEO article for more information on how this works.
Offering unique content
What differentiates you from everyone else? Why should someone buy from you, when they can buy from any other site?
One way is to offer something no one else offers in your industry. Unique content doesn’t just have to be information. For example, you could be offering video tutorials, industry news, or even web tools that your users would find helpful.
If you were looking to buy a video conferencing solution, would you buy from a site that offers little information, nothing unique – a “packaged” standard site? Or would you prefer to buy from a site that has many pages of information about video conferencing, how it’s used, tutorials, benefits of their services..perhaps they even offer a free tool as part of their services?
Unique content will also improve your link popularity. People will be more likely to link to you if you are constantly publishing new articles, or if you are offering a free tool that they can download or link to.
If you do a search in Google for “link popularity tool”, www.marketleap.com is # 1. Why? They offer a free tool that anybody can use – and it automatically links back to their site. This has given them over 30,000 links in Yahoo.
Why not identify a tool or service for your industry that no one else offers? It is KEY for you to offer something unique – regardless of the format.
Why waste more time?
Go to delicious and digg.com to create accounts, start brainstorming a new tool or writing new articles. The more you engage in these techniques, the more visitors your site will have from the search engines and from other sites.
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Web Site Promotion Tool
Thanks for short yet informative article. It covers most of things I wanted to know on this topic