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Marketing your website online can be a time consuming process, and building a relaible
stream of visitors takes real effort. For a website to be sucessful you need to
have an approach which encompases different methods. We take a look at a some online
marketing methods below together with some of the pitfalls: |
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Nothing is free, or is it? Well once your site is well listed in Google, Bing,Yahoo
and as long as you keep creating fresh content - then search engines certainly deliver
a plentyful supply of good visitor traffic.
The only catch is how do you optimize
a site for a search engine. Although most search engines work roughly the same way
( they crawl your site, they index the pages, they return them in the Search Engine
Results Pages - SERPS), the method used to rank your site within the SERPS is diffrent.
Google works by using a bit of math to look at links between sites, content freshness
, longevity of domain and volume of searches against the domain name. Bing on the
other hand seems to use the age that the site has been active on the web as a ranking
factor. SEO is really about making your website easy for a search engine/crawler
to navigate, sometimes SEO has a shady reputation, but that really referers to BlackHat
SEO, which is more about depception rather than optimization.Taking a look at Google
- Google's crawlers like well laid out sites with plently of HTML links pointing
to the various sections of the site - Links should look like links, it they don't
Google may penalize the site for deceptive links. Another important point to make
it enurse that urls are search engine friendly, use a ISAPI re-writer to display
urls without the extension and use hyphens to separate key words which relate to
the page.
An example of well optimized sites are
TNS Press Cutting - Press Cuttings web, and press monitoring services.
and another site,
AudioMicro - Royalty Free Music
. These sites were made simple to navigate using simple links with straightforward
urls with keywords contained within the url separeted by hyphens. Getting good relevant
links to your pages is also important, however it is vital that links grow organically
and not by link exchanges that are just created to elevate your sites rank. Be careful
with buying links as google will penalize your site and may impose the dreaded -30,-60
-950 penalties or even band your site completely from thier index. ( to explain
the -30,-60 etc, these are the number of positions that your pages will drop in
the google index - so if your page appeared at say 5 for a particular keyword -
it will now rank at 35th - ouch!!) |
Paid Per Click (PPC)
Ok SEO takes time but PPC is almost instantanrous. You create an account,
create some ad text, select a few keywords and bingo - your site is seen by a whole
load of new potential customers.
If only if it was that easy, unfortunately you
are now doing battle with Pros ( people who specialize in PPC), and for the novice
it can be a very expensive learning curve before you work out which keywords convert
and which don't. You will also find that ( in the case of Google) the costs can
be eye -watering. So beware, to get started select a small group of keywords and
use different ads to see which ones work. Ensure that you track everything and be
preapared to spend a lot of time managing your account. Only once your confident,
start ramping up your keywords and matching patterns.
PPC can be highly profitable if you manage to work out well targeted and low cost
keywords on highly selected matches. Google Adwords,
Bing and Yahoo Overture all have PPC
products, but don't ignore others like Adbrite Advertising,
they are not as fashionable , but they sometimes are a lot cheaper than the big
boys |
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