Web Site Promotion

by pixelatedcyberdust, 4/13/04

The basic principle behind web site promotion slash advertising is to to receive not just steady amounts of traffic to a web site but to target visitors who's interests are in your products or services.  There are three stages to getting your site ready for potential traffic; site completion and site readiness, proper submission and advertising practices, luring current traffic to stay put and to come back time and time again.

As basic as the principle behind web site submission is, the majority of the people do this incorrectly using improper techniques or starting their campaign before their site is up and ready.

Site Readiness:

Before a marketing campaign can begin, your site must be completed and tested for dead links and overall perfection.  Traffic does not respond well to dead links and typically the moment a dead link is found and accessed, a user will move on to another site.  Be sure all the links on your page are tested and all pages linked to have a link back to the previous page.

When your site is completed visually; all content loads properly and all links are in working order, you may begin the search engine readiness process by working on your meta information.

Meta information is a set of meta tags included in the header of your web site which inform some web spiders what to display about your site.  A web spider is bot that some search engines will use to scan your web site for meta information and actual keywords and phrases from your web site.

There are dozens of meta tags you may use within your page, though none of them can negatively impact your page's performance (unless written incorrectly), the majority of them are not supported in the engines today.  The important meta tags to consider are Title, Keywords, Description, and Robots.

Title

The title tag is by far the most important as this is what the user will see when they search for your site.  Titles need to be short, descriptive and luring for optimal effectiveness.  Think of this as the slogan for your web site and you have under three seconds to inform the users of your web site and your services and to have them believe you have what they are searching for.

The general rule of thumb is to have no more than 65 characters and use no more than 7 words.  Search engines will index your site if the title is too long but it will be truncated and this appears messy.  It is said that Google truncates their titles at 68 characters and although they don't limit word usage, you do not want to clutter this information.  It needs to be very clear and very descriptive.

Keywords

Second only to the title information is the keywords meta tag. There is a lot of controversy over how many keywords we should include in our site and of those, how many we can safely repeat without being penalized.  A common misconception is you may include as many keywords as you want within your keyword meta tag.  It is better practice to limit your keywords to no more than 30 if possible.  This will ensure engines won't truncate your keywords and this will force you into a deeper analysis on what words and phrases would be most effective.

Be as explicit as possible, your web site is guaranteed never to come up with the words "free" or "xxx" or "cars".  Instead use key phrases such as "free lawn care tips" and "foreign car supplies".  Ask yourself this question, "What would you search for if you wanted to find your site?" and make a list of all keywords and phrases you can think of.  If the list is short, you may want to use a thesaurus to branch out some words other people may use.  If the list is long, you will want to go through each of them careful and determine which ones would produce more searches.

Use keywords that are unique to your web site or business.  If you are selling a software package, use the name of your software in your keywords as there will be little or no competition for this search query.  The more simple the keywords, the more competition you will be up against.  Pick your keywords wisely and feel free to change them often.

Do not over-use the same word repeatedly through your keywords or key phrases.  Using the same word or words six or more times can be considered spamming by many search engines and this could result in your site being temporary (or worse, permanently) banned from being indexed.

Let's use this site for an example.  We offer many Perl and CGI scripts and we need to press these words in as much as possible, but the following keywords would not be acceptable due to the over-use of some words: free perl scripts, free cgi scripts, cgi chatroom, cgi image gallery, cgi archive, free perl and cgi resource, cgi tutorials, cgi classes, mailing lists.

The keyword "cgi" was used far more than six times which would in return get some search engines to ignore my site completely.  They don't take lightly the sites that spam keywords or try to cheat the system.

An example of this meta tag is taken from www.microsoft.com:

Description

Describing your site in the limited space can prove to be project all in itself.  You don't want to put in the first thing you think of and attempt to place yourself on search engines.  This must be carefully mapped out because this, too, has to attract and impress a user in mere seconds.

According to Yahoo!, you have 150 or less to inform the web searcher what your web site has to offer them in regards to the keywords they used to find your site.  You should base your description off many of the keywords you used to ensure the content on your page resembles that of what they searched.

For example, we have an online fishing store which sells artificial lures.  Some of our meta tags may include: artificial lures, fishing lures, fishing supplies, fishing tackle, plastic worms, crank baits.  We could utilize relevancy in our description tag by borrowing some of our keywords.  An example could be: Minnesota's largest fishing outlet- Full stock of artificial lures such as crank baits and spinners. 

That example was short, descriptive and to the point.  It informed them who we were and the products and information they will find by visiting our site.  Notice we did not use complete sentences or toss in explanation points.  Complete sentences may be used but often times they become over-wordy and exceed the allotted space restrictions. Just be direct and keep it simple.

An example of this meta tag is taken from www.addweb.com:

Search engine submission results:

Above was a search engine screen shot from a random search on Google.com.  This is to give you a better idea as to what the results look like and what to expect if you go over your character limitations.  You will notice both the title and the description have ... which make the results appear a bit messy.  The description was written very well but it appears they tried to use keywords in their title.

Hopefully this gave you ideas as to what to look out for when you're ready to prepare your meta information.

Site Submissions

Once your meta information is intact and you believe it is to the best of your abilities, you may then proceed to submitting your site to engines, directories and free-for-all link pages (FFA).

Manual vs Automated submissions:
Manual web site submission is preferred by some individuals because they fear the automated software they are using can get them penalized by the search engines.  This is a very real problem you should be aware of.  If unauthorized automated software attempts to submit your site information to the major search engines, you may be banned from spamming.

Choose your automated tools wisely as a mistake here can make the many hours it took to design your beautiful site worthless.  I have been using AddWeb's web site submission software for three years now and have had tremendous results both for me and my clients.  They attain licence by the search engines allowing their tools to automate the submissions for you.  The price may seem a bit steep, but the hours this saves you from manually submitting your site to every imaginable place and the feeling of security makes this worth every penny.  You may download this software from www.addweb.com.

If you still wish to take the manual method, be prepared to spend many hours per week doing this.  The major engines now require image code verification which makes submissions take those few extra moments.  Finding the submission pages will prove to be a difficult and lengthy task as well, they do this intentionally as they need to keep shifting them around to prevent unauthorized automated software from abusing their system.  Plan on it taking more than an hour per each four or five engines you plan on submitting to.

Getting listed

Submitting your information to search engines in no way guarantees you will ever be indexed.  Some search engines take between two weeks and two months to get through their work load and finally get to your site. Just imagine how many millions of users are submitting their site to the same engines as you in a given day.  This creates a backload of sites they need to index which takes time.

Check the engines in a month to see if your site can be found using the keywords you used in the meta tags when you submitted your site information.  If it can, you've nearly won the battle.  If it's still not indexed yet, the search engine still might not have had a chance to come across your page.  You may also need to check your meta tags to see if your keywords aren't being over-run by competitors.  This will have a large impact on whether or not your site will be found.

Check the engines regularly to see how your ranking is improving.  If your ranking continues to get worse, remap your meta information and try again.  Use a new set of keywords and a new description to see if you can pull in more traffic.

Submit Regularly

Regular submissions are mandatory to keep your link fresh on the engines.  Forgetting to do so may result in your page dropping rankings and being replaced with sites that were newly added.  Search engines don't have unlimited storage space so they like to keep their links fresh and up-to-date.

A regular submission of once-per-week is highly recommended as this is frequent enough to let them know your site still exists and needs to be updated.  Submitting your site too frequently can get your site penalized for abusing their system.  This is another downside of most automated software packages; they allow you to submit your site as frequent as you wish.  AddWeb has prevention against this and will not submit your site to engines that meet this spam requirement for your safety.

Last but not least

If you wish to pay a company to advertise your site to search engines for you, watch out for false promises.  Make no mistake, no company can guarantee ratings or traffic. It is not within their hands to drive traffic to your site, that is up to the search engine and the competition.

Do not pursue companies who make these promises to you.

Keeping Traffic

You now have sufficient traffic to your web site, now what?  You need active content that changes often to keep their interest levels high.  If your site is never updated, there is no use for them coming back to your page for old content and information.

Traffic is not guaranteed to make money, this means the more traffic you have does not guarantee a higher profit.  It only increases your chances of someone ordering your products or services, it is up to you to convince them to do otherwise when they visit your web page.

Ask your visitors to bookmark your site to check back often for site updates.  Install a news section explaining the newest site updates to let them know someone is continually working on the web site.  Visitors love knowing the site they are visiting is updated often and not growing old and forgotten.

Other useful information

Not all search engines use keywords anymore.  In fact, the majority of the major engines will not even look at these when their spider visits your web site.  For these engines, they keywords used are pulled directly from the content of your page.  Put simply, the text on your index page is scanned and analyses for repeated words and uses these as your keywords.

Keyword depth is how often the keywords you used in your keywords meta tag are found within the content of your page.  Optimal percentage is between 12% and 18%.

Too often to people disbelieve the importance of Free For All (FFA) link pages.  It is true that people generally do not visit these pages and click links they find on them.  But some engines read each link back to your page as a virtual vote which increases your link popularity and search engine ranking.  This means, for every time your link is found on an FFA page, even if no person ever visits this, it still counts as a virtual vote for your web site and helps your search engine ranking.  Do not forget to submit your information to these places.

Overview:

• Take considerable time and effort into designing the best meta tag information you can
• Submit your site frequently-- Once a week is optimal, any more than this is spamming.  Do not wait two weeks before submitting again.
• Give your site visitors a reason to keep coming back and to tell other people about your site.  Traffic is hard to achieve, return traffic is even harder.

Services

If you find you do not have the time to do this manually or you do not have the funds to purchase the software mentioned in this article, feel free to contact me for an offer.

I have been in the web marketing and promotion business for three years and have had many success stories from clients who achieved desired search engine ranking status.

Please visit our promotion services page if you are interested.