Search Engine Promotion or Website Success
Search engine promotion is essential for the website success of anybody who is serious about making money online using their own website. Since the vast majority of online businesses have websites, then techniques whereby search engine listings can be improved are in great demand.
You can promote your website on search engines in one of two basic ways: either through organic listing by means of good search engine optimization, or by pay per click (PPC) advertising. PPC advertising is exemplified by the adverts that will find on the right hand side of each of Google’s search results pages. The left hand side of the page displays web pages that the search engine algorithms have calculated to be the most relevant to the search engine term used to find the information needed.
The right hand side displays adverts placed by Google Adwords customers that pay for every click made on these adverts. Which set of results a Google user is most interested in will depend upon whether they want information or to purchase products. The Adwords ads generally offer products, while the search engine page links offer information, although they too can also offer products for sale.
However, let’s assume that you want your website to be visible when somebody uses your keywords to find what they are looking for. How do you get your website organized to give you good results in your search engine promotion campaign? The usual way that most people start with is to optimize each of their web pages, starting with their home page, for the search engines.
There are various ways in which this can be achieved, and although each individual search engine has its own specific way of looking at websites and grading them according to relevancy, you cannot have a different webpage for each different search engine. You must therefore optimize each page to suit the main requirements of the major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN and Altavista. Although many believe Yahoo and Altavista to show the same results, this is not always true. Frequently it is, but now and again they show different results.
Search engine promotion is an important marketing technique for any website, and is a must for anybody that is seriously looking for traffic. Once your home page has been optimized, you should do the same for each page on your website. You should also provide both Google and Yahoo with a sitemap of your website. This makes sure that every page in your website will be visited and indexed.
A very important aspect of promoting a website by means of search engines is your linking strategy. There are two aspects to this: internal linking and external linking. Each of your webpages starts of with a Google PageRank of 1.0, and you can organize your links so that your home page gets the bulk of the cumulative PageRank total for your entire website. This increases the chances of a Page 1 listing for your home page. Always concentrate on that page with your SEO because once you get visitors there, then you can lead them all over your website.
You can also gain a proportion of the PageRank of other websites by having a link to your site on other websites. In fact, it is individual pages on your site that benefit by these links and not the whole website, in exactly the same way as individual pages in your site share the overall website PageRank differently according to how you arrange your navigation links.
The overall listing position of each of your web pages will vary according to what individual keyword each is optimized for, and how many incoming and outgoing links each has. You gain a score for each incoming link, and lose score for each link leaving your page. However, sometimes it is worth it since your visitors might get frustrated if you have no links to other sites whereby they can get more information on the topic they are researching.
What all this amounts to is that search engine promotion is a tricky and complex business, and you might be best advised to seek the help of an expert to help you with it. If you decide to take this route, however, make sure that you choose a respected expert SEO site and don’t get caught by one of the many sites out there that know little more than you, yet charge you the earth for the privilege of gaining next to nothing.
Especially make sure that they can provide a monitoring service that can make slight adjustments to your pages according to results. Such services are worth their weight in gold, and can make all the different between success and failure in your search engine promotion campaigns.
