Website Marketing and Promotion

We all want a million Website visitors a day right? Without web site marketing and promotion you would have one visitor a day, YOU. There are many ways in which you can increase the number of visitors to your web site.

You already know how to make your own web site, now you need to know how to promote it, and more importantly, you need to know how to do it properly. It is important that you know what NOT to do before you start promoting your Website. The reason for this is that there are several things that you would not think are bad that will harm your web sites rankings.

What NOT to do

First I will go over some of the things that you want to make sure you do NOT do. One of the biggest killers of sites is duplicate content. The SE's know that anyone can create a big, nice site that makes a little money then duplicate the exact same site over and over and over to make even more money. The problem with that is the Search Engines want to deliver informative, unique results to their users.

If someone types "Website Promotion" into a search, they want several different options. They don't want to see the exact same content everywhere. This is why the search engines will very rarely rank two or more pages with the same content very high. There are always exceptions to the rule, but 99% of the time one will be indexed and rank, while it's copies will not.

Another thing you do not want to do while marketing your Website is to link to "bad neighborhoods." There are alot of sites out there that do not follow the rules. These sites may somehow earn a few dollars in the beginning but they always fail and get banned eventually. Make SURE you do not link to sites like these. Of course you can not always tell but use your best judgment and really take a look at each page that you want to link to.

Now lets get into the things you NEED to do...

One of the most effective techniques in promoting a Website is Article Marketing. This is the process in which you write an article (around 300 or so words) about something in your 'niche' (your sites topic.) You then find some good Article Directories and submit your article to them including a link or two pointing to your site in the 'About the Author' or 'Signature' block.

Now you will receive a one-way link from each article directory AND other webmasters can post your article to their site as long as they include your signature block. This means not only will you get one-way links from the article directories you will also get some from other webmaster.

The links that you recieve are not the only benefit of articles. If your article is interesting enough, and/or teaches the viewer something new, they are very likely to follow-through to the link in your signature block.

Finding link Partners is also a very important factor in getting your site seen by others. When the SE spiders go out crawling the net one of the biggest things they are looking for is the number of links that are pointing to each site and the quality of those links. If you have alot of quality links pointing to your site then your site is probably important. Keep in mind though that 10 links from strong, quality sites are always better than 100 links from weak sites with low quality.

There are a few different types of links you can go for...

Reciprocal Links - This is a link in which site A places a link to site B's site and site B places a link to site A's site. This was one of the most common link-building practices years ago and it is still being used today. However, it is not nearly as effective as it once was and it's also against the Terms of Service of some of the major Search Engines such as Google.

Triangular Links - This is where site A places a link to site B, site B places a link to site C and site C places a link to site A, forming a triangular linking pattern. This gives each one of the sites a one-way link. This can still be effective if all three parties have some type of authority and are hosted in different geographical locations. In other words, don't link your own sites together triangularly.

One-Way Links - A one-way link is THE BEST type of link you can get. Natural links (below) are a type of one-way link. Above we talked about submitting articles, this creates one-way links. This is very simply explained as site A provides a link to site B but site B does not provide a link back. Now site B has a one-way link.

Natural Links - Natural links are the most beneficial type of link you can obtain. It is "natural" when another site places a link to your site on theirs strictly because it is of value to their visitors. These are the type that the Search Engine's love to see but we cannot control that, or can we?? This is another reason to have good rich content on our sites. For instance I placed links to other sites on my Directory List because they are useful directories.

"Content is King"

If that's the first time you've heard that phrase, you'll be hearing it more in the future. When it comes down to it, you will not get many visitors if you do not have much content. The more pages you have the higher the liklihood of traffic.

This is simple, write as much quality content as you possibly can. A web site is NEVER complete. It takes constant updating because the world is always changing. If you create a site and leave it, there is a chance that your visitors will swindle down to nothing.