Content is Key

Good content is key to website promotion success. All bells and whistles in world will not hold an audience like compelling information. Ask yourself: Why would a visitor stay at my website? What are they looking for? What do I have that they need? What holds them there once I've got them visiting? You have to tell your story in a way that will keep your visitors interested and coming back for more.

Get Those Visitors

The first part of process is getting visitors to your site through search engine promotion and other traditional marketing methods. As you increase your visibility, more visitors will come to see what commotion is all about.

Keep Those Visitors

The second part of process is keeping them there. If you provide quality information that is easy to access, you are giving visitor what they are looking for. Don't give your visitors a reason to click away. Quality content means happy visitors, and with enough happy visitors, you become an "authority" on your topic. Having a site recognized as an authority means good ranking in search engines.

Know Your Audience

So how do you get your visitors to stay on your site, and to return to it? First, you need to understand your audience. Who are you trying to reach? Create your pages with them in mind. Do you want to reach a narrow audience, or will you try to reach all levels of readers? Buzz words may make sense to you in your business, but will they reach your target audience? If you are a high-powered underwater basketweaving consultant, focused only on serious underwater basketweavers, you can keep discussion on your site fairly technical. If, however, you really want to spread joy of underwater basketweaving to a wider audience, you may want to keep tone more general, giving newcomers to underwater basketweaving information they need to become as enthralled by basketweaving as you are.

Get Your Visitors Involved

So what kind of content do you need to provide for your visitors? If you have a site selling gardening books, you will have lists of titles you have for sale, an order form, and contact information. Everybody else selling gardening books will have these pages too. How do you rise above crowd? How do you stand out as definitive gardening book website?

Write Articles

There are two ways we can rank search engines. The first, is in terms of Popularity; number of people that are using search engines to find products, services and information. The second, and perhaps most important factor from a marketing point of view, is Audience Reach; number of search portals that a Search Engine is showing its results through each day, thereby reaching maximum number of people.

First, lets look at Popularity. The following search engine popularity figures were compiled by Neilson/NetRatings, a provider of digital audience information and analysis. This company monitors over 225,000 individuals in 26 countries to gather its Internet usage results.

In October 2002, Search Engine Popularity in U.S. was as follows:

Google 29.2% Yahoo 28.5% MSN 28.1% AOL 19.7% Ask Jeeves 10.3% Netscape 5.5% Overture 5.4% InfoSpace 5.1% AltaVista 4.4% Lycos 4.4% LookSmart 3.0% Earthlink 1.8%

(source: Search Engine Watch)

These figures tell us a lot about search engine usage; where people are going to find their information. But what they don’t tell us are more important facts about how widespread each search engine’s listings are across Internet as a whole.

Let’s look at this from a marketing perspective. Most major search engines have agreements in place with each other and with different search portals to display their results. This means that their Audience Reach is actually much larger or smaller than Neilson/NetRatings results suggest.

Although actual figures are hard to determine, here’s how search engines rank from perspective of Audience Reach:

1. Google Every web user, in every country, has access to Google’s search results. As well as providing results via its own search pages, Google supplies search results to Yahoo, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Netscape, EarthLink and AT&T. Search services InfoSpace, IWON and Simpatico.ca (Canada) also display their listings. A high ranking listing at Google will return an enormous amount of targeted traffic to your site because of its wide audience reach through partner search sites.

2. Overture (formally GoTo.com) Overture is a pay-per-click search engine. Its audience reach is also extremely wide. Overture’s top three search results are displayed as premier listings on Altavista, MSN, Lycos, AllTheWeb(aka FAST), Excite and Go.com. Its results are also displayed on hundreds of smaller search portals. If your goal is to gain maximum exposure within a few days and you are prepared to pay for it, Overture will deliver maximum audience reach.