One of
most frequent questions I get asked by my clients is "What is
best way to promote my site?" If a brand new webmaster asks me that question then I will take as much time as I can possibly muster to answer their request, before they learn about and put on
SEO and ranking blinkers so many webmasters wear with pride.Allow me now to state
obvious,
success of any website is in direct proportion to
amount of visitors it receives. If success is about visitors then why on earth would any intelligent business person devote 95% of their promotion time and budget to a single method of advertising their site?
Imagine for a moment you are
advertising executive for a large automobile company. Your company has just released
most economical car ever and your job is to make sure everyone knows about it.
Which of
following would you do?
1. Place a full page ad in one or two car magazines, then spend
next year rehashing and tweaking
wording of that ad, because it wasn't creating
sales you wanted.
OR
2. Advertise in every magazine and newspaper you can find, start national TV advertising campaigns, make sure you have slots on every commercial radio station in
country, advertise on billboards, in cinemas, sponsor sporting events and what ever else you could think of.
It doesn't take a genius to work out
second idea is a much better plan. Now this may come as a shock to you, but
major search engines are not
only source of visitors to your website. Many SEO gurus are quick to point out to you that search engines are
only way to achieve substantial traffic. That is simply not true. One disturbing idea promoted heavily by
SEO world recently is that "Links are dead" My answer to that idea is, if links were dead then there would be no web.
Links are how people travel
web, whether they are text links, banners or email links to visit any site you need to click a link. Google itself is one enormous searchable link database.
Let's states something even more obvious. Google is not
only site on
web that links to other sites. There are directories, there are banner exchanges, and
big one there are hundreds of millions of other websites. How many of those carry a link to your site?
For any keyword or phrase on
major search engines there are millions of sites vying for just 10 first page places. Are you really devoting all your promotion time to SEO with those kinds of odds?