Why Website Promotion Isn’t Just About SEO
Gone are the glory days of search engine optimization. Today, full-on website and brand promotion is the name of the game.
While SEO is focused on keywords and search engine ranking, website promotion is focused on creating a strong overall presence on the internet for your company, your brand, and your website. Website promotion includes SEO as a necessary component, but instead of just relying on the search engines for traffic, we look beyond Google to the ever-expanding world of social media and social networking.
For example:
- Best Buy hooks customers by providing technical support through Twitter…
- Facebook is experimenting with a “Subscribe” button for business Facebook pages…
- And the search engines are far more sophisticated, ranking sites on things like social networking activity, and even providing sitemaps for videos.
What these changes mean for you…
While standard search engine optimization is still a key component of a website promotion campaign, it’s only one piece of the pie today.
You can’t simply “optimize” your web pages for the search engines and walk away. You’ve got to do more – sometimes far more.
While nobody can promise that your clever video will go viral on YouTube, there are things you can do on a limited budget to promote your website.
The Catch SEO Experts Don’t Tell You About
Some SEO specialists will tell you that the key is to get links back to your site from other sites. That’s only a part of the equation today, as what you do within the social sphere is taking on an increasing importance.
You can do everything right on your site, such as proper keyword selection and placement, and good page-to-page linking strategies, and still not get the attention of the search engines.
The hard work of SEO comes after the initial site is built. Here’s the kinds of things that will help promote your website and move you up in the search engine rankings:
- Other sites contextually refer to your site, using the same keyword phrases you use…
- Your site itself is active, as you change, update or add new content on a regular basis…
- Your site also has real-person activity, as people visit and comment on your site…
- They stay on your site and view multiple pages once they’re there…
- And you’re consistently mentioned in the social sphere (bookmarking, social media, etc.).
See what I mean? That’s a lot of work.
And The Trick to Making it Cost Effective
You probably can’t hire a team of social media specialists and writers to create content. So, what can you do as a small or mid-sized business with a limited marketing budget?
You do what Internet Marketers do… you use state-of-the-art tools and techniques, along with a little elbow grease.
Here’s what happens:
1. Create great content.
This is the most time-consuming, costly, and yet most important piece of the SEO equation. The more great content you have for people to see, the higher you’ll get ranked for a much larger selection of keyword phrases.
Your content should be of real value to your readers, and isn’t there simply to occupy SEO space. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of quality copywriters who will gladly write informative content for your site, and often for less than you might imagine.
Internet marketers know that the key to getting a lot of free traffic is to have “enough” content, focused on “enough” keywords to get the attention of the search engines.
What’s great about using “smart” tools is that you need far less active content than you might imagine. We’re talking about perhaps a few dozen quality articles to get you going, and only one per week after that.
2. “Syndicate” your content.
This is where the magic happens, and it’s something you can do if you subscribe to the same service I use, or I can do it for you…
We create variations of your content and distribute that content to article directories, which creates valuable links back to your site. You’ll also create short, educational videos out of the content that you can syndicate to video sites, such as YouTube.
We then use our network of marketers and businesses to spread the word. They will actively bookmark your web pages in social bookmarking sites, add comments to your web pages (and the social bookmarking sites), and even Tweet about your content.
In other words, we use the network to create a “buzz” about your web site, which not only gets the attention of the search engines, it also creates all kinds of activity on your site… and those precious links back to your site.
It’s all good.
What’s Next?
Call me at 503-287-0246, OR complete the form below, and I’ll call you to see if, or how, I can help you to better promote your website and services online.
