So, you have this great web site, professionally designed and optimized to the max, but no one visits your site? Could it be because you come up somewhere around page 500 in the major search engines?
You're probably thinking, "maybe I should spend some money on professional SEO, or perhaps buy some guaranteed traffic for my site. This will surely put me on the map."
Well, guess what? Don't waste your money on these gimmicks, because I've tried them all and the only ones making money are the companies I've dumped my hard earned cash into.
I received an email the other day, proclaiming "We'll submit your website to over 30,000 top search engines" - for a fee, of course.
You're thinking, "this is great! 30,000 top search engines, I'm sure to get on page 1 of the search results on at least 1% of them."
Stop and think a little harder. Are there really 30,000 TOP search engines? I can only think of about a half dozen search engines I would consider to be tops. Maybe another dozen that are ok, but how can there be 30,000? And won't submitting your site to 30,000 other sites raise some questions about your site? Isn't this just more spam?
And what about this so called "guaranteed" traffic? I've tried about a dozen of these companies and they've all been a waste of time and money. Sure, they send you traffic, thousands of hits a day if you're willing to pay the price, but it's all worthless traffic. Much of it comes from pop-ups and redirections from people misspelling the website they were actually looking for. I recall paying one company for 100,000 guaranteed hits, which by looking at my server logs, I actually got. But, not one converted to a sale, in fact, I don't think any of these "hits" went past my landing page.
So, how can you promote your business? I'm in a very competitive field, selling web hosting and design, and I know it's extremely difficult to list high enough in the search listings to be seen, but it's not impossible. If you follow these tried and true steps, you'll find your business will grow and do well, even though it may not grow as quickly as you would like.
The first step is to make sure you have a product or service that people either need or want. How many people do you know who have Pet Rocks? How many of you have even heard of a Pet Rock? If you happen to be one of the first when a new fad comes out, you'll make money, but only in the short term. To continue making money over the long haul, have a good product or service.
Make sure your web site is complete and fully operational. Nothing will turn off a potential customer faster than a web site that's under construction or contains numerous broken links.
Optimize your web pages manually. You don't need special software; just edit the Meta tags with your favorite text editor, making sure that what you put in your description and keyword tags is what is actually displayed on your page. Don't try to stuff the tags with unrelated or misleading keywords because the web crawlers will detect this and not list your pages, or list them very low. Also, don't use text in images. You might be tempted to do this because you want to make sure your text is displayed with a certain type font, but the search engines can't read the text in graphics, and so will ignore it. And be sure to customize the Meta tags for each page. You can't create a generic description and keywords to use in every page on your site, because the search engines will detect this also.
Make sure that all your pages are linked from one or more pages on your site, and that all pages are accessible by following links on your index page. This is very important, because most search engines will start with your home page and discover your other pages by following the links. If your pages are not reachable from the index page, they may not be listed. And make sure you use the html anchor tag, not JavaScript, to link your pages. Most web crawlers will not follow JavaScript links.
If possible, select a domain name that contains your keywords. This single thing will greatly increase your chances of your listing showing higher in the search results. Of course, it's not always possible to get the domain name of your choice, or you may already have a domain name, but you should definitely look into this.
Now that your site is ready, it's time to promote it. From my experience, it's a waste of time and effort to bother with anything other than the top dozen search engines, so manually submit your site by visiting these search engines and using their submission links. It won't take more than an hour to do this, but it may take weeks or even months for your site to show up in the listings. Be patient - if you have a good site, it will be listed.
Now for the hard part. You need to get other sites to link back to your site. The best links are from sites that rank high in the search engines themselves. One way to do this is to research sites that relate to your site but are not directly competitive. If you are a wedding musician, for example, you may want a link from a wedding photographer. When you find potential sites that may link to yours, contact the owner of the sites and see if you can work out some kind of link exchange, but beware of link exchange programs. Most sites belonging to link exchanges place hundreds, or even thousands of unrelated links onto a "links" page, and most search engines will ignore these pages.
Another good way to get quality links is to write and submit articles to news and other content sites. These can generate thousands of quality hits that will convert to sales.
I hope my experience with website promotion will help others avoid the wasted time, money and mistakes I've made on the way to building my business. Despite what many of the quick promotion and SEO companies say, there is no quick and easy way to promoting your business. You need to work on it, and it's an ongoing commitment.
