Beginner's Guide to Advertising your Site

Advertising your Web Site

Submitting your Site to Search Engines

Before you submit to search engines, visit the search engine site and read through their rules of submission. They have different rules. Some search engines will only accept submission of one URL. All give excellent advice on how to write your pages so that the URL can be indexed by their 'spider'. Not all pages visited will be indexed. Pages that meet the criteria of the search engine will be rewarded by being indexed. Before you submit, ensure that the url meets all their requirements. Submit only the page that most meets the criteria set by each search engine.

You may have seen promotions for submitting your site for $$ to one thousand or more search engines. There are not one thousand search engines: there are a handful of major search engines and even fewer specialist directories where you need to submit your site. There is no need to pay anyone for this service and it is easy to do it yourself. There are free submission services available for submitting your site to most of the top search engines. Ineedhits.com and ScrubTheWeb.com are two services which are very easy to use. Submit to the 6 or10 main serach engines for your country.

Paying to be listed by the search engines will get you listed quicker and may be the only option if you need to be found quickly. Paid listings give a quick idea of how well the pages are optimized, enabling you to do a quick rewrite if you are ranked down at number 1000 or worse. This can come with a price: stop paying and the page may be removed.

Effective use of link exchanges

There are certain curtisies to be followed when asking for links. You are asking for free advertising. Always check that the sites linking to you are on the same theme and that you provide them with a reciprocal link before asking for a link. Tell the webmaster the URL of the page linking to them and offer the webmaster the option of changing the wording used on your site. Do not give away links to sites that hide your links from the search engines or prevent your links from being followed.

Try to have incoming links to more than one page. Use short keyword phrases in the linking text which are relevant to your page.

Avoid link farms. Link pages are popular on sites. Make it easier for the visitors to your site by putting outbound links on relevant pages throughout your site.

To see an example of a linking site where page relevance is a key factor you can visit the SE London Business Directory and Top Ranking Resource Directory. A site which offers page relevance is not to be confused with a link farm. Link farms can have hundreds of links per page, each one to a different industry. For page relevance to be a factor, all links on the page will be as relevant as your link, and there should not be more than 40 or 50 links on the page, less than 20 is even better. The reason for such a low number is that search engines can only hold so many links in their database and once that field is filled, the excess is ignored.

Testing how search engines see your pages

Google will spider your page every few days to assess the content of your page. If Google can not work out what your page is about or if it has no 'on topic' ads, then public service ads will be placed on your site - what a valuable and free way of finding out how well you have optimized your page.

In addition, you receive free reporting of how many times your pages have been viewed. And, you can earn an income from having the Google Adwords being clicked on.

The down side of this is that once a visitor has clicked on an advertisement, they are gone forever. Only you can decide whether you will earn more from giving free information and promoting sites of interest to your visitors, or selling to your own visitors.

Advertising your Site

Is your advertising working?

Monitoring your site's performance needs to be done constantly. There is no point paying for monthly submissions to search engines. Most search engines will crawl your page when they want to and paying someone to keep submitting the same page is more likely to have a nevative effict (called spamming the search engine). By all means, if you have a major update of your site, resubmit important pages. If you are not monitoring how your site is performing in the search results, updating pages can also have negative effects. Re-submitting will do nothing to improve your ranking if the page is not optimised for your keywords and keyword phrases. Search engines have a habit of changing so that while you may have ranked well for some time, one day you may find that you have disappeared from view.

Use the form below to check your Google PageRank. When finished, use the back button to return to this site.

Advantages of Pay Per Click

Pay per click advertising can help to keep you visible and is useful for sites that are not optimised or are using very competative keywords: it is far more expensive than the exposure you receive from having a good position through search engine optimization.

If you run a PPC campaign, you need to monitor your logs hourly and trace the behaviour of your visitors through your site. Keep and eye on sales revenue versus the cost of the campaign and cancel as soon as you see ROI dropping below your breakeven point or suspect fraudulent clicks. Bid on non competitive terms which will bring you in highly targetted and motivated visitors for a much lower cost.

Using link exchanges and clicking for visitors

Both link exchanges and programmes which allow you to click onto other sites in return for visitors to your sites are very popular. Avoid link farms. Links should add value to your visitors. Effective link exchanges can bring you many visitors.

Click exchange programmes are usually only used by people who are clicking to get hits to their own sites. If you use them, ensure that your web pages load in about 5 seconds. Many programmes only require a 15 second gap before clicking to the next site. How much of your message can be absorbed in less than 10 seconds of viewing? Unless you are promoting a 'must have now' product available internationally, it is unlikely that paying to recieve any of this clicking traffic will actually bring you in any revenue.

Email follow-up to customers

Don't bomb them with emails every week - what most call unsolicited commercial email (or spam) - rather update them when something is worthy of mention. Keep your emails valuable to your customers and they are less likely to be deleted without being opened. You know it yourself: think of why you read one lot of emails while deleting all the rest.

The last thing you want to do is have happy customers requesting that you remove their contact information from your database. Worse, complaining that you are a spammer, and having all your emails blocked by the spam filters.

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