Affordable Website Promotion

31 Aug

We have not had a PageRank update for almost 5 months and now watchers are saying that they are seeing the early signs of Google getting ready for an update. So, will there be a major September Google PageRank update?

I personally think that there will be. It has not happened for a while and Google is desperate to keep us using the PageRank toolbar widget, so it must update soon. Why is it desperate for us to maintain the use of that tool? Well that is a whole series that I am supposed to be typing up when I get the chance - check back in a couple of weeks and hopefully it will be ready by then!

Aside from that, really any changes to your search engine positions will happen week on week as there are the smaller changes to the PageRank that Google does not show to us. It is just once in a while that the search engine teases us by giving us a new insight into its ranking of our websites.

On the whole, an update is nothing to fear. As long as you have good content and so on you will be seeing pretty much the same traffic now as next week, whether or not it updates. It is only if you are selling links that a climb could be excellent news and a drop devastation!

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5 Aug

A little tale of caution for you today!

A web design customer asked me yesterday for a quote to optimise his site for a local search term. So, I did my research.

Is the term worthwhile?
On the Google keywords tool, it came back with zero monthly searches, which I was expecting as I have a good knowledge of what local search terms are relevant to this area.

So I checked his site's position for that term and he was nowhere to be seen, but my own website (without direct effort) was second. A quick look back over Google Analytics for 15 months and this confirmed - no-one uses those search terms.

Sometimes traditional marketing is best
I emailed him back explaining this and saying that he would be better off spending money on direct advertising as, at the moment, there is no traffic on the terms.

The sting in our tale
But where is the warning in this tale? Well he thanked me for my time and said that he had not chosen the terms himself, he had been approached by some SEO wizards promising him first place placement and loads of traffic with it, for a total of £1,500.

Of course, my research and honesty had just shown to him that the money would have been wasted. So the moral of the tale is, if experts approach you with great offers, check that the offers really are worth while and spend time on your own research first.

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25 Jul

There are 3 basic keys you need to make sure that you are getting lots of visitors from the search engines. So, read this article, review your website and see if you can increase your website traffic quickly!

Yes, there really are just 3 keys to a successful search engine traffic campaign. On the whole, they are quite simple. You just need to keep working at them over and over again to make sure that they are working for you. Anyone can do it, so follow this 3 point plan to increase your search engine marketing results.

Key 1 - Plenty of unique, fresh content.
Whilst sourcing articles from article directories can be very useful, just limit yourself to a few from each one and concentrate on your own, unique writing. Maybe leave the article directories for when you are short on time, on holiday or whatever.

Search engines will quickly pick up that your website is full of content that can also be found elsewhere, so if there is nothing unique, why should they send visitors to you? Give the search engines something to want to send people to you for.

It is also important to be adding plenty of new material so that the search engines know that your site is maintained, that the content is up to date and relevant and that they are not sending their visitors to an outdated website with information that could mislead.

Key 2 - Plenty of relevant, useful incoming links.
Inbound links, through articles, guest posts, forums, blog commenting and the likes all show to the search engines that your site is popular in some way and make them want to send you more visitors.

Search engines see all of these other sites linking to you and this shows your site is popular for the relevant keywords and they want to jump onto the bandwagon of recommending you for these keywords.

But don't just make the links all use high power keywords and link to your home page. Link also to main internal pages and vary the link text, so that it looks natural and you spread the efforts to different areas.

Key 3 - A sensible and well structured website navigation.
Without a good site navigation, information will get lost and so will your visitors. This is one of the reasons why blogs are so powerful as they file away posts under categories, tags and archives and it is easy to get to the old posts.

Your navigational needs will depend on the size of your website and how many pages it has, but make sure that it is easy to get to all of the pages from the home page and pay special attention to key information pages. Maybe make these link from the home page or even every page.

If you can't get from the home page to the information in a few steps, then the search engines and your visitors certainly won't be able to do so either!

Yes, that's it! Write plenty of your own content, get plenty of links back to your site and make sure that the navigation links on your website are easy for search engines and visitors to follow and with these 3 keys you should be seeing plenty of website traffic!

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20 Jul

There are, I believe, 3 essential keys to search engine traffic. Get all of these right, in the correct proportions, and you should be flooded with traffic. Get one wrong, and you could be doomed to failure.

So, just what are these keys? Well, that information, how you get them and why I believe this to be true is going to take a full series, starting from August. It will take me until then to write, check and double check everything I am telling you. So in the mean time, do sign up for the RSS feed so that you don't miss anything. Or, just book mark this post and keep coming back - every week or so I'll add links to the new relevant posts.

In summary the three keys are:

1) Write plenty of quality content. Contrary to what you might have seen elsewhere, the weight is on quality, not necessarily uniqueness. But that difference comes out in key 3.

2) Build a good number of links. No surprise here then. Write articles and guests posts. Leave comments on do-follow blogs. Forget link exchanges! Target your link building carefully though.

3) Get plenty of traffic. No left to three because it is the surprise, but because it is where it should go. But how can you get plenty of traffic to build search engine results? And why? But it look like, moving forward, having this as the third step is going to be absolutely vital.

Given that steps 1 & 2 have been well looked at, I will only glance through them quickly. Most of this new series will be looking at how you can build traffic to build search engine results; why this should be the case and the theories behind it.

The content I'll look at then will include:
• Writing quality content for your site.
• Building incoming links for your site
• Increasing traffic, to increase search engine positions
• Why Google would favour heavy traffic websites
• How Google could monitor your website traffic
• The evidence that Google could use traffic as part of its search engine ranking algorithm
• Which is better, lots of unique visitors, or lots of hits?
• Ways to increase traffic for free, without optimising your site.
• Cheap, paid methods to increase your website traffic

Hopefully, that should be enough to get us started and no doubt a few more titles will be added along the way. Check back during August when I'll start using this page as an index and linking to the relevant new posts.

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18 Jun

If you want to be seeing more people visiting your website, then you just need to follow these three simple steps and quite soon your traffic levels are going to be increasing. It is as easy as that!

1 - Do your research and find suitable and realistic keywords
This is the important piece of work and a little bit of care goes a long way. Think through a few terms that your visitors could be using to find a site such as yours. To begin with, do not go for anything that is going to have too much competition. "Mortgages", for example, would be a very bad idea. But you also want terms with traffic.

How to achieve this balance it is an article in its own right, but terms such as "Best UK Fixed Rate Mortgages" will be more along the lines that we are looking for.

2 - Write a post loosely mentioning these keywords
Now write a post either about the keywords or that can mention them. Do not go over the top trying to mention the keywords! If they can be naturally mentioned in the title and a few times throughout the post then great.

But after you have finished look at your word count and how many times you have mentioned the keywords. Keep the target phrases to less than 2% of the post - so in a 400 word article, no more than 8 references in the title and main post text.

3 - Write more posts, articles and guest posts
Now start writing more detail! I like to write an initial post about the subject and then write more detailed posts about different elements of the subject.

For example, if I wanted to do it with this article, I would then write up each step in a single post, maybe adding extra posts explaining how to find suitable keywords and so on.

Publish these to your website, linking from the main post (written in step 2) to the detail steps. This gives the more detail links the search engines see.

Now manually rewrite slightly each of the posts created in this step and submit each one to article directories, to blogs as guest posts and so on. On each submission, have it linking to the post written in step 1 and your website's home page.

This third step is the longest stage of the process and is about getting the word out about your article and loads of links in.

Conclusion
1. Decide what keyword you want to target.

2. Write a page including that keyword.

3. Write more detail about the subject and syndicate the writing to get links and visitors to that information.

That is it! Your three steps to getting more website visitors through the search engines, totally for free. Keep doing that for more keywords and your traffic levels will rapidly increase. For a blog, I like to recommend one new keyword per month, quite an easy level to work with.

Plus, as you are working through these steps your general website ranking is improving anyway, so you will also start to see more general traffic arriving at your website.

Good luck. Do let me know how you get on!

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