Website Promotion - The Stakes Are Rising – And So Is The Cost
By Tony Cooper
Over the past couple of months it has been quite noticeable
that the amount of time and effort that is going into website
promotion is rapidly rising and therefore so is the associated
cost of keeping ahead of the competition.
More and more people are devoting more and more time to
website promotion and it is becoming a feature of nearly all
website promotion campaigns that they are embracing all known
search engine promotion techniques instead of exclusively
relying on one or two methods.
What we are seeing at the moment is a landshift change in
promotion techniques. Only a year or so ago it was thought
enough for a search engine optimisation company to optimise
the pages (on page optimisation) and submit the website.
However now that the competition is becoming ever fiercer
off page optimisation is becoming a necessary requirement of
any respectable website promotion campaign.
Let’s examine these two terms and see what we mean my “on
page optimisation” and “off page optimisation”.
On page optimisation is the process of tuning the page for
a search engine or more usually trying to make it rank highly
on a selection of search engines. It’s no wonder that many
search engine optimisation engineers focus on google
exclusively as it certainly produces the most traffic of all
engines, but will that always be the case? Things can change
quickly in internet land.
Page optimisation strategies generally consist of using
your keyword or keyword phrases in all of the pages known
“hotspots”. The page title, meta keyword, meta description,
alt tags, first heading and the body text. Subsequent “tweaks”
can include bolding the keyword phrase, using the keyword
phrase in a hyperlink and more.
To a point there is only so much that you can do to search
engineer a page before it starts to look spammy, repeating the
keyword phrase over and over. Of course some “optimisers”
still do this but it’s quickly becoming a frowned upon
practice as it detracts sharply from a website wanting to
produce a professional image, not to mention your chances of
being banned from the search engine altogether.
This is where “off page optimisation” takes over.
Both Google and Yahoo use a system of “ranking” websites
dependent on several factors - one of which is how relevant
the content appears to be to the keyphrase searched for (on
page optimisation).
The second important criteria that your pages are judged on
is how “popular” those pages are in comparison with your
competition. Broken down into it’s basest form it means that
the more quality votes (links) that your page has then the
more popular it must be and so is promoted higher up the
search engine results. In google parlance this feature is
known as “pagerank” and pagerank is a vitally important part
of your website promotion campaign. If you don’t have any then
you are standing naked in front of everybody and that’s not a
nice feeling!
Google pagerank is based on a scale of 1-10 where 10 has
the most influence. The algorithm is configured on a sliding
scale so that you only ever gain pagerank as a percentage of
the full amount. As those with the highest pagerank are
constantly adding more “votes” for their pages it makes sense
that those at the bottom end of the scale are going to have to
work ever harder to play “catch up” and that is where the
extra cost is being factored in to website promotion
campaigns.
However it becomes more complicated.
Not all links are equal.
Blindly rushing off and trying to get as many links as
possible is not going to help you much. In fact it’s one of
the reasons why people are spending so much time and effort in
their link exchange campaigns and finding they are getting
nowhere.
Savvy online marketers have established that links from
pages with a low pagerank are not as valuable as links from
those with a higher pagerank. But also in paradox to this it
is possible to get more value from linking to a page with
lower pagerank than the higher one!
Confused! No wonder “off page optimisation” is becoming
such a sought after area of expertise.
The paradox occurs because built into the pagerank
algorithm is a method of transferring the amount of pagerank
“boost” a page gets by dividing up the total pagerank of a
page by the number of links present. So a high pagerank page
with 100 links on it is not going to give as much “voting
power” as a low pagerank page with only one or two links on
it.
Trying to make sense of this is at the heart of any “off
page optimisation” campaign. Sifting through links, setting up
reciprocal link campaigns (the site you link to links back to
you) getting links from directories and so on is a time
consuming task, even when using some of the more advanced
tools that take a lot of the manual drudgery out of the job.
Link exchanges are springing up all over the place offering
to bring together people willing to exchange links and the
humble text link is becoming one of the most valuable pieces
of internet property. Costs for placing text links on higher
ranked sites are escalating and it’s becoming ever more
important to network closely with other sites offering useful
services to your visitors.
Throwing up a links page and asking all and sundry to link
to it is not going to work – all that’s going to do is give
you an administrative headache and make your visitors wonder
if they are making the right choice. Choosing quality link
partners is a time consuming and therefore expensive business.
What this all means is that the cost of website promotion
is constantly going up. And those companies with well
networked sites and strategically placed links are in a much
better position to help their customers than those who rely
solely on pay per click campaigns and other expensive forms of
advertising.
A website promotion campaign is still the best value for
money form of advertising that there is in my opinion, it’s
just that the costs are rising and will continue to rise. But
the rewards for those that get it right are greater in
comparison.
To sum up, search engine optimisation is becoming a more
and more labour intensive exercise. There are more pages to be
made search engine friendly and to gain top spots each page
has to be tuned for a particular search engine. Gone are the
days of “one size fits all”.
In addition there is a large amount of work involved in
linking strategies and building the “popularity” of a website
so that it has a chance of making it into the top 10 results.
It’s this combination of work required that is forcing up
the costs of a search engine optimisation campaign.
Tony Cooper is internet marketing manager for:
http://www.keywordmarketing.com Building results driven
websites.
dead link apr 20 07 webmaster mike
@ custsvce.com (remove spaces)
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