Web Promotion and Web Site Optimisation

Irina Ponomareva |

September 20, 2004

Category: SEO/SEM Integration |

This article may be reproduced in its entirety provided the proper credit to the author is given, and a valid link to http://www.spiderfriendly.co.uk | added.

SEO as a part of your web promotion campaign

There are a lot of web sites around. They cover an immense variety of purposes, styles, niches and target audiences. Web sites can be static or dynamic, small or huge, contain funky graphic images or a lot of textual information and next to no graphics.

Whatever the purpose of the site, its owner wishes to make it visible to its target audience. A web site that has no visitors is in most cases useless, so, after the site is created and uploaded, web promotion becomes the next task of the site owner.

But web promotion is hard and requires time and a certain amount of labour. By far the most complicated part is search engine optimisation (SEO) - the art of making the web site as friendly to search engines as possible in order to gain better positions in the search engine listings.

Yes, most of the time people find sites via search engines - and not so many of them go further than the second page of the listing. So, if you've got a site, the top 10 in Google | and Yahoo! | (together with some less important search engines) becomes your goal, and its success depends on your time, money, patience and dedication.

Web promotion doesn't consist of SEO and SEO alone. It also includes pay-per-click campaigns, banner exchange, affiliate programs, public relations and many other important things. And such web promotion measures as directory submission or press-releases find their place in SEO well enough by increasing the link popularity (and, as a consequence, improving the SE rankings) of your web site.

Why optimise a site?

Is it compulsory to optimise a site? Not necessarily. Many sites do well without any sort of SEO done on them, and some of them have a huge amount of visitors daily for the simple reason that their addresses are known to the world. People just type their brand names in browsers. That might work for big guys - but not everyone is successful enough to have a worldwide marketed brand.

Yet you wish your web presence to bring you your modest share of visitors - and, perhaps, sales - not to compete with big guys, but to earn a living and be happy and contented. Maybe your niche is not very competitive, so big guys just do not come into play.

That's where you are bound to start thinking about web promotion - and to take it seriously.

How do you drive your visitors to your web site? Via pay-per-click or another type of online advertising? It's possible that you will find this solution the most effective. What's more, organic search engine listings are never stable enough to rely upon them solely. Search engine algorithms often change, so pay-per-click should always be considered as a supplementary guarantee for your online marketing success. But organic search engine positions still bring you benefits that can't be underestimated.

With paid advertising, you just have to pay again and again to receive visitors. With SEO you invest once - and then only basic maintenance will be necessary to stay on top - if not for all targeted search terms, but at least for most of them. In non-competitive niches, once acquired, rankings are quite likely to remain yours for years - and you will have no need to pay for each visit.

Generally, good web promotion strategy suggests SEO and paid advertising used in flexible combination, good ROI monitoring and thorough tracking of visitor conversion ratios. But there are cases when paid advertising is chosen as a main tool, and SEO is disregarded completely. There are also successful web sites doing well with organic search engine positions only.

Anyway, as we've already discussed, search engine optimisation, when done properly, improves the quality of your web site, making it more targeted, consistent and user-friendly. It is always better to SEO your site, at least basically.

Unless, that is, your site is one of those that doesn't need visitors.