One of the most frequent questions I get asked by my clients is “What is the best way to promote my site?” If a brand new webmaster asks me that question, then I will take as much time as I can possibly muster to answer their request, before they learn about and put on the SEO and ranking blinkers so many webmasters wear with pride.

Allow me to state the obvious; the success of any website is in direct proportion to the amount of visitors it receives. If success is about visitors, then why on earth would any intelligent business person devote 95% of their promotion time and budget to a single method of advertising their site?

Imagine for a moment you are the advertising executive for a large automobile company. Your company has just released the most economical car ever and your job is to make sure everyone knows about it.

Which of the following would you do?
1. Place a full page ad in one or two car magazines, then spend the next year rehashing and tweaking the wording of that ad, because it wasn’t creating the sales you wanted.
OR
2. Advertise in every magazine and newspaper you can find, start national TV advertising campaigns, make sure you have slots on every commercial radio station in the country, advertise on billboards, in cinemas, sponsor sporting events and what ever else you could think of.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out the second idea is a much better plan. This may come as a shock to you, but the major search engines are not the only source of visitors to your website. Many SEO gurus are quick to point out to you that search engines are the only way to achieve substantial traffic. That is simply not true. One disturbing idea promoted heavily by the SEO world recently is that “Links are dead”. My answer to that idea is, if links were dead then there would be no web.

Links are how people travel the web, whether they are text links, banners or email links. To visit any site you need to click a link. Google itself is one enormous searchable link database.

Let’s states something even more obvious. Google is not the only site on the web that links to other sites. There are directories, there are banner exchanges, and the big one there are hundreds of millions of other websites. How many of those carry a link to your site?

For any keyword or phrase on the major search engines there are millions of sites vying for just 10 first page places. Are you really devoting all your promotion time to SEO with those kinds of odds?

There is also much talk of the value of links, and nearly all of it is based on the value of links in a search engine’s eyes, and how that will or will not improve your rankings. Stop!!! You need to get this!!! The value of a link is how many times it gets used, clicks and visits, NOT rankings.

While many will object to this statement, SEO is nothing more than educated guesswork. Why do I say that? Simple, because Google, Yahoo and MSN do NOT tell SEO experts how they order their results. Just the opposite, they regularly change how their results are ordered to stay one step ahead of the SEO experts. Why do they do that? Because they do not want their results manipulated, period! They want one thing, to deliver accurate search results.

Don’t take my word for this, go and get the words from the horse’s mouth here.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Notice that all the advice is geared towards building your site for visitors not for search engines.

If you really want to build steady long term traffic to your site, then advertise your site in every legal way you can. Yes, it requires time and a consistent effort. As a wise man once said �The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary”. In closing, how many of the following have you used to advertise your site? If you haven’t done them all maybe you need to.

Have you?

• Listed your site in a couple of hundred directories?
• Exchanged quality visible links with at least 200 sites?
• Exchanged banners with sites in your genre?
• Started a small pay-per-click advertising campaign?
• Written articles to do with the genre of your site and offered them to other sites for free inclusion in their newsletter or on their site?
• Had your site reviewed by a review site?
• Donated a product or free membership to a competition on another site?

These are only a few promotion methods that will bring visitors to your site. There are many more, if you use your imagination. This is also advertising that will not be undone in one minute by a Google algorithm change.

Am I saying don’t optimize your site? NO, I am saying don’t rely totally on SEO for your traffic.

Are you putting all your promotional eggs in one basket? If so, isn’t it time you stopped and gave your site the best chance of success.

By Gary McHugh

Success in life comes through building and sustaining both personal and professional relationships. As human beings, we strive to be at the right place at the right time in order to make the right connection. We quickly learn that each right connection links to another and before we know it, we are part of a network.

Do you wonder why your site does not receive the traffic you believe it deserves? The only people visiting your website are current customers. Where are the new customers the web designer promised you? One of the most overlooked steps in creation of a website is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We like to think that search engines will crawl our website and shazaam, like magic, we appear at the top of the results for our keywords. Unfortunately, it rarely works that way. We need to build relationships or “links” to our sites. While this can be a daunting endeavour, it can be very rewarding.

We are going to look at link building theory and practice. How do you let the world, more accurately the web, know you are open for business? Where do you begin building links? What about link building software? What are directories? Who are your top competitors? Who links to them? How do you ask for a link? Do you want reciprocal links? How many links do you need? These are the questions all website owners and link builders need to answer.

Search engines look at links as votes. The more links your website has, the more votes it has to be number 1, or the “authority” on your subject matter. Not all links are created equal. Links from more popular websites are weighted heavier then links from less popular sites. Search engines are smart enough to know that content is related, so, links from relevant sites are more important then links from sites which are irrelevant.

The link text will help you rank better for your keywords. If possible get into the major directories. Avoid FFA’s or “Free For All” link farms.

How Do You Let The World Know You Are Open For Business?
PR or public relations. The way most link builders will approach this is to create a press release that is disseminated to the right people. How do we know we reach the right people? In a recent talk with Eric Ward, the father of link building, I learned that most of the press release web services allow a person to subscribe to items that interest them. If a person runs a widget website and is interested in widgets, they will receive any press release that is related to widgets. Often, they may list the new widget information on their own website. That’s an easy link. The press release itself is another link. Yes, it may cost a bit of money to draft and the service may not be free, but you have built several links with a simple press release.

Link Building Software
Link building software automates the task of collecting relevant sites and their contact information, based on keywords. Many of the available software packages include an automatic contact manager that allows you to contact sites with very little effort. It is generally accepted that you should not use the automatic contact features. Instead use the software to identify sites and contact them manually. Many webmasters feel the automated emails to be sp@m and will reject, with prejudice, any site that asks for a link using them. Software should be used in addition to other link building strategies.

The Directories
The major pay for inclusion directories includes Yahoo and Business.com. These directories charge to be included in their database of websites. They are often used by major search engines to help determine rank. Don’t forget the free directories such as the ODP and joeant.com. The ODP (Open Directory Project) is at http://dmoz.org. They are selective on the sites they include. Not all websites will be able to obtain a link at the ODP. joeant.com on the other hand is very easy to get into. You will have to join to enter your site into their database, it’s very easy to do, and is a super easy link to obtain.

Who Are Your Top Competitors?
It is important to seek out your top competitors, the websites that are ranking on the first page of search results for your keywords. Knowing who is at the top, and who links to them is the first and foremost part of link building.

Who Links To Them?
Returning to our link building is like life analogy, imagine you operate a linen laundry. As a linen laundry owner, you wouldn’t want to network with people who are involved in high technology or manufacturing. You would want to network with people who are in the hospitality or closely related industries. Restaurants, hotels or people who interact with them on a frequent basis. That is if we have a website that deals with the latest widgets and widget reviews, we wouldn’t want to waste time seeking links from automobile manufacturers (unless the widgets are automobile related). We want links from other widget and widget related websites.

The easiest way to determine who is linking to your top competitors is to use the link: command in your search engine of choice. The Google link command seems to be broken, so use a search engine other then Google. For an example we will use a fictional company Widgetreviews, with the URL of http://www.widgetreviews.com. Widgetreviews is at the top of the search engines for your search term “widget reviews”. Because of this, we want to see who links to Widgetreviews. Just enter “link: www.widgetreviews.com” (without quotation marks) into your favourite SE, other then Google of course.

Follow this procedure for the top 5 or 6 sites that use your keywords. Compile a list competitor websites and their incoming links. We will use the list as a source for our link building strategy.

Asking For a Link
We now have a list of website pages that link to widgetreviews and so can see if we can get our site listed on the page as well. You will need to visit the pages listed. It is important that when you write an email to a webmaster that it is obvious you have visited the site yourself and that it is not a machine generated email (sp@m). You will need to determine the email address of the person you need to send your request to. Be sure to state why you deserve to be listed on their page, as well as a few compliments about their website, and your contact information. Be courteous and succinct. Most webmasters have little time to deal with their daily tasks. Most important, ask for link text that uses your keywords, not your company name. Using our widget example, you would ask for a link with the text “widget reviews”, or in HTML
Widget Reviews.

Reciprocal Links
Generally, reciprocal links are not weighted as heavily as non reciprocal links. I usually only offer a reciprocal link if I really want a link from a high traffic site that demands a reciprocal link.

How Many Links Do You Need?
Your work at link building will never end. The good news is that as your site becomes an authority on your subject matter, websites will link to you on their own.

Your Options
You have three options when it comes to link building. Hire someone; don’t worry about it or Do It Yourself.

The first option is a good option, but, it can be very expensive. Professional link builders often charge $20 a link + the cost of the link (yes, websites sell links). As you can see, this can add up quickly. Building a hundred links through a professional link builder could easily cost $2,000!

The don’t worry about it option doesn’t cost a thing. But, don’t expect any traffic. The World Wide Web is a collection of links. Each site pointing to other sites. Without links, your otherwise brilliant and insightful website will slowly die a horrible lonely death.

By Brett Hart

Google is undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in its short, seven year history. As of next week, Google will have finished sorting what might be its largest algorithm shift ever as the final points of the 3.5 part Bourbon Update were installed last Monday. This update has been staggered into three and a half sections in order to avoid a massive amount of dislocation in established rankings as was seen in previous major updates. While changes stemming from the Bourbon Update have not actually manifested into a full reordering of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), many individual webmasters have reported fairly significant losses or gains in ranking over the past few days.

There are dozens of factors behind changes at Google but the greatest is the enormous valuation of the company itself. With share prices nearing the $300 mark and current market capitalization topping $80 billion, Google is considered the most valuable media company in the world, surpassing the $78 billion value of Time-Warner and rising far above Yahoo’s estimated value of $56 billion. Most of Google’s riches are newly found, having been generated after their August 2004 IPO. In their race to outlast, outperform and outsmart their competitors, Google has changed its PR strategy and its appearance to suit the legions of suits swirling in and out of their Mountain View offices.

While money may move mountains, it takes a community to change an institution. The search environment has changed substantially over the past three years and in that time, every major player in the search sector has changed as well. Today, Google has become a lot more complicated, so much so that it has stopped trying to look simple. This change in corporate attitude is best reflected in two places, the homepage and the About Google section.

Google’s homepage used to be quite simple. Recently, Google created a personalized portal interface google.com/ig offering users instant access to several of these new features. For folks with Google accounts such as Gmail users, subscribers to Google Groups, Google desktop users and other account holders, personalized versions of the once sparse homepage presents instant entry points to the various applications the individual uses. Many industry observers have suggested Google’s adoption of so many new features and an all-in-one interface show they are moving towards presenting themselves as more of a portal like Yahoo or MSN. Google has always been a bit different than its competition. Even when borrowing and innovating on competitors’ ideas, Google has, until today at least, managed to keep itself at an arm’s length from the mainstream in appearance and operation. The maintenance of that image gave Internet users an alternative view of Google, one that propelled Google to a position of almost total dominance of the search engine sector. While that dominance might have slipped over the past year, Google is still the most popular search appliance in the world.

One of the ways Google has acted differently than others is in the appearance of not taking itself too seriously. Its corporate ethics policy was limited to the three word phrase, “Don’t be evil”. Its front page interface retains the double-entendre induced “I feel lucky” button, even though the button is rarely used. The prospectus issued during their August 2004 IPO was specifically written to appear idealistically anti-corporate. Since its introduction, Google has practiced projecting a simple, youthful image that required very little in the way of explanation, so long as their search engine lived up to users’ expectations.

Google strives to live up to user expectations and, for the most part, has met and exceeded them time and time again. There is one long-held expectation that Google may not be able to live up to any longer though. Many of us assume Google’s relatively informal public attitude will continue to carry over into the later part of the decade. It won’t. By comparison, Google will almost certainly continue to be perceived as the search engine driven by youthful energy. Whenever competitors such as MSN or Yahoo try to appear as down-to-Earth as Google does, their efforts seem obvious and forced. Does anyone remember that poor-fellow in the butterfly suit wandering aimlessly around New York last year? Google’s communication style is maturing and the best place to view these changes is on the About Google section of their site.

Google has published information about itself on pages found behind the About Google link for several years. While documents found in the About section have nev�r been totally static, a facelift over the past few weeks has radically altered the look and feel of the section. Along with the traditional organic search engine results and highly targeted paid-ads, Google is actually a series of 30-someodd search-based applications ranging from alerts and answers to wireless search and weather information. Driven in part by an inventive entrepreneurial spirit and in part by a desire to keep up with products offered by competitors, Google has been rapidly adding new features and tools to their core search service for the past three years.

Google’s About Google page was once much smaller than it is today. It has grown slightly larger every time Google adds another offering to it. The biggest changes are found behind the increasing number of links on the about page. Today’s version of the About page has five boxes added to the left hand side of the page advertising Google Desktop, Blogger, Google Code, Google Mobile, and My Search History. In the centre column, Google continues to show four main site sections labelled, Our Search, For Site Owners, Our Company, and More Google. Collectively, those sections contain a larger number of links than they did previously and the number of documents found behind those links has grown as well. Serious Google users should take an hour or two to tour these changes and learn more about the staggering range of features, services and search-enhancements Google currently offers.

For webmasters and SEOs, an examination of the new Google Webmaster Guidelines is a definite must. Google has recently changed its webmaster guidelines which are also considered to be a primer on “ethical SEO” practices in relation to Google placements. Google has recently updated its webmaster guidelines to include information on “supplemental listings”, crawling frequencies and pre-fetching. Google has also posted information on its new Google Sitemaps experiment.

Google Sitemaps is perhaps the most important new feature for SEOs offered by Google in a long time. Said to be an experiment in spidering, Google Sitemaps invites webmasters to feed site data directly to Google through an XML sitemap page. Webmasters and SEOs can now tell Google exactly which sections of their sites to crawl, and providing they are keeping their XML sitemap current, when and where to look for changes to their sites. This experimental initiative will especially help webmasters working with database driven sites or large Ecommerce sites where documents are subject to frequent change and are often found behind long-string URLs. Google has been kind enough to provide detailed information on establishing an XML feed and setting priorities for GoogleBot.

As it grows, Google appears to be running into the same problem other webmasters with numerous sites or services encounter, the rapid dilution of a domain’s unique topic focus. In order to keep themselves accessible, understandable and relevant, Google’s teams of engineers, programmers and public relations specialists are involved in what appears to be a massive overhaul of the interface, public documents and the basic sorting algorithm that produces organic results. As in previous years, how this all plays out in the end is entirely up to the searching public. From the SEO/SEM perspective, it is a good thing Google is in the midst of this update. Web workers have been demanding a greater degree of transparency from Google for some time and perhaps these updates are the beginning of a new commitment to communication from the Googleplex.

By Jim Hedger