Promote It

How do I Promote my Website?

You need to get good rankings for certain keywords in Search Engines like Google to generate relevant traffic. So ensure you place the right meta tags, engage in link building, getting to the top and staying there.

What Meta Tags?

Meta tags are information (HTML codes) inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Meta information in the head area is used to communicate data that a human visitor may not be concerned with. The meta tag is used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes.

The Meta tag in html is not a required tag when you're creating your web pages. In fact, many pages don't use the tag at all.

Information in the head area of your web pages cannot be seen by those viewing your pages in browsers, except for the TITLE tag. So, in the context of search engine optimization, when people refer to meta tags, they are usually referring to the META DESCRIPTION tag and the META KEYWORDS tag.

In addition to the well-known meta description and meta keywords tags, there are other useful meta tags, including the meta http-equiv tag, meta refresh tag, the meta robots tag, the meta copyright tag, and the meta author tag, etc. These tags are used to give web browsers and search engine spiders directions or data on various information.

Meta tags look like this:

In the example above, you can see the beginning of the page's "head" area as noted by the tag. It ends at the portion shown as .

Meta tags go in between the "opening" and "closing" HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag.

The HTML TITLE tag isn't really a meta tag, but it's worth discussing in relation to them. Whatever text you place in the title tag (between the and portions) will appear in the reverse bar of someone's browser when they view the web page. The title tag is also used as the words to describe your page when someone adds it to their "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" lists.

The META DESCRIPTION tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag (these are listed on the Search Engine Features page). The description tag is the part that says "name=description". The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag and could be a word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed. Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the title of your page in an index.

The META KEYWORDS tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy. How does this help you? For most major crawlers, it doesn't. That's because most crawlers now ignore the tag. The few supporting it can be found on the Search Engine Features page. The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think are important for a page, on the few crawlers that support it. The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don't appear on the page itself.

One other meta tag worth mentioning is the ROBOTS tag. This lets you specify that a particular page should NOT be indexed by a search engine. To keep spiders out, simply add this text between your head tags on each page you don't want indexed. The format is shown below:

There are many other meta tags that exist beyond those explored here. These meta tags are optional and are ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines.

Link Building - It's All About Quality

Link building is a general term used to describe anything you do to build links to your web site. Building links can be easy, but building quality links can be rather tedious. For those of you who didn’t notice the difference yet, “building links” pertains to just simply getting backlinks for your site. This means that you’re getting every single link that you can, without thinking too much about how many of those 100 links you developed are actually worth it. “Building quality links” is different. It means that you spend your time looking for links that are worth the time and effort. You won’t get a link for your internet marketing blog from an entertainment site simply because “it’s still a link”. Instead, you will find sites that are related to your own site’s topic, and try to get links from them.

When building links, make sure that they are of high-quality and not just from some rubbish site which doesn’t even have a single page related to yours. Make sure that the site is well-established, regularly updated, and has a good reputation. Even though some people say that grabbing every opportunity to get links is better than just concentrating on high-quality links, you should NOT waste time in getting links that won’t really benefit you.

Remember that while link building is one of the most important elements in any search engine optimization campaign, Google and all the other search engines judge your web site’s credibility and rank value by how many QUALITY backlinks you have built to your site and its individual pages. Credible, quality backlinks give your site authority and you will rank well in the SERPs. These backlinks need to also be authoritative and relevant to your site’s main subject matter.

It’s Quality Over Quantity

When building links, quality always trumps quantity, as poor-quality links create a poor user experience and cut off the flow of knowledge that backlinks are supposed to encourage. Most web surfers need a few pages of relevant content and user experience to assign credibility to a site. Relevant backlinks not only build up your authority with the search engines, it also builds up credibility and relevance with the people who could turn into conversions.

Get on Top and Stay There

When your main goal in creating a site is to set up a business and sell your products or services online, the one important step you need to take is to attract as many potential customers to your site as you can. But how do you become visible in the Internet community and get potential clients to find you?

How to Get on Top

The answer is simple. Your web site has to make use of certain techniques and technologies to make search engines (like Google) rank your site high on their results list when people do a search for your kind of business. This strategy is SEO or search engine optimization. Optimized web pages increase your search engine rankings, your site’s traffic levels, and, ultimately, the potential earnings from your web site or your online business.

This strategy involves having your web pages contain keyword phrases that match what your target audience is actually typing into search queries. That is also why you need to find out the exact keyword phrases your potential clients would probably use to look for information about the products and services they need. These keyword phrases should be used throughout your site’s text or content, anchor text of links, meta tags and other significant areas of the web pages code.

Once you have applied SEO strategies to your site, people will find you easily and will try out your products and services. Once your site is highly optimized, you can then confidently say that you are on top of your game.

How to Stay on Top

When you are already on top, it doesn’t mean you will stay there forever. The web is very dynamic and a lot of elements change over a given period of time. Countless new sites are born every hour, every day, every month. These new sites also work hard on their own SEO strategies and are competing to get to the top of the list. Site rankings change. Your market’s behavior also changes. Keywords change.

To stay where you are and enjoy continuous success online, you need maintenance. Just like how a vehicle would need proper care and maintenance to always look brand new and stay in great condition.

Make sure you have monthly onsite and offsite efforts to keep your position. Monitor and review results of keyword rankings on a monthly basis and update keywords regularly. Know your top competitors as they change from month to month. Recommend strategies for monthly onpage optimization. Moreover, you need to regularly look for and submit your site to directories, as well as comment to related blogs with a link-back to your site.

Other SEO experts would also suggest that you take into account the growing popularity of sites like YouTube for searching material. You also need to shift your mindset from optimizing your web site to optimizing your web presence. This means ensuring material for a business or product are on social networks, blogs, photo sharing sites and Wikipedia – as these sites often rank well in search engines.

Out-sell. Out-perform. Out Shine

You may be asking if you can outperform big sites like eBay or Amazon. The answer is no, because they are too big for you to fight, in respect to their size, age and popularity. However, this won’t be the case if you wouldn’t think of these sites as competitors (just because you have started a new product-selling website and those products are sold in Amazon and eBay too).

If you are strategic enough, these giant sites do not even have any chance to stand in the competition.

Just think that you are not fighting with these sites. What you are actually competing with is one or two of their pages. Though we know that these one or two pages have the trust and credibility values of such great domains, ultimately, the reality is that they are actually individual pages.

While it is true that these domains are very old and got huge trust rank, if you outnumber them with inbound links, domain age would not be a problem. You may say that they have gathered thousands of links in many years and it would be very tough to outnumber them. That is correct, but don’t think that all those links have targeted anchor text.

You would also normally think that these giant sites are the best sources of information. This is not entirely true, as they are not well optimized in most cases. Moreover, there is nothing like “best source” and you can often offer better information package if you concentrate more on the specific information needs of your visitors. Additionally, many pages of Amazon and eBay are full of duplicate content, especially pages with seller-generated content.

Lastly, it is true that people often visit these giant websites directly. However, most of the visitors for competitive keywords use Google to find them the best page and if you can rank top for those keywords, you will not need to worry about visitor count.

Just think that bigger sites have bigger problems, and a smaller site can easily outperform them by exploiting those holes. All you need is a really good and flexible strategy. You can count on SEO as it is still the best way to outperform, outsell and outshine all your competitors.