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PAGE 1 WEBSITE PROMOTION

Listed below is a list of what makes a good or a bad website to promote, as far as search engines are concerned, and what you need or don't need in order to ensure that your website appears on page 1. Forget what others may tell you, this is the only method that works. It may not be easy, it will take time, lots of it, but follow these guidelines and your website will appear on page 1. Follow these guidelines to the letter, and you may just find that your website appears in pole position. Please note that whilst we tell you what you need to do, we do not show you how to do it. If you want to learn that please book one of our website promotion training courses.

What makes a bad website to promote

You can have an expertly designed website and even have it registered with all the relevant search engines, have it fully optimised and pay a specialist to promote it, and it still won't appear on page 1 on  search engines. Why? probably because it has any one or more of the following drawbacks.

It may have:

Not enough page copy (text) on the index page

A Flash intro page

Flash menu's or a Flash navigation structure

Drop Down Menu's

Pages constructed using frames

Database-driven or websites using Dynamic pages, Cold Fusion, or PHP

Slow loading pages

Poor quality design

A lack of content

Only one or two pages

Broken links and component errors

Or, it may be:

An affiliate site

An adult site

A site that need a username and password to enter

A site that have been promoted before, or has been incorrectly listed already

Listed in the wrong category, and listed under the wrong name, "Untitled" for example.

Already blacklisted for sending Spam (sending unsolicited email)

Already blacklisted for breaking search engine or directory rules

Guilty of cloaking or re-directing browsers to other sites

A shared IP address

A site using pop-up banner advertising

A site using pop-up windows

A website that is hosted on free pages or on free web space (without it's own domain name)

A site with no links to and from it

A site with links to or from it, but from banned or blacklisted websites

The solutions for unsuitable websites is almost always to create Mirror Sites or a new URL for each keyword phrase.

The benefits of creating mirror sites.

1. Allows the website promotion company to start with a blank canvas so that the problems above can be overcome.

2. Can be targeted to individual keyword phrases. Essential if multiple keyword phrases are to be used as it is very unlikely that the index page can be optimized for more than one or two keyword phrases

3. Gives the company several bites of the cherry. We often fill the first 4 or 5 rankings with mirror sites.

4. We can improve the design or promote a mirror sites if our customers doesn't want us to touch their main website.

5. If the main index page is updated on a regular basis it often deletes a lot of the optimization we have carried out so.

What makes a good website to promote

For the best chance of a Page 1 ranking, it helps if your website has:

A website title that includes the keyword phrase

An index page title that includes the keyword phrase

Meta Tags and Image Alt Tags that include the keyword phrase

A proper navigational structure with at least 5 or 10 pages

A text navigational structure that includes the keyword phrase

Text links that repeat the keyword phrase

Links to and from the website

Fast loading pages

At least two or three sentences of text on the index page that includes the keyword phrase at least once in each sentence

Unique content

Informative useful pages

What not to do in order to promote your website. Exposing website promotion myths.

Do not:

Use hidden text (text the same colour as the background)

Just keep repeating the same keywords over and over again

Use a software program like TopDog or WebPosition Gold to submit your website.

Use a cheap website promoter or search engine submitter.

Submit mirror sites all at the same time

Submit your website to the wrong category

Submit your website too often to search engines

Use keywords, especially adult keywords, unrelated to your website.

Search Engine Guidelines

Study Search Engine Guidelines before submitting the URL. All the major search engines give advice and tips on how to achieve good rankings and what to do and what not to do. Often they also explain their formula for ranking website. Read and learn.

What you can learn from websites that appear on Page 1.

Look at the design, the load time, and in Internet Explorer choose "View" then "Source" to check the html. Look at their Meta Tags. The description, keywords, etc, and compare them against websites on lower pages and yours. This should teach you the reason why some sites are listed higher than others.

Analysing Traffic and Website Statistics

A useful tool for website promoters is to analyse website statistics. Most ISP's offer a facility to analyse traffic or they can provide a log on the server that you can download and analyse using your own software such as Webtrends. Even the most basic free statistics will show you information such as how many visitors are visiting your website, which search engines they used, and what keywords they used. Some log analysers will even tell you the domain names of companies visiting your website, which pages they visited and for how long, and a host of other information. A valuable tool for any website promoter.

Prepare your Keyword Phrases.

This is a crucial decision and can make the difference between a website optimized to appear in pole position on most search engines that gets almost no visitors, and the same website optimized for a similar keyword phrase that gets hundreds of visitors.

Netmechanic did a survey and asked webmaster which keyword phrase got more hits.

"San Francisco four star hotel" ranked number 1 on search engines, or

"San Francisco luxury hotel" ranked number 10 on search engines?

This search term "San Francisco luxury hotel" receives hundreds of searches in a typical month across the major search engines. In contrast, the phrase "San Francisco four star hotel" receives 0 searches per month, so a #1 ranking for this search term won't bring you any traffic. If you are unsure what keyword phrases to promote NetMechanic offers a Keyword Popularity Tool which will tell you how often people used that phrase.

The Importance of Google

Google is by far the most important search engine in the world. It has little competition and is getting bigger all the time. Almost too big. This is because more and more search engines use Google's results. Here are some of the major search engines that use Google:

AOL, BBC.co.uk, Freeserve, iWon,  Netscape,  NTL, and, since October 2002, Yahoo 

plus a host of smaller search engines.  

Techniques for a high ranking in Google

Google publish their own guide to achieving high rankings and it is essential reading. Google say they want everybody to have an equal chance of reaching page one and explain what to do and what not to do. Unfortunately Google may be starting to manipulate, or at best, "correct" some top rankings. See below for more information.

Generally, the best way to achieve top billing on Google is to have a site which has been optimized as explained above, but also has the all important keyword phrase repeated about once in every sentence. Google ranks pages in several different ways but we have found that rankings rely heavily on the "snippet" they cache from your website. Until a year ago the snippet was nearly always taken from the top of the page. Therefore all that was needed was to make sure the first lines of text on your index page stated the keyword phrase you wanted to promote. Google realised this and changed the way it operated and now takes the snippet randomly from anywhere on the page. If you were the country's largest car auction companies your website may be listed in Google with the following description:

"..M25, then take the M3 until Junction 4a and follow the signs to Blackbushe Airport then.."

This is because Google has taken their snippet from a section of your webpage that does not mention the Keyword Phrase. If this happens, the simplest way to change it is to redesign your page. Whilst this example is almost useless to a company that wants to promote a keyword phrase such as "Car Auction Company" it can be useful in another way. Some website promotion companies will enter the keyword phrase at the M25 point hoping the directory will re-snippet at the same place. Another good thing to note is that this company will probably come top in search engines with the keyword phrases "M25 M3 junction 4a" or "Signs to Blackbushe" and maybe even "Blackbushe Airport". This may not be very good for them but if you were a luxury hotel in Brighton and the snippet used by Google was "..plus conference and banqueting facilities up to 300..."

You may find that even though you are not listed under "Luxury hotels in Brighton" you do come top with "conference and banqueting facilities". If you are receiving a lot of business because of that you may decide it would be wise to leave it and promote another page aimed specifically at the keyword phrase "Luxury hotels in Brighton". This is where mirror sites come into their own.

Other factors relating to Google

Whilst Google likes to promote the image that it's an honest directory uninfluenced by nothing other than their algorithm which ensures everybody has an equal chance of reaching page one, some people think otherwise.

Along with many other website promoters we saw a big change in the way Google ranked SOME of our customers websites around October 2002. Some websites that had enjoyed very high rankings suddenly and inexplicably, saw their rankings slashed.

The following link is from a posting sent to us which may explain the reason why. It's about a company that always enjoyed top ranking in Google until October when it's ranking, and income, was suddenly wiped out. They started legal action against Google and were promptly re-instated back to page one but Google deny they were doing anything wrong.

Google manipulates search results. Draw your own conclusions.

We have no doubt that Google fixes it's results. It only takes a few seconds to see that it promotes itself, (fair enough) and it's partners (unfair) especially with the most popular keyword phrases.

Luckily, it appears that it is only the most popular "generic" keyword phrases that it manipulates which leaves the millions of other ones unfixed and a fair target for good website promotion.  

The Open Directory Project (ODP) do's and Don'ts

One of the most important steps in any site's publicity campaign is submission to the Open Directory Project since this directory provides search results for many of the most important search engines and online portals. The ODP is not a robot driven spider, but a human edited directory and you must observe a few important points if your submission is to be successful.

More Info >>

Tips for a high ranking in Inktomi (MSN, LYCOS/HOTBOT, ABOUT, LOOKSMART.com)

Inktomi is probably the nearest rival to Google as it's database is used by MSN, About.com, Lycos/Hotbot, Looksmart.com and others. The Inktomi database takes it's description from the Meta Description on your website so all that is usually needed for a top ranking is to start your description off with your keyword phrase. "Car auction company offering auction services for buyers and sellers of private cars and commercial company vehicles located near Blackbushe." Nicely repeats the keyword phrase "car auction company" twice plus other related keywords with being too obviously self promoting.

At the time of writing, January 2003, it has been announced that Yahoo has purchased Inktomi.

Other important Search Engines (Fast Search, AltaVista, Excite, Teoma, Yahoo,

AlltheWeb, Excite, FastSearch, Teoma, and, since October 2002, Yahoo  

Search Engine Submission Software (WebPosition Gold, Topdog, etc)

TopDog & WebPositionGold are the two most popular software packages for website promotion. When you see an advertisement for website promotion or search engine submission for only $19.99 or $59.99, you are probably looking at a site offering to submit your website via one of these two packages. Website design companies also favour these packages whilst often assuring you that they have a specialist website promoter. Whilst these search engine submission packages can and do often produce some results, especially on obscure or overseas search engines where submission by hand requires the services of a

multi-linguist, we recommend that their best attributes are for the fast collection of data. Most of  the major search engines also advise against using software like this to promote your website. This because most major search engines require submissions from human beings, but also because the software packages often break search engine submission guidelines that can result in your website being deleted or even blacklisted. Where these software packages excel is on the collect of data. To monitor your website's ranking on the international and UK versions of the major search engines (about 30) for only one website and only one keyword phrase it will take you about two hours to produce a report.

If you want to monitor 5 keyword phrases on 50 search engines it is likely to take you the entire day. TopDog can produce a report on 5 keyword phrase on over 300 search engines in only a few minutes. For this reason we advise that you purchase this software.

Search Engine Submission

All the major search engines use by human beings to vet and edit submissions. They also demand that submissions come from human beings and not machines. Many search engines have gone to the trouble of making it impossible for a machine to submit a website anyway, so using a software package will not work. Please be patient and submit your website yourself. There is an art to this. To prevent delay or even exclusion, you must submit to the correct category. Many search engines allow you to suggest your own description. This is where the art is. You should create a description that includes your keyword phrase, reads well, but does not look promotional. Keep to the search engine's guidelines, if they say you can suggest a description between 12 and 20 words long, do so and try and make it about 12, 13, 14, or 15 words long as using 19 or 20 invites them to make it more concise. The golden rule is that it must look and sound natural. One hint of self promotion will invite the editor to do his worst.

Remember that all the major search engines offer sponsored links themselves. They have introduced rules like if you are a manufacturer of "Nuts & Bolts" and you want your website listed under the category "Nuts & Bolts" you are not allowed to repeat "Nuts & Bolts" in the description. Remember this and add "Nuts and Bolts to the title of the site, "Acme Nuts & Bolts" instead of "Acme Ltd". Also make it difficult for the editor to remove "Nuts & Bolts" by saying something like "Galvanised nuts & heat treated bolts makers."

Read the directory guidelines, Directories and search engines like the Open Directory do not require repeat submission and some directories use the same form to add as well as delete your website. This means that you could be deleting the sites that took you months to register.

What not to do

All these methods of promotion are liable to get your site marked down in ranking, deleted from the search engine completely, and even blacklisted.

Do not use software to submit websites unless you want them submitted to overseas search engines, like Japan, and you cannot understand the forms.

Do not keep repeating your submissions unless it is necessary. If it is necessary, re-submit no more than once a month.

Do not use hidden text.

Do not use adult keywords like "sex"

Do not make it obvious you know about website promotion techniques.

Do not complain to search engines unless absolutely necessary.

Do not submit to an incorrect category. Read the category description and make sure it fits before you submit.

Do not submit a website that has any part of it still under construction.

Do not submit a website that has broken links or menu's that don't work properly.

Do not submit a website with an index page of more than 50 - 70 Kb. Ideally it should be about 25Kb in size. If you have a large Flash introduction page consider replacing it with an optimized index page that allows the browser to choose whether to view it or skip it.

Do not forget to optimise the file size of all images.

Do not submit poor quality websites.

Do not submit websites with no contact name/address/phone/email details.

Do not try to promote an affiliate website offering only one product or service. Make sure it has some unique and useful content to make sure it is accepted.

Useful Resources

Netmechanic.com Tools to help optimize and promote your website.