Website Promotion: Choose the Promotion methods that are best for
YOUR site

Website Promotion is a varied enterprise. There are several
methods of online promotion, and each website owner has to choose
the mix of methods that is best for his or her particular
website.

The field of Internet promotion can be divided into two major
categories: free promotion and paid advertising. The first
category is similar to what is called public relations in the
off-line world, but has its own particular style in the world of
the Internet.

Free Website Promotion

The common forms of "free" Internet Website Promotion includes
search engine submission, search engine optimization, reciprocal
linking and placing content on other websites. I put the word
free in quotation marks because it is common to pay others to do
this work for you, and even if you do it yourself, some of it can
be time consuming and thus, costly.

Search engine submission is important. Even if you eventually opt
for paid forms of promotion, it never hurts to be included in
search engines. A little known fact is that you hardly have to do
anything to be listed in search engines. Establish some links to
your website from a few other websites that are already listed in
search engines. When the search engine robots come to visit those
sites they will follow the links, find your website and put your
website in their respective indices. Of course you should also
submit your site to the big search engines just to make sure.

Submission alone doesn't guarantee traffic. If your site is
buried on page 25 of search results then you will not get
visitors. If you implement search engine optimization then your
site will appear higher in the listings, bringing you traffic,
and hopefully business.

Another form of free promotion is to get links to your website
from other sites around the Internet. Find directories related
to your website and look for an "add url" button. Add your
website information wherever possible. You may be required to
offer a reciprocal link in return for your listing. Speaking of
reciprocal links, reciprocal linking is now one of the most
vigorously applied promotion methods on the Internet.

The practice of reciprocal linking started at the very beginning
of the modern Internet, with website owners casually trading
links with other "cool" sites. Now it is no longer casual because
link popularity is a huge factor in the algorithms that search
engines use to prioritize websites. In theory reciprocal linking
is free, but its cost in time is very great, and there are
professional companies that handle this function for website
owners.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Paid advertising is another area of website Promotion.
Banner advertising was the first form of paid advertising that
appeared on the early sites, and it is still around. However,
click-through-rates for banners are not very high and in recent
years there has been a shift to more effective forms of paid
promotion.

Pay per click advertising is perhaps the most widely used form of
paid advertising. In this model you get a priority text listing
on search engines results pages. These are usually labeled as
sponsored listings and they appear at the top of the page before
the other listings.

In another form of pay per click advertising, such as Google
adwords, your add appears as a text box on the side of the search
results pages, near the top. What is common to both forms is
that you have to pay for every visitor that comes to your website
by clicking on the links from these listings. The fee is based on
the target keywords that you select. In some programs very
competitive keywords cost $12.00 per click-through, but the fees
are typically much lower and start from as little as .05 per
visit.

Pay Per Click advertising is excellent for a well focused sales
oriented site that has a good conversion ratio. If your selling
message has been well presented, then your costs for advertising
will be compensated by the sales from the steady stream of
traffic that will come to your site.

Choose the methods of Website Promotion that are best for your
particular website. If you would like some help in choosing your
promotion methods, contact a promotion specialist and get a
professional opinion.

By Donald Nelson
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Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He
has been working on the Internet since 1995 and is currently the
director of A1-Optimization (www.a1-optimization.com) a firm
providing affordable search engine optimization, reciprocal
linking, website copywriting and other promotion services.