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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 n 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 Internet 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 for a query then you will not get visitors. If you implement search engine optimization on your site it 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 Internet 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.

Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor, and social worker. He has been working on the Internet since 1995 and is the proprietor of A1-Optimization, http://www.a1-optimization.com, a firm providing search engine optimization, copywriting, reciprocal linking, and other web promotion services. He publishes a monthly ezine, A1-Web Promotion Tips, available at http://www.a1-optimization.com/newsletter.html