Website Promotion Do’s & Don’ts

Posted by Terri on November 28th, 2007 at 04:22pm

DON’T ever include a keyword or key phrase in your meta tags that is not present on that page. Keywords should REINFORCE what is on the page, not define it. I’ve seen this, time and time again on sites I maintain, as search engines are defining this a spam more and more of the time.

DON’T use a general (free) banner exchange service. You will see at most, a 1/50th increase in your site traffic from the banner exchange and at worst you will lose 1/10th of your traffic because they look cheap. Some people claim that a few search engines now decrease rankings if the standard banner programs are present (ie:link exchange/click trade, etc). However, there are some good banner exchanges out there for just certain topics (kinda like Webrings) that can work good to target a particular demographic audience.

Search Engine Ranking Tips: Do’s
Do use high value keyword “phrases” in addition to keywords. Look for something unusual, don’t just copy the competition, but do target the competition. Look at your referrals and see what combinations of words are being used together and work them into a phrase near the beginning of your keywords.

Do use descriptive short alt tags for your images - many search engines will use them (which adds to your keywords). Each search engine has different criteria for indexing your site (as detailed elsewhere; but, all don’t mind the alt tags and some use them - go for it, its a free bonus)

Do check the competition. See what they are using for keywords and phrases. Check what sites are referencing them, and check what they are doing to get those referrals. Reverse searching for your competition can tell you a great deal about what your site is missing.

Do consider each page of your site as an entry point for a search engine, and watch the results for each page. Use this to your advantage as a method of steering traffic and visitors back to your main page.

Do put in a few small specific pages targeted directly at the keywords you wish to be listed under. Make one page of one paragraph that is highly descriptive including only your base keywords in the paragraph. Submit it to an engine and you’d be surprised and the results - smaller is better some times…

Do take steps to consider heavily your Strategic Web Site Submission policy before you build and submit links for the next page. Start by building the page around a new keyword list. You-guessed-it, use the page to reinforce the keywords and the keywords to reinforce the page. This is still one of the best hints to up, your site presence before you announce it to the world.

Do use at least one strange keyword as a means of testing bizarre and unrelated results. I used the word strange in this document. I assume I will get some unrelated hits based on the strange keyword, which can let me check what people are search for via referral data. If I get a few hundred hits a week based on the strange keyword, that might be an avenue to explore for a whole new page.

Do Log the visitors web site and referring URL. This is critical information for adjusting your site keywords and phrases. Study and learn; do research on the internet for a good log analysis tool or logger program. This can do more to help your web sight placement than anything. (side bar: notice the few intentional mis-spellings in this doc? again, reinforce those keywords! Its a classic tip for the techniques and promotions column that can honestly increase and generate site traffic before and after you announce your site to the world. I find I do far more keyword and meta tag work after a page is two months old, than I did when I built the page. I usually leave 300-400 characters play room in my meta keywords just for follow up work. There be gold in that referral data!

DO mix it up. Consider every page on your site as a potential point of entry for visitors. Use some small widget, solo topic, or narrow focus pages with keywords unto themselves - and also some large heavy content pages with broad topics. With search engines constantly changing their ranking systems, one month a large content rich page will score high, while the next month that little two paragraph “after thought” page will suddenly jump to the top of the rankings for seemingly unknown reasons. You should be careful with this technique not to give the search engines the appearance of spamming (don’t just replicate a page and change a little here and there - keep topics divided).

Under Promotion