The vast majority of website traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines, Yahoo, MSN, and Google (although AOL gets almost 10% of searches, their engine is powered by Google results). If these search engines can’t find your site or your content can’t be put into their databases, you’ll miss out on the amazing opportunities available to websites provided through search: you get people who want what you have by visiting your site , for free. Whether your site provides content, services, products, or information, search engines are the gateway to the web for most Internet users. With the amount of free traffic available, it’s obvious that the top spots on any of the major search engines are very lucrative pieces of internet real estate.
So what do I need to get started?
The days of adding a few pages to a website and immediately driving traffic to it through dubious means are over, search engines are now much smarter than they used to be, and their techniques for finding fake sites are getting better all the time. In this article, I’m assuming you’re not looking for a “quick bucks” return on your website, but rather you’re looking to build a business that provides a regular income for years to come. First let’s take a look at some Internet history.
A Brief History of Website Promotion
In the early years, before 1999, what was on the pages of your website largely determined your ranking on the then-dominant search engines Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, and MSN. By placing your keywords, those words you want to be found for, in certain places within your web page, you could persuade search engines to place you at the top of their listings. As the content of his own website is entirely under his control, this was obviously open to widespread abuse, and was abused. At the same time, just by repeating his keywords multiple times on a single page, he was able to get to the top of the listings by giving the search engines what they were looking for: high keyword density.
Then, in 1998, Google was formed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two doctoral students at Stanford University in California. The nature of the internet is links, and Google’s new idea was to use what other websites were saying about your website in their text links, to decide what your site was about. Also, from Google’s point of view, the more websites that have links pointing to you, the more important you should be, and therefore the more worthy you would be of a high place on their list. It got its first place by the number of “votes” it received from other websites.
So the introduction of Google started a new direction in the way search engines awarded their top rankings and, with some variations, all major search engines now use a similar method to determine their order of merit for listed sites. .
By the way, this is probably a good time to make a statement: there is no “natural” measure of a website’s merit. Each search engine marks a website up or down based on its own set of rules, but those rules are an artificial creation of the search engine’s algorithm. Evidence for the above statement comes from research by Netrazer.com, where we found that 6 out of 10 results produced by each of the major search engines do not overlap with any other search engine. To put it another way, 6 out of 10 answers to any given question are different depending on which search engine you ask. What do the other 4 out of 10 have in common that ranks them so well in more than one engine? More on that later.
The history of ink construction.
So the stage is set for the great link building rush of the spring of 2000. As with the keyword “stuffing” before it, website promoters soon discovered that the more links they had, the better they did in the future. search engine results. More was better and much more was even better. Websites were created with the sole intention of using them as link sources, and until around 2004, this was a strategy that worked well.
However, Google is not replete with PhDs in information theory for nothing, and since the spring of that year several changes have been made to Google’s algorithm to remove the more obvious “link farms”, as they are called. , which they had carried, according to Google. , to a degradation of its search results. Increasingly, the only links that counted were the ones that seemed “natural” and “organic.” That is, a link between websites whose primary purpose is to inform or educate rather than one that has been placed solely for the purpose of increasing the number of links to improve search engine rankings. Life was getting harder for those who wanted to live off the net. One thing is certain though, good quality inbound links to your website will be important for the foreseeable future in getting and maintaining top search engine rankings.
So how do I promote my website now?
From our research, we have found a few things that will promote your website in search engines in the long run. These are not fads, but basic rules that should keep free search engine traffic on your site for years to come.
Create good content. To get started, you’ll need at least five or six good pages of original content. Add pages over time, but always ask yourself “would an ordinary person interested in the subject of my website be genuinely interested in what I have written?” If the answer is no, search engines now or in the future will also be equally disinterested. Other than that, put your keywords in the title and once or twice near the top of the page, but no more!
Create good “organic links” from a large number of external sites by offering link exchanges to other webmasters.
Offer a three or four way exchange between two or three websites instead of just a reciprocal link as search engines discount those now. Use a semi-automated system like Netrazer to eliminate most of the hard work, but avoid “one size fits all” emails.
Vary the landing page of your links. Target some of the links you exchange to pages on your site other than your index page. Sites linking only to their index page look very artificial.
Do not use artificial tricks like “cloaking” or “redirecting”. If you’re wondering whether or not you should use a technique, pretend Google is calling you for an explanation. Could you then give a direct answer? If not don’t do it.
In the next article, we’ll cover link building and how to get the most out of your money and effort.
ben james
Senior Analyst
netrazer.com