Digital Marketing

If you build it, they will come… Well, more or less; What I learned as a novice webmaster

When I started my work at home business, I had no experience building websites or advertising. I decided to use Microsoft Front Page to create my site because I had used other Microsoft Office software products and thought it would be the easiest for me to learn. My first site looked great. I was meticulous to make sure all my links worked and everything was aligned. I uploaded it to my host server and asked someone else to look at it for me. Someone looked at it and said, “Are you kidding me? Your site is a mess!” Hey? I do not get it!

Well, it turns out that my site looked great in Internet Explorer, but it was a mess in Netscape! After I fixed the problem and asked some of my friends to search again, they said, “So if I google your website, will I find it?” Well, I knew I wasn’t at the top of the Google search engine, but I had no idea how to get there! Sure, I had submitted my website to Google, so I knew it was there. In fact, if I entered my URL in quotes into the Google search bar, it would show up right away, but otherwise I couldn’t search or find it. Unfortunately, I learned that the only way to quickly get a new website to the top of the Google search engine was to pay for it. You’ve probably noticed when doing a search that there are listings that appear to the side and at the top of the search results, with the words “sponsored listing” next to them. It turns out that these are ads that people pay for. In reality, they offer a certain amount for each “click” they receive. As long as they keep their price per click low enough, they can make a profit. So I guess the notion “if you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply when it comes to websites.

It turns out that with all the hundreds or even thousands of search engines out there, most searches are done with Google, Yahoo and MSN. According to Nielson/Net Ratings as of November 2005, Google has the most US-based searches at 46%, Yahoo is second at 23%, and MSN is third at 11%. I also learned about something called “SEO” which stands for search engine optimization. I think it should really be called “WSO” for website optimization. Because in the news all we can do is optimize websites for higher search engine rankings, not the other way around. Google uses a rating system known as “PageRank,” which assigns a rank to each site between 1 and 9. If you’re wondering why it only goes up to 9 and not 10, it’s because Google is the only site that rates a 10. Even Yahoo and MSN only have a PageRank of 9. The algorithms for determining PageRank are not easily understood, or even communicated in such a way that the average person can understand them and I can only describe them as “double secret”. If you download the Google Toolbar, you can customize it to show the PageRank of the sites you’re viewing. It’s basically a little green bar that will show the PageRank if you hover over it. In general, it seems that the way to increase your PageRank is through backlinks. These are links from other websites that link to your URL. And not just any links, they have to be relevant to your type of site and the higher the PageRank of the sites linking to you, the better.

After some research on the net, I discovered a website (www.linkpopularity.com), where you can enter a URL and it will tell you how many sites are linking to that URL. By using some of your competitors’ URLs (the sites that appear at the top of a non-Google-sponsored search), you can get an idea of ​​how many links it takes to get to the top, and what types of sites you can link to. to. In many cases, you can link to these same sites. After doing this, I discovered that there are many different types of sites that can link to you that are different from the norm, such as classifieds sites, guestbooks, forums…and directories! I think directories were my biggest find. There are a large number of directories, many of which are free. Many times when you request a link, whether by email to a site or through a site with automated online forms, you are asked for a “reciprocal link.” Basically, this means that they would like you to put their link on your site, so that they can try to increase their own PageRank.

The most surprising thing I learned while reviewing my competitors’ sites is how many backlinks they had. He had about 3,000 to 4,000 links. Considering the amount of time it takes to request a link, post a reciprocal link, and load my page on my host server, it would take me a long, long time to get the same number of links. Basically, I’ve dealt with this situation by committing to requesting 10 links per day. So hopefully I will have significantly increased my PageRank over the next year and will be able to increase my traffic without spending as much money on pay per click advertising.

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