Advertise Your Real Awards

[Ms. Fausey]

And don't forget about advertising off the web. I do maintain a site for an art museum which advertises on television and radio. They never list their web address. How goofy!

 

Anyway, I love internet marketing. New technique: Enter real contests with real awards. Have your clients enter real contests with real awards. My company just won second place for the website we designed for First Night Great Falls 2003. This was an international contest. Now, First Night International talks about us, and First Night Great Falls. First Night Great Falls will do a press release to the local and state papers. Our partner and public relations firm will do a press release. They will also put it on the Great Falls Chamber of Commerce website, which we have also designed and maintain. It will further be in the Chamber's newsletter. Now, we will put the award and the write up on the First Night Great Falls site as a front page story and make another page for it, also submitting it to all the major search engines. We will do this for our public relations partner, CoMedia Consulting, to go on their site, and for ourselves under our news section and a headline link on our front page, as well as the award going on the portfolio page.

 

Don't forget when making new pages, submit those new pages to Google, yahoo and all the rest. Have other people and companies link to your site, even buy extra space to link to your main site. List your self or your non-profit clients on portals where non-profits can advertise free. Then make sure you link to yourself on your non-profit clients' sites.

 

I have a battle going with Shannon Fausey and John R. Fausey School. We keep doing a rotation in the top 3 or 4 places. Typing Fausey one month may show my site as the top dog, another month you may get the school or Shannon's art. Take a lesson from Shannon Fausey on marketing your site within your site and mention you own name in the site not as a link, but just as text. This is also important and I'm finding that this is even more important than the use of meta tags.

 

I just found this thread and I have much to say about internet marketing, but it will have to wait for another time.

[SEO]

Anyway, I love internet marketing.

I too love Internet marketing.

 

No marketing dollar can be nearly as affective as those placed on search engine optimization. Think about it, we all do searches. What site do you pull up? The first few or the 4,365,432nd one?

 

The number one driver of new visitors to a web site is through a search. Then, consider that the individual being passed to a particular site is one that has actively 'searched' using a phrase appropriate for that site. Meaning that a properly optimized site gains biased traffic, individuals actively searching for the information and/or product that that particular web site promotes. Your customer/client is coming to you.

 

Any study that looks at return of investment will show that a properly optimized web site will out weigh all other forms of marketing. Now I will cover my self slightly here by saying that if a site is very regional in nature, the benefits of optimization will be minimized. However, if your interested in obtaining a broader market, it is incredibly beneficail.

 

What do I mean when I say a properly optimized web site?

 

I will continue with your own example. You state:

 

I have a battle going with Shannon Fausey and John R. Fausey School. We keep doing a rotation in the top 3 or 4 places. Typing Fausey one month may show my site as the top dog, another month you may get the school or Shannon's art.

 

Now if you wanted to optimize your site for 'fausey', it would not be difficult (e.g. you could easily obtain the number one rank for 'fausey' virtually forever). There is minimal competition for that particular keyword (i.e. only 3,650 pages in Google's index) and none of the mentioned sites have been optimized. However, would you really want that phrase?

 

When I say 'properly optimized', it begins with selecting the very best search phrase.

 

What phrase(s) are people actually using when they are looking for me/my product/my information. Marketing a web site is very different then traditional marketing. In the traditional world, we place a billboard (TV, print media, etc.) in front of as many viewers as we can in hope of snaring a few. Now sometimes we can bias that viewer somewhat by the show airing during our commercial time, or the type of print media (e.g. Good Housekeeping, PC Magazine, etc.). In general however, we are hoping the 'right' person sees the advisement.

 

With the Internet, it is the consumer looking for you… very different. Here we have a sea of information and individuals sifting through in an attempt to find a particular subject/product/etc. Now the job of a good web site is to be properly designed so when the individual searches for your information/product/etc. they find you… obtain top rankings among the main search engines using relevant and appropriate keywords.

 

Example: TotalChoice Hosting, what is the very best search phrase? total choice hosting, cheap web hosting, free hosting, hosting, website hosting, web site hosting, domain hosting, web hosting, free website hosting, etc. It turns out that 'web hosting' is not only the best, but is also a very competitive phrase (i.e. 4,020,000 pages in Google's index). Nevertheless, if you were a web site hosting company, you would select 'web hosting' as the primary search phrase for optimizing your site.

 

The next step would be to actually optimize the site for that phrase. This would include the often-mentioned Meta tags (title, keywords, description, etc.), it would include analyzing all header, link and body text (first words, keyword density, etc.). It would involve a site link structure conducive to optimization. It would involve developing and implementing a solid external link campaign. Finally, search engine submission strategy would be developed. All these techniques can be maximized for their utmost benefit, but one must also understand their limits. Each of these techniques can be abused which would be recognized as search engine spamming and result in varying degrees of penalties.

 

And don't forget about advertising off the web. I do maintain a site for an art museum which advertises on television and radio. They never list their web address. How goofy!

 

I agree! Your www should be everywhere and on everything. All marketing is useful but it never ceases to amaze me how little effort is placed by both small and large companies on the most important Internet marketing strategy of all, search engine optimization.

[greatfolios sysop]

It would involve a site link structure conducive to optimization.

dsdemmim,

 

Could you go deeper here for me, and type slow, I'm not a fast reader

 

Your posts are awe-some!

 

Thanks!

 

Mr. Bill

[SEO]

I promise to address your question (slowly; ) in a more formal matter.

 

[more formal matter ???? ]

 

Coming soon!

 

 

(First time I every used three icons in one post! ; I mean four!)

[greatfolios sysop]

 

 

TCH Rocks

[SEO]

I promise to address your question in a more formal matter.

 

Get a cup of coffee (and some time) because here it is.

[TCH-Don]

WOW Scott, awesome!

this will take the weekend and a case of dew to absorb.

Thank you so much for the effort!

This is why TCH Rocks