Slow Food Blog

I have been a web marketer for the last ten years; there have been many changes to the way people should go about promoting their websites in this time and it can prove to be a bit of nightmare trying to keep in touch with the latest web promotion changes. What worked only three years ago could now result in your site receiving a ban or penalty on the major search engines. Paid links and over-excessive reciprocal linking are seemingly a thing of the past. So as we move through 2011 what forms of website promotion strategy should a webmaster be following?

It is not that long ago when a person, well at least a person that had enough money, could purchase a highly ranked backward link which would then result in their website gaining a high SERPS. It did not even seem to matter if the site that was providing the link had anything to do with the site purchasing the link. We therefore saw online poker websites purchasing text link adverts on media and publishing websites which had a high page rank. Businesses grew out of this new niche market of selling backward links; it seeemed that this was a very easy way to make a lot of money.

But then the major power in the world of the search engines, Google, decided to move the goal posts by declaring war on this paid links market, stating that it was seriously distorting their search results. This upset a lot of people; this tends to happen when money is involved, with many accusing Google of acting as God. The reply from Google was short and to the point and went along the lines of; it is our search engine and we therefore decide our own guidelines; if you want to sell one way links that is fine but it may result in some form of penalty as this goes against our current guidelines. They were basically saying you can do whatever you want to with your website and at the same time we can do whatever we want with our search engine. Fair play, I say. I am actually very happy with the new guidelines; it was very hard to compete with webmasters who had deep pockets etc. Now the one-man band can compete with the big corporation; hard work, keeping up to date with the latest guidelines as well as learning from the SEO experts will once again prove to be very beneficial.

2011 brings about a new watch word in the world of web marketing services; relevancy. What does this mean? Well quite simply the backward links that you attempt to obtain now need to be relevant to the site that you run for them to have a real benefit. Again this surely is common sense in my book. If a website about gardening has a link pointing to a website about camping, is this offering any value to its site visitors? Not really.

2011 is also the year when those who are willing to work hard will finally get their rewards. Some of the old favourites such as article marketing are becoming more popular than ever but quality is now far more important than quantity. Only the best articles will be chosen to be published on other people’s websites and let’s face it they have enough articles to choose from. This is something any decent web promotion company or link building service is also likely to advise.

Ensuring that your website is optimised correctly with the main keywords placed naturally within the text of the homepage will also be essential, be careful not to “keyword stuff” your homepage though.

When choosing which company you would like to build your website, there are many factors which you need to take into consideration.

Firstly how much is the website going to cost to build and host. We all have different budgets, however there are some very good deals to get, if you are willing to search around.

I am not a web designer myself; I provide people with a one way link building service and a web marketing service. I do however have a large amount of sites on the net.

When choosing a company it is important to look at their portfolio, this will give you a good insight into the type of work they do.

Most web desgn firms will offer additional services such as optimisation, a link building service and may also submit your website to the search engines – it is a matter of asking.

I would expect any site that a company produces for me to be optimized for my chosen key phrases and that it has been submiited to the major search engines. It is always worth asking to make sure.

I always ask for the person or company to add a link from their site to mine as this is likely to increase my overall search engine position as well as the websites page rank. The higher the page rank, the more visitors you are likely to obtain.

If you want to promote the website even further, google adwords is a favourite of mine. This in a way ensures that people get to here about your services as it enables you to create an advert that will appear on the right hand side of the results when people type in the particular key phrase into the search box.

You can also write articles, like the one I am here or you could pay for a manual article submission service to do it for you. This will potentially obtain you even more additional links and visitors. I wish you every success.