Digital Marketing
How important is SEO to my Website? Extremely important! Again, many web designers do not know how to properly optimize a Website for search engines. It is important to have someone who specializes in SEO go over your Website and make sure it is ready to get crawled and indexed by the search engines.
There was a time when SEO was all-inclusive with link building, Website promotion, search engine marketing, etc. Times have changed somewhat and the search engines have become more complicated, so now many people specialize in certain aspects of SEO.
I define SEO as coding the Website properly, writing text that contains the proper amount and correct keywords and phrases, search engine submissions, and some link-building techniques.
Search Engine Marketing: What is SEM and how important is this to my Website? Search Engine Marketing by my own definition is marketing your Website through Google Adwords, MSN AdCenter, and other keyword purchasing programs as well as purchasing links, ads, and sponsored listings.
Again, many people are specializing in an area they have success with these days. I am very good at SEO, but I have limited experience with SEM. Therefore, I can make your Website ready to be crawled, do link building, and write the text that helps you attract good search engine rank and traffic, but I would not be the guy you would hire to manage your Adwords program.
Website Promotion: Yet another category with a relationship to SEO and SEM. How important is this category? In my opinion, it tops the list. What is Website Promotion? This category includes Article Marketing, Press Releases, Link Popularity, Buying Traffic, Blogging, Forum Posting, and more.
Why do I consider it more important? First, none of the things mentioned here can stand alone. You need to consider all of the different aspects as important. However, search engines change constantly. Depending on search engines for all or most of your traffic and sales is putting your life in Google’s hands basically since they account for 60% of all searches now.
If you are comfortable with one company having that much control over how well you do on the web, then ignore Website promotion and just do SEO and SEM. You need traffic from many different sources if you want to be successful. That way if one source dies out, you are not affected nearly as much as someone who only had one or a few sources of traffic would be.
Focus on getting traffic from every source you can. Post comments in Blogs and Forums related to your topic. That means actually join the forums or blogs and actually get involved in the conversations there and post quality comments. Be helpful to people at the forums and blogs. Ask questions. No one will mind that a link in your SIG line goes to your Website is you are a real participant. If they do object at that point, find a new place to join.
Start your own Blog. You can put up two if you really want to benefit from Blogging. A Blog within your domain name or on a subdomain can help you add fresh content to your website more often. That helps with the SEO. You can build a Blog on another domain name and promote links to pages within your Website and benefit from a little link popularity while also giving customers another way to find your Website. Doorway pages used to be the way to go. Blogs on their own domain name have replaced doorway pages as the way to go.
Article Marketing means writing articles and submitting them to article directories, writing quality articles, and offering them to topic-relative high-traffic Websites as exclusive content, and press releases are a great source of traffic that builds link popularity as well. The traffic you get from people who read your article is many more times likely to convert to a sale than the traffic you get from search engines.
I will get new customers and signups due to this article you are reading right now. Article Marketing and Website Promotion work very well.