Promote it and they will come!
Ascend Web Promotion enables website owners to promote their businesses on the internet by utilizing professional search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing strategies for the purpose of increasing website traffic coming from their target audience.
Are your customers finding your web site?
A website is a visual form of a marketing plan that represents your business. A website without a marketing plan may as well be invisible with no return on investment, and investing in a website that has not been properly promoted and set up for search engine optimization is like paying to have business cards printed up that stay hidden in your desk drawer.
- Do you currently have a web site that is receiving few visitors?
- Have you attempted unsuccessfully to promote your own website?
- Have you subscribed to one of those mass Free-For-All site submission services with poor results?
- Are you looking to create a web site that adheres to search engine optimization as part of the web design?
The effort that goes into creating a successful website that receives targeted traffic is 1/2 design and development and 1/2 promotion. Having a sound promotion and search engine optimization strategy interwoven into a well designed website is critical to its success, something that many site owners are not aware of.
Developing a website that has rich content that reaches out to your target audience takes time and planning. The plan begins with market research around your target audience. Who are they? Where are they located? What are they looking for? How do they look for it? What will bring them to your web site? The gathering of this marketing information is also known as keyword research.
Once that information is ascertained, you can begin to plan the content of the copy and tag optimization of your web site; How will the pages be structured for easy navigation? What sort of content will go on each page? Content that reaches out to your target audience is essential.
How will the website be programmed? It should be done in a way that is able to obtain a good ranking by the search engines If you are going to use programming elements such as java, flash, graphic intensive websites, or frames, make sure that provisions are made so that the content and navigation links can be read by the search engine crawlers.
Once the web site has been launched, there is the process of search engine submitting and listing with the various spiders and directories for positioning your site within the search engines. Where else where your site be listed in addition to the search engines? Link building is also a crucial factor in search engine ranking.
Ascend Web Promotion is a website promotion service with over 10 years of web site design and promotion experience and education. We are here to provide you with professional web promotion and search engine optimization services.
Additionally, we feel that you should have the opportunity to learn how to promote your own web site, and we provide tips on search engine optimization, promotion friendly web site text, website navigation and website design, submission of web sites, link building, professional seo promotion practices, and anything else you might need in order to succeed in having a successful web site.
Contact us for a web site promotion consultation.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization is a set of strategies targeted toward improving a website's ranking and visibility in the listings of the various search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, and directories on the web.
People use search engines to locate web sites when they type in keywords. For example, a potential customer is looking to visit San Francisco and wants to find a place to stay. She visits a search engine and types in the search phrase, using the keywords San Francisco lodging. When the Search button is clicked, a list of websites targeted by the keyword phrase San Francisco lodging appear. The order in which they appear is based on their ranking by the search engine.
The higher the ranking of a web site, the closer it is to the top of the page, increasing visibility. The more visible it is, the more targeted traffic it receives.
SEO strategies improve a website's visibility using organic listings, meaning the utilization of unpaid listings, rather than incurring the additional cost of paying for advertised listings. The most successful websites accentuate promotion through search engine optimization methods such as keyword savvy content, strategic tags, search engine placement and link relevance.
How does Search Engine Optimization work?
As the Internet began to expand in the mid 90's, the first search engines were created for the purpose of indexing the growing number of web sites. At this point in time, search engine optimization was not a factor in website promotion because the search engines employed the use of spiders to "crawl" throughout each website gathering data which was then automatically categorized by topic, without creating a specific strategy.
As the number of web sites continued to grow, the search engines became more sophisticated and began using algorithms, which are like recipes, to categorize and rank websites. Each search engine has its own algorithm, and its workings are a trade secret.
Figuring out how a search engine's algorithm secrets is like tasting a dish and trying to figure out which ingredients were used, in what amount, and for how long does it cook?
In the early day of search engine optimization, meta tags were the primary "ingredients" used in the algorithms. Meta tags are hidden elements within a web page that provide information about the content of that page. And figuring out the algorithms, or recipes, was akin to trying to figure out the recipe for a simple dish, such as macaroni and cheese.
However, as human nature dictates, many took advantage of the use of meta tags by skewing the information in inappropriate ways in order to increase the rankings for their web sites.
As a response, the algorithms became more complex over time, and continue to do so. Consequently, with increasing sophistication, the number of ingredients in the algorithms has grown, and continues to do so. These days, deciphering an algorithm is like guessing the recipe of a gourmet dish like Ragout d'Escargots Forestiere.
Fortunately, there are some seo web site promotion guidelines that will send you in the right direction.
- Your target audience comes first. These are the people who will be looking you up in the search engines.
- Research the keywords that will be used in search queries when a potential customer is looking for your business.
- Write your copy and design your website navigation with these keywords in mind, but remember that you are writing primarily to connect with your target audience, not to appease the search engines.
- Program your website so that the content can be read by the search engines.
- Pay attention to link building. The more websites linking to yours the better chance you have at a higher ranking. The best way to get links is to have a quality site worthy of being linked to.
- It is important to employ professional search engine optimization strategies, and to avoid using "black hat" tricks that can get you thrown out of a search engine, like Gateway pages and hidden keywords.
And, most importantly, - Have Patience! In the days before there was the Internet, a business had to have large budgets for marketing and lead generation. Today, with search engine optimization and marketing strategies, the same results can be achieved for far less money. And while search engine marketing is more affordable, and much more accessible, it is not much faster. As always, real success is made one link, one contact, one connection at a time.
