Many companies all over the world have their websites created for them and then the webmasters that actually create the websites don’t inform them of website SEO and marketing. When a website is created in the eyes of the search engines it is just a small sitting duck in a huge ocean of websites on the internet.
With Google now indexing over 8 billion pages on the internet and many more to be added to that index, should it not be worthwhile to try to understand and attempt to market your website for the niche your company is in. Some niches on the internet will be a lot harder to gain good rankings for than others – for example, the sex industry usually uses a lot of BlackHat methods to help with their marketing, which we will discuss.
Firstly when actually developing the website itself it is a good idea to work on the Seo changes whilst making it, so as to avoid going back on work you have already done. The first step to do in Seo is to add the title and Meta tags to the website.
Many webmasters say that these are of no relevance nowadays in the eyes of the search engines, but through research and practice, I believe they are still of use if just for giving the search engine a helping hand to show what keywords you are aiming for at using.
Note that whilst developing the pages of the website, it is important to change the meta tags and the title tags so that they match the page content – a good idea is to take the page that you have created and upload it to a temporary directory on your server, then to use a keyword analyzer in order to show you which keywords have a higher density and therefore a higher impact on the search engines.
When choosing a title tag you should always write the title like this Keyword: website name more keywords, as the first word in your title should be your main keyword, your company name unless well known should not be your main keyword, then after the company name write a few more keywords that have a relation on the website.
Next look at any of the images on your website, see what if any alt tags they have, alt tags are what text is visible if the user has disabled images on their browser, or if the image has been removed from your server but still posted as part of your site.
There are two types of alt image tags – ones that are linked and ones that are not linked, say for example you link to a page on your site from your main homepage, the keyword on that image alt is freebies – and then the page has a lot of relation to the linking keyword on your website then this will increase the ease of navigation of your website which is another factor looked at by search engines around the world especially Google.
Now the next step is to actually look at what your links are – say for example on the homepage your want to link to your product page, would you have your product link say product.html, what relevance will this have to your page, if at all you will probably only mention the word product once – so target keywords on that page which is relevant for example it could be a product page for bike accessories, then you would make the page bike-accessories.html, and this would have a lot more relevance to that page.
There are many more factors that affect the Seo on a page but we will move on to the marketing of the website using both blackhat and white hat marketing techniques.
Firstly we will look at whitehat methods – here are the most commonly used methods to market your website on the internet – directory submission – article writing and submission – automatic link building – manual link building – Diggs and stumble upon – viral marketing – opt-in email marketing – web rings – blogs – forum marketing – link bait.
Directory submission was once one of the most used ways of marketing on the internet and gaining backlinks to your website, nowadays thou the directories have less impact than they used to as the search engines are looking for related content – so it is worthwhile looking for directories that have content that is related to your website, so say for example if your website is related to search engine optimization – find a directory that is purely related to that subject. Another option is to find a directory that does not just stick your link on a page with a large number of other links but your link points to a unique page on the site where all your company information is, and also the title of the page is related to your site, and most often they add the option to have related keywords placed on the page as well.
This gives a much higher relevance to your website than just a general directory although these should not be ignored, some people do look through directories that they have found on the internet and may find your website on the list and visit it, but for submission, purposes use automatic website directory submitters to save you time and effort.
Article writing and submission is one of the best if not the best ways of marketing on the internet, just ensure that your content is original to the internet, when writing try to include keywords related to the page that you will link to, say for example your linking to an inner page on your website that is about bike accessories you would not want to write an article that is about bike materials, although it would be relevant for some keywords.
When a search engines see the pages with your article on it will look at it and see the content then it will see your link and will follow this, then it will analyze the relationship between the original site where your article is and where the link points to, so a well-written article relevant to your site is gold to you and the search engines.
With automatic link building you will have a website submitter and it will submit to websites all over the net that offers link exchanges or in some cases way links, this method is usually not fully automated as you will have to input captcha codes unless the software you are using is highly advanced but in most cases, it is not, although this can build up your links, it will not build up a good base of relevant links as this is untargeted marketing.
But with manual submission you would target sites on the internet using special search queries in search engines such as Google to find sites that have relevant content that is related to your website, then the next step is to find websites that offer link exchanges to other sites, many sites do offer this and some just have a links page and if you send them an email and tell them that you wish to exchange links and the reasons why most are more than happy to do this and you will gain valuable backlinks to your website that are targeted.
One method for finding related websites on search engines is to do a search query like this “keyword”+”link exchange” this will find websites related to your website content and will also find websites that have link exchanges at the same time, or your could type “keyword”+”links.html” so it will find websites related to your website that have a links page, and because they have a links page you can ask if it is possible to exchange links.
Stumble Upon and Diggs are the new big craze in marketing – users either download a toolbar or see links on websites that you can click when they like the website, then these links will be placed higher for other users to see and gain exposure on the internet, in a way this is a form of viral marketing.
Viral marketing is the simplest form of marketing and requires little effort, and it has three outcomes – no traffic – a little bit of traffic, or a lot of traffic, say for example you say to one person about your website and you tell them to tell two other people, then they both tell two other people, etc, and then a large number of people will know about the website and will visit it to see what it is about. One method some companies use to start the role of viral marketing is offering freebies online and offline.
Say for example a web design company wants to be virally marketing, how would they best show off their work, the answer is to give away a freebie, and a good freebie, in this case, would be some vector graphics, these can be submitted to a large number of sites all over the internet and if people using them like what they see they will visit the website links to get work produced by your company as well as telling other people about your work on offer.
There has been a lot of talk about spamming on the internet recently, people in all countries around the world are using email harvesters to find people’s emails and to send unwanted mail to them, the government is coming down heavy on people that are sending out spam as it counts for a lot of the emails sent daily if not most, now this presents a problem for people who want to market via email, but the solution is simple opt-in email.
How many times have you signed up for something on the internet and not read the small print in the scrolling boxes that appear just above the signup button, well I know I don’t read them often, but you click a little box that says you agree to the terms and conditions in that scrolling area. Now in that area, there is usually the usual information about privacy but with opt-in, there is a section saying that you agree to receive emails from the website and in some cases from a selected partner. Now as this is 100% legal it goes under a white hat, but you may be thinking how do I get these lists to send to, well it is the same with viral marketing, offer a freebie related to your site(s), people enjoy obtaining free items and will easily ignore the terms and conditions section, and there you go another person on your list ready to send product emails to, simple as that.
Webrings, generally are not a good idea, by having these webring codes on your website you may be putting your website up for the chop by the search engines, as the format they have is to view the next site on the webring or the previous, and either of these may be marked by Google as to being a bad site and therefore you linking to these sites may get your site black listed and taken out of the search engine.
But if you actually are in control of the web ring you can choose which sites can go into the web ring and therefore only accept quality site submissions that have relevant related content on their website and in turn boost your website ranking, but one downfall is they usually make the website look untidy as they are usually bulky in design.
Blog marketing is a very good way of creating targeted results and backlinks to your website, if you register at blogger which is now actually owned by Google you will get your own blogger web address, now search engines love content and they especially love new content, and with blogs, the whole purpose of them is to write in them like a diary, so they are constantly getting new content to feed the search engines, and then you add your links on the blog to related sites, and you gain good exposure through your blog.
Forum marketing is mostly used to sell specific products, say for example a web template package, something that someone wants to make some quick cash with, people use signature links in forums to market via this method, it is not very effective for search engine marketing as most forums use something called bb-code which is not proper HTML code and therefore the links are not counted as a backlink. If you wanted to use forum marketing I would suggest finding a good list of forums that offer the use of standard HTML signature links, then start posting on the forum to increase your links, but don’t spam or you may be banned.
Link bate is a simple method of creating something that will make webmasters want to link to it, if you have a new hot product and you have an article, offer the possibility to copy HTML code with your backlink and details directly into their site for convenience on formatting, this is a very good way to create backlinks and traffic to your website, but the link bate has to be of considerable quality in order to gain large exposure on the web.
Now we will discuss the blackhat marketing methods – Automatic Diggs and Stumble upon – HTTP Referrer Submission – Guestbook amp; Forum Spamming – YouTube.
As discussed earlier, you are able to gain ranking and exposure on Digg and Stumble, but with black hat methods, you will not want to wait around for people to say they like the site they have been on. There is software available that will basically automatically Digg and stumble the links that you add, they work by going through a list of proxy ip addresses and creating accounts for these, then the software will log into these accounts using the proxy ip’s to hide your identity and increase your ranking.
HTTP Referrer Spamming – this is both possibly highly untargeted and targeted at the same time. The first thing you would do with this is to obtain tools to harvest the websites, the websites the harvester tool will be looking for is ones that publish referrer links on their website. You will be able to choose which keywords to search for so it is more targeted to the site’s content or you can type in random keywords and save the results in a text file.
Now that you have your list of URLs that your harvested you will then open up an HTTP referrer spamming tool, a basic explanation of what this does is simply when you visit a website from a link, the page you came from is the referrer, say for example on the search engines, your search for a keyword, then you click a link and it opens up a website, the referrer is the search engine because it referred you to the website. Now what this tool does, is firstly it loads up a proxy to hide your real identity, then it loads your list of harvested websites, and it visits them and uses the website address you want marketing as the referrer.
Now your site will be published as a referrer and you will gain a temporary link on the website, if this is done on a regular basis on the same websites you can gain constant backlinks, but if left, all the links will disappear as new websites will become the referrer.
Spamming on the internet is a very regular occurrence, the first topic is forum spamming, there is a tool available that you can buy called Xrumer, this basically posts on a large list of forum websites along with links, this is a quick way to get some people looking at your website, but you will get banned eventually when the administrator of the site notices what you are doing.
Blog spamming tools will look for websites that have a comment feature on them, but they have to have three fields on them or they are not as valuable, the name box, the website box, and the comment box. Now when most people post they actually put their name in the name box, but some people don’t notice that when you do this and you also put your hyperlink URL address in as well it links the name to your website.
So using this method you would change your name to a keyword and then add your link and post a comment on the blog, giving you a keyword-related link back. If the blog doesn’t offer the name and hyperlink boxes, you can simply post a link in the comment area but they will not be keyword related, it will work on the basis of people seeing the link and visiting it.
With billions of views every day YouTube has become one of the most visited websites on the internet and therefore is not to be overlooked by marketers on the internet, many of you may have seen videos on YouTube with advertising in them, but what is the point in them they will never get voted to be viewed on the front page. Now lets where you’re wrong, there are several tools available that fake the views of your video via rotating proxies, each video can receive 200 views per single IP proxy, then the views will not count, so you would first build up a list of good proxy IP addresses, then add these to the software and add your URL, now it will rotate through the proxies until the desired view count has been reached.
Another feature available within the software packages is the ability to make fake YouTube accounts and post fake comments from a list created, as well as giving rotating video quality scores, doing this will very quickly lead you to the front of YouTube and gain your video and website massive exposure.
