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Over the past couple of months
it has been quite noticeable that the amount of time and
effort that is going into website promotion is rapidly
rising and therefore so is the associated cost of keeping
ahead of the competition.
More and more people are
devoting more and more time to website promotion and it is
becoming a feature of nearly all website promotion
campaigns that they are embracing all known search engine
promotion techniques instead of exclusively relying on one
or two methods.
What we are seeing at the
moment is a landshift change in promotion techniques. Only
a year or so ago it was thought enough for a search engine
optimisation company to optimise the pages (on page
optimisation) and submit the website.
However now that the
competition is becoming ever fiercer off page optimisation
is becoming a necessary requirement of any respectable
website promotion campaign.
Let’s examine these two
terms and see what we mean my “on page optimisation”
and “off page optimisation”.
On page optimisation is the
process of tuning the page for a search engine or more
usually trying to make it rank highly on a selection of
search engines. It’s no wonder that many search engine
optimisation engineers focus on google exclusively as it
certainly produces the most traffic of all engines, but
will that always be the case? Things can change quickly in
internet land.
Page optimisation
strategies generally consist of using your keyword or
keyword phrases in all of the pages known “hotspots”.
The page title, meta keyword, meta description, alt tags,
first heading and the body text. Subsequent “tweaks”
can include bolding the keyword phrase, using the keyword
phrase in a hyperlink and more.
To a point there is only so
much that you can do to search engineer a page before it
starts to look spammy, repeating the keyword phrase over
and over. Of course some “optimisers” still do this
but it’s quickly becoming a frowned upon practice as it
detracts sharply from a website wanting to produce a
professional image, not to mention your chances of being
banned from the search engine altogether.
This is where “off page
optimisation” takes over.
Both Google and Yahoo use a
system of “ranking” websites dependent on several
factors - one of which is how relevant the content appears
to be to the keyphrase searched for (on page
optimisation).
The second important
criteria that your pages are judged on is how
“popular” those pages are in comparison with your
competition. Broken down into it’s basest form it means
that the more quality votes (links) that your page has
then the more popular it must be and so is promoted higher
up the search engine results.
In google parlance this
feature is known as “pagerank” and pagerank is a
vitally important part of your website promotion campaign.
If you don’t have any then you are standing naked in
front of everybody and that’s not a nice feeling!
Google pagerank is based on
a scale of 1-10 where 10 has the most influence. The
algorithm is configured on a sliding scale so that you
only ever gain pagerank as a percentage of the full
amount. As those with the highest pagerank are constantly
adding more “votes” for their pages it makes sense
that those at the bottom end of the scale are going to
have to work ever harder to play “catch up” and that
is where the extra cost is being factored in to website
promotion campaigns.
However it becomes more
complicated.
Not all links are equal.
Blindly rushing off and
trying to get as many links as possible is not going to
help you much. In fact it’s one of the reasons why
people are spending so much time and effort in their link
exchange campaigns and finding they are getting nowhere.
Savvy online marketers have
established that links from pages with a low pagerank are
not as valuable as links from those with a higher
pagerank. But also in paradox to this it is possible to
get more value from linking to a page with lower pagerank
than the higher one!
Confused! No wonder “off
page optimisation” is becoming such a sought after area
of expertise.
The paradox occurs because
built into the pagerank algorithm is a method of
transferring the amount of pagerank “boost” a page
gets by dividing up the total pagerank of a page by the
number of links present. So a high pagerank page with 100
links on it is not going to give as much “voting
power” as a low pagerank page with only one or two links
on it.
Trying to make sense of
this is at the heart of any “off page optimisation”
campaign. Sifting through links, setting up reciprocal
link campaigns (the site you link to links back to you)
getting links from directories and so on is a time
consuming task, even when using some of the more advanced
tools that take a lot of the manual drudgery out of the
job.
Link exchanges are
springing up all over the place offering to bring together
people willing to exchange links and the humble text link
is becoming one of the most valuable pieces of internet
property. Costs for placing text links on higher ranked
sites are escalating and it’s becoming ever more
important to network closely with other sites offering
useful services to your visitors.
Throwing up a links page
and asking all and sundry to link to it is not going to
work – all that’s going to do is give you an
administrative headache and make your visitors wonder if
they are making the right choice. Choosing quality link
partners is a time consuming and therefore expensive
business.
What this all means is that
the cost of website promotion is constantly going up. And
those companies with well networked sites and
strategically placed links are in a much better position
to help their customers than those who rely solely on pay
per click campaigns and other expensive forms of
advertising.
A website promotion
campaign is still the best value for money form of
advertising that there is in my opinion, it’s just that
the costs are rising and will continue to rise. But the
rewards for those that get it right are greater in
comparison.
To sum up, search engine
optimisation is becoming a more and more labour intensive
exercise. There are more pages to be made search engine
friendly and to gain top spots each page has to be tuned
for a particular search engine. Gone are the days of
“one size fits all”.
In addition there is a
large amount of work involved in linking strategies and
building the “popularity” of a website so that it has
a chance of making it into the top 10 results.
It’s this combination of
work required that is forcing up the costs of a search
engine optimisation campaign.
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