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Build a Successful Online
Business Without Google
Browse through any search
engine forum, or simple do a search on Google to look up search
optimization for Google, and you will find incredible amounts of
information on the latest trends in the way they rank websites,
webmaster tricks, and theories as to what the future holds for Google.
Website owners are simply obsessed with Google, and many are spending
too much time trying to appease Google when they could be building a
wildly successful website.
Successful Websites Do
Not Have To Rank Well
Investors constantly preach of the benefit of diversifying a portfolio
to reduce the risk of fluctuations investments tend to carry. The same
strategy needs to be taken with developing your website’s marketing
strategy. Diversify the sources of your traffic. Growing over-reliant on
any single type of traffic sets your website up for failure if that type
of traffic happens to fail for some reason. Unfortunately many website
owners simply do not know how to generate traffic to their websites.
These website owners would do well to think about their website in more
traditional business terms. Traditional businesses do not have search
engines to bring people to their doorstep. Rather, the brick and mortar
businesses rely on word of mouth, good solid promotion, good customer
service, a good location, and quality products. Websites can incorporate
these same techniques in developing traffic. Article writing, press
releases, participation in forums, development of a mailing list, and
developing a strong public relations campaign are all solid promotion
techniques. Entering into partnerships with industry websites, doing
joint promotions such as co-registrations can help position in you in a
location where your visitors can find you. Offering your visitors the
ability to recommend your site to a friend, adding community
interactivity to your website are all ways to help promote your site
effectively.
Stop Optimizing Your
Website (That Means No Trading Links)
One of the worst things to happen to websites is the development of
search engine optimization. Although it is perfectly acceptable (and
expected) to do a cursory amount of SEO, many website owners do too much
to the detriment of their sites. The purpose of your website is to offer
information and possibly a service to clients and visitors. Your SEO
activities should never define how you develop, structure, and word your
website. The most popular technique in search engine optimization
currently is link trading. Knowing that Google judges a page’s value
by the number of inbound links, website owners learned that they could
set up entire links pages and exchange links with hundreds of other
website owners. You will know the websites that do this. They will have
a page named “links” or “resources” that contains a myriad of
links to other websites. If you visit those other websites, they
typically will have a similar page. The problem with exchanging links is
two-fold. The first, and more important part, is the fact that link
exchanging does not have as strong as an effect as it once had. Google
knows that webmasters exchange links, and many webmasters are concerned
primarily about the quantity of links they have. Google also knows that
these links are primarily exchanged in an attempt to increase their page
rank, something Google probably will try to not recognize. Page rank was
initially developed to incorporate the number of natural inbound links a
website had. So, to prevent website owners from falsely increasing their
page rank, Google actively works on developing systems that determine
links that are a part of a link exchange and links that occur naturally.
The problem with link exchanges is this: website owners are spending way
too much time on an activity that has relatively little impact when they
could be spending their time writing articles or other more reliable
traffic generation techniques. The second problem with exchanging links
is the cosmetic effect it has on your website. Visitors that come to
your website do not want to see a loosely collected arrangement of links
to sites that may or may not be similar to your topic. They came to your
website to see what you have to offer. If you want to recommend a
resource to your visitors, you can do so, but you certainly would not do
so in the form of a links page. The cosmetic effect that links pages
have on a website is to make it look less professional. SEO should never
dictate how your site is arranged, worded, or how you spend the majority
of your time.
When You Get That
Visitor Promoting
your website is only half of the effort in developing a wildly
successful website. The other half of having a wildly successful website
is to have a website that will bring visitors back time and time again.
Not only do you want a website that visitors find worthy of revisiting,
you want a website that people talk about and refer to others. There is
a popular saying among internet marketers: “Content is King”. Well,
this is sort-of true. It takes more than simply having content on your
site to bring visitors back to your site time after time. It takes
quality content. People visit websites on a repeat basis for a few
reasons. First, they may believe that a particular website is the only
place they can get the content they are looking for. Secondly, they may
recognize that more than one website offers the same content or
information, but they prefer the format, look, and design of one website
over another. When developing your website, make it your goal to not
just match the quality of your competition, but rather to far exceed the
quality of your competition. Be confident that your layout and design is
of a higher caliber than any competing websites. And, most importantly,
offer more unique, valuable, and helpful information than any other
website that could compete with you.
That’s the Rub? Yep,
that’s the Rub.
Here is the amazing part…when you stop focusing on developing your
website for the search engines and start focusing on a website that is
the best of its kind, the search engines will find you. By focusing all
of your attention on developing a high quality website that leaves an
impression on visitors, and by focusing on developing alternative
sources of traffic, search engines will take notice and give you the
ranking you deserve. Google and the other search engines have a very
simple goal with their search results: to provide the most relevant
results to those who perform a search. Some of the brightest minds are
working on developing formulas and algorithms that do just this. Your
job as a website owner is not to focus on trying to demystify the
secrets of members of Mensa-level search engine developers. No, your job
is to develop your website, to promote it through the many channels
available, and to maintain the high levels of quality content your site
offers. If you successfully build your website on a diversified set of
traffic sources, your website will be protected from the loss of any
single traffic source. Furthermore, if you build your online business to
capitalize on every visitor that you receive, the traffic will always be
present. If you happen to be picked up by Google, or Yahoo!, or MSN
Search, the results will simply be a pleasant addition to your already
abundant sources of traffic.
Mark Daoust
This article was found at Site
Reference.
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