What if you created a Web site and nobody came? You don’t want your sites to end up obscure and unused. No doubt you’veread about meta tags and how they can help your sites get ranked better; and just about everyone using the Web is aware of the annoyances related to Web advertising. But these issues are just the tip of the iceberg. Read any Web site dedicated to Web promotions and you’ll see all kinds of topics, often controversial ones.

This article lets you in on the insider’s view of why so many Web marketing methods are problematic, and shows you the right way to use common techniques such as keyword and description tagging, how to expand and extend keywords within your content, how to get submitted to search engines in a timely fashion, how to get the word out to interested parties, and how to increase interest via sponsored links and offline promotional opportunities.

I will not teach you how to spam, use annoying ads, or compromise the integrity of the products and services you represent. Just apply a balance between great Web site design and customer service and you will never have to rely on gimmicks.

About Web Site Marketing

A couple of marketers decided to take their “guerrilla marketing” tactics to the Internet, persuading a lot of newcomers that aggressive marketing would make them profitable. In 1995 the Web itself was very young, and we were all trying to sort out the best way to do things. Some of these guerrilla ideas caught on in a big way, but almost always in detriment to the comfort and prosperity of all.

Guerrilla marketing tactics encouraged (and still encourage) e-mail spam, browser hijacking, overuse of ads (especially popups), and a range of adware that’s become a scourge to the good users of the Web. From a management and team perspective, marketing is often considered the most difficult aspect of a successfulWeb site team, as they tend to have conflicting goals. Marketing goals often conflict with technology goals, and there also tends to be a different focus in marketing. Their job is the sale, and while designers and developers seek to support that, sometimes the two conflict in their goals.

On the Web, no practice can work without the technology necessary to make it work. Technology and how well we use it makes up a significant portion of a site’s success. Of course, marketing and promotional methods are not all bad, and certainly many methods, such as regular specials or Web-specific coupons, can end up being extremely useful in successfully promoting your site. The best of marketing and promotion savvy, in my opinion, are those that relate to successful business strategy, great management, and workflow—all topics found elsewhere in this series article. Now Focus Is on Structure and Content While you will see how to use long-existing techniques such as meta keyword and description in this post, the real focus for today’sWeb sites is to ensure that they are structured and written so that search engine computers can successfully rank them.

By getting rid of deeply nested tables for layout, ensuring that style is handled with CSS, and making your sites accessible for the disabled, you open up your site to be quickly and easily catalogued by a search engine. Add to that effective titling of your documents, clear language use, and many other cues related to readability and usability, and the rest of the job is pretty straightforward.

A lot of information will try to steer you otherwise—toward paying money for additional software or services to help you get ranked. This is only one of the many myths that exist regarding most search engines and how they rank you.
Other myths include the following:

• A competitor can ruin your ranking. A competitor cannot purposely sabotage your ranking or remove you from a search engine under normal circumstances. However, if they have done a better job than you with the design of their site, or they have a very large amount of relevant links to their site, or they have a domain name that is very close to the main concept of the site, they might get a higher ranking (molly.com, for example, will rank higher on most search engines when people search for “molly”).
• You can pay your way to the top of Google. No, you can’t. You can buy sponsored links and advertising that will appear alongside or above searches of relevance to your site, but there are numerous factors that get sites “to the top.”
• Paid inclusion services are the way to go. No, they’re not. With very few exceptions, inclusion services are scams, and finding those exceptions is very difficult (see the next section).
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No matter what your site’spromotion goals, in the immortal words of rapper Chuck D, “Don’t believe the hype.”

Avoid Unscrupulous Marketing Techniques

Here’s a fact: No one can promise you top rankings on all major engines by doing anything to your site. I take that back! They can promise, and they do promise, but they don’t deliver. In the past few years, a rash of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies has emerged to “help” us optimize the code on our site and fix problems related to search engine rankings. Many SEOs are straight-out frauds, doing nothing for their clients or doing very little and calling it a day.

Of course, some of these companies aren’t fraudulent, but the proliferation of the bad guys is such that you as a consumer must be hyper-vigilant if you decide to use any of their services.

Google has an excellent overview of SEOs that provides guidance in how to choose one, and how to report complaints about any SEO in the United States or abroad. See www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html.

Thankfully, the techniques in this article, along with your well-designed and structured Web site will alleviate all of those woes. In fact, in just a few short pages, you’ll learn enough to open your own SEO should you desire a little time on the guerrilla-marketing front.