Web site promotion services to help you promote your site to the top of the search engine listings. Good promotion starts in the concept stage and follows through to completion as a fundamental element of the design! does your designer know how to get it right? Read on..

Web Site Promotion - How the designers promote your site?

Web site promotion can make or break your web site! With the number of sites appearing on the web increasing at an incredible rate, it's becoming extremely important that your design company can build search engine friendly sites, and can promote to these search engines correctly. The major search engines and directories, are where more than 80% of all your sites traffic will arrive from. It's not enough to make nice looking pages, if nobody knows they're there.

Technorealm design the promotional requirements of your site straight in from the start, not tacked on as an afterthought. Getting it right early, saves a lot of effort later on.

So, when discussing promotion of your web site with a design company, ask them:

• What promotional package is included in their price?
• How many search engines/directories & listings will the site be promoted to within the cost?
• How frequently will submissions be repeated?
• How are the submissions done?
• How will I know that submissions have been done and accepted?

Is simple placement enough?

No. Your position in any listing will drop right down over time. Search engines are dynamic databases (typically), that can be manipulated into moving your sites position up the list. This is usually done via monthly repeat submissions.

That's not enough though. Re-submitting the same information has only a small effect. To maximise the effectiveness of re-submission, you can do a number of things:-

• Tune the site to make it search engine friendly
• Monitor your sites web logs, and adjust content to suit
• Tweak the sites meta-tags
• Re-write the content texts
• Re-invent your headings
• Re-title your pages
• Change page 'file' names
• Submit multiple pages so the site is indexed from different 'doorways'..

..and a host of other 'tricks' to make the site appears 'different'.

There a 2 main reasons for making changes to a site

1. It can help with search engine positioning, and more importantly..
2. It helps to bring people back, giving fresh site content makes the site more interesting, thereby offering more opportunity to make that sale/collect those e-mail addresses etc.

Even if you change the above every month, you still won't be able to guarantee a position, and your site will still yo-yo around a lot, but it will be placed higher, and is likely to receive many more hits.

Design companies typically offer the above works under the heading of 'Site Maintenance', and will charge you a fee for this work. This work can be time consuming if done properly (search engine submission is an artform in it's own right) so expect to pay a reasonable amount.

Make sure you get your monies worth though, check the site regularly and look for changes. Check and log the sites position in a couple of search engines over a period of at least 5-6 months, and look for positional changes.

If the site sits at or near the top of a search result table -fantastic, if lower down and its position rises - great, if it stays the same - fine, if it drops once in a while -that's still ok, because there is an element of hit and miss involved with some of the tweaks that can be made.

However if the sites positional drops are large and regular, start asking questions. If you feel that you're not getting your monies worth, then make it known and ask for proof of exactly what site 'maintenance' has been carried out.

Useful tips

• Some listings and indexes will not except software submissions, so these need to be submitted by hand.
• Many of the smaller search engines, and nearly all of the FFa's send out e-mail confirmation of submissions. This usually happens when the site is submitted for the first time. Don't consider these e-mails as junk-mail because they are good indicators that the work has been carried out. You may get hundreds over a few days! Just delete them. (Tip: We would normally set up a dummy e-mail account to dump these into, as one of our clients had over 1000 emails in one week!).
• The time it takes for a submission to be listed can be a much as 6 MONTHS! Though most are within a week, and many in 24 hours. You can buy faster submissions from most of the major engines and Yahoo! You just need to decide if it's worth it. And remember, if the site doesn't comply with their submission rules, it may still be rejected!
• Yahoo! has a team of staff who look at all sites submitted. Because of this, you may not appear for a while. If your site does not do what the submission says it does, you will not be listed at all.

If you find this subject interesting, visit the excellent www.searchenginewatch.com for more details.

Now you know a little more about site promotion, we hope you can appreciate it's importance, and can budget to suit.