Website promotion

Website promotion is the continuing process used by webmasters to promote and bring more visitors to a website. Many techniques such as web content development, search engine optimization, and search engine submission, are used to increase a site's traffic.（From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia）

Search Engine Marketing just got a whole lot easier.

In the very early days of SEO it was good enough to write a keyword laden page title, stuff the meta tags full of keywords we wanted to rank for and wait for weeks if not months for the work to seep into a search engine's consciousness.

What about the content?

As long as there was some writing on the page and it sort of made sense then it didn't really matter what the content was.

In a young and evolving industry it was possible to rank highly for keywords just by doing ABC SEO.

A bit like filling in the blanks using a template model.

Page titles, alt tags and headings done correctly would yield better results than the competition that ignored them and paid no attention to ranking factors.

Then along came the back link anchor text and very quickly it was discovered that you could outrank just by gaining a few links with your keyword anchor text.

Life was good.

When Google introduced AdSense all of a sudden people saw an easy way to make cash and started putting up all sorts of garbage websites with prominent AdSense advertising.

We even had ways of subconsciously inciting people to click on the ads by placing images directly beneath the advertising.

That stuff worked for a while until AdSense accounts started being cancelled and Google put a leash on the marketing monster it had created.

Content writers in far flung corners of the world who could put together semi coherent sentences were in big demand.

Freelancer sites buckled under the weight of adverts.

50 articles for $10? Who can write me 50 articles on finance related subjects?

Now the content farms are gone with a wave of the hand. The back link blog networks are being de indexed at a furious pace.

As the industry matures and the algorithms develop it is no longer feasible to keep trying to game the search engine. The loopholes are being closed. The dark entrances are being sealed off and backdoors are barred shut

There is no place to hide anymore for the black hat operator.

Now you have to put some real effort into a new site. You can't just piggyback on your existing site network and expect the links to catapult you up the rankings.

Google has turned down the knob on the value that links provide to a page ranking and turned up the knob marked "content value" so that quality content – the cream of the crop - should rise to the top.

What does this mean for site owners?

First of all I think it's a good thing. Hundreds and thousands of hours are wasted on link building exercises and whilst you will still need links to rank, the emphasis is more on the quality of the content and less on the volume of links.

This means that instead of apportioning a large part of your SEO budget into meaningless link building you can now start to put that money into building quality content for that is where the gold at the end of the rainbow is.

You need content that Google values. You need quality content to make it happen.

Quality content is the foundation upon which you should build your business. If you haven't already, stop paying for low quality links and start writing or paying for high quality content which will stand the test of time.

Of course it has always been this way.

Build websites for users and not for search engines has always been an SEO mantra but it's very difficult to stick to your principles when you see black hat operators with their shitty sites coining it in with very thin content offerings.

Stop building "me too" sites and look for new markets and trends where you can make a difference with some excellent content.

It's easily possible to outrank long established sites in competitive markets with superb content that they don't have.

Start implementing quality control on your articles; take care with what gets published and you will see amazing results in a very short time.