The How to Market Your Website by Creating a Web Presence - Part 3

By David Notestine, Creator of the Zeus Internet Marketing Robot.

Creating a link page or link directory is a great way of providing new visitors, opportunities, content for your return visitors and search engine traffic. Properly organized, tightly themed link directory pages can send your website thousands of visitors on a daily or weekly basis. These mini-search engines become immensely popular and it’s location is saved in thousands of browser favorites, especially if you have a way for your visitor to conveniently search for information with a search script. Once a visitor finds a link directory pertaining to a subject they are interested in, they return again and again.

You should require a reciprocal link to your site to be included, when webmasters request to be included in your website’s link page or directory. Websites want to be included and oftentimes you will get so busy adding websites that you don’t have to market anymore in other ways.

Traffic THREE ways! Your Link Directory is providing traffic from your reciprocal links, return traffic from it’s content and traffic from the search engines because of the individually keyword-tuned directory pages.

Reciprocal links do help your placement in search engine listings but the important thing is the link pointing to your website, not what it does for your website in search engine marketing. Too much emphasis is placed on search engine marketing and until webmasters understand this, they will never be truly successful.

I always hear marketing experts talk about how link popularity improves your listing in the search engines. That’s a simple side effect but the important result is the qualified traffic you get from the link itself. Search engines are just one of a thousand different ways to get traffic.

If you rely solely on them then you might as well be just relying on a listing in the WHITE PAGES Telephone Book in your real-world business. I’m not cutting the search engine form of marketing, I just think it narrows a webmasters thinking to just that. I have three very successful and profitable websites and if I just relied on the search engines, I would be making 4 cents for every dollar I currently make. Remember that a listing on a search engine is a link to your site that you cannot control.

I call it passive marketing, waiting for visitors to come and leaving that decision in someone else’s hands, hoping for them to send you a trickle of traffic.

I do not spend much time optimizing my pages or on search engine marketing, especially with what I know now, since using the pay per click-through services, and owning so many keyword phrases, with all of those appearing in the number one spot.

If I would have wasted time trying to influence them with page optimization etc, I wouldn’t have gotten any traffic anyway as I’m not getting the numbers I need now to survive by buying them. Search engines are only a piece of the whole in creating a web presence. It all adds up. If you rely on search engines for your visitors, you are depriving yourself of the opportunities you must have to be successful. Quit wondering how links will affect your listings with the search engines.

It’s not how links affect the search engines; it’s the links themselves. One good link will send you a many visitors as the largest search engine. The search engines will wonder why so many links point to your website, then they will start sending you traffic. By that time, who cares? It’s nice but will only be a small part of your traffic.

Go out and put links to your site throughout the Internet. Don’t think too small by just considering normal hyper-links. Links can be anything as long as a user can reach your site through it. Reciprocal links, advertising, the printed page, search engines, word of mouth, people talking about you on the forums and message boards, banners, affiliate programs, writing articles giving yourself credit, referral scripts etc.

All of these add up and are roads back to your website. No one of these will make you successful. If you rely on just one, you won’t have much traffic. Each one will bring you a little traffic and closer to your goals.
 

Content has been reprinted with permission of the author.

First appeared in http://www.cyber-robotics.com

© 1999-2000 David Notestine, all rights remain with author.

The How to Market Your Website by Creating a Web Presence - Part 3

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