Over the past couple of months it has been quite noticeable that
the amount of time and effort that is going into website
promotion is rapidly rising and therefore so is the associated
cost of keeping ahead of the competition.
More and more people are devoting more and more time to website
promotion and it is becoming a feature of nearly all website
promotion campaigns that they are embracing all known search
engine promotion techniques instead of exclusively relying on
one or two methods.
What we are seeing at the moment is a landshift change in
promotion techniques. Only a year or so ago it was thought
enough for a search engine optimisation company to optimise the
pages (on page optimisation) and submit the website.
However now that the competition is becoming ever fiercer off
page optimisation is becoming a necessary requirement of any
respectable website promotion campaign.
Let’s examine these two terms and see what we mean my “on page
optimisation” and “off page optimisation”.
On page optimisation is the process of tuning the page for a
search engine or more usually trying to make it rank highly on a
selection of search engines. It’s no wonder that many search
engine optimisation engineers focus on google exclusively as it
certainly produces the most traffic of all engines, but will
that always be the case? Things can change quickly in internet
land.
Page optimisation strategies generally consist of using your
keyword or keyword phrases in all of the pages known “hotspots”.
The page title, meta keyword, meta description, alt tags, first
heading and the body text. Subsequent “tweaks” can include
bolding the keyword phrase, using the keyword phrase in a
hyperlink and more.
To a point there is only so much that you can do to search
engineer a page before it starts to look spammy, repeating the
keyword phrase over and over. Of course some “optimisers” still
do this but it’s quickly becoming a frowned upon practice as it
detracts sharply from a website wanting to produce a
professional image, not to mention your chances of being banned
from the search engine altogether.
This is where “off page optimisation” takes over.
Both Google and Yahoo use a system of “ranking” websites
dependent on several factors - one of which is how relevant the
content appears to be to the keyphrase searched for (on page
optimisation).
The second important criteria that your pages are judged on is
how “popular” those pages are in comparison with your
competition. Broken down into it’s basest form it means that the
more quality votes (links) that your page has then the more
popular it must be and so is promoted higher up the search
engine results. In google parlance this feature is known as
“pagerank” and pagerank is a vitally important part of your
website promotion campaign. If you don’t have any then you are
standing naked in front of everybody and that’s not a nice
feeling!
Google pagerank is based on a scale of 1-10 where 10 has the
most influence. The algorithm is configured on a sliding scale
so that you only ever gain pagerank as a percentage of the full
amount. As those with the highest pagerank are constantly adding
more “votes” for their pages it makes sense that those at the
bottom end of the scale are going to have to work ever harder to
play “catch up” and that is where the extra cost is being
factored in to website promotion campaigns.
However it becomes more complicated.
Not all links are equal.
Blindly rushing off and trying to get as many links as possible
is not going to help you much. In fact it’s one of the reasons
why people are spending so much time and effort in their link
exchange campaigns and finding they are getting nowhere.
Savvy online marketers have established that links from pages
with a low pagerank are not as valuable as links from those with
a higher pagerank. But also in paradox to this it is possible to
get more value from linking to a page with lower pagerank than
the higher one!
Confused! No wonder “off page optimisation” is becoming such a
sought after area of expertise.
The paradox occurs because built into the pagerank algorithm is
a method of transferring the amount of pagerank “boost” a page
gets by dividing up the total pagerank of a page by the number
of links present. So a high pagerank page with 100 links on it
is not going to give as much “voting power” as a low pagerank
page with only one or two links on it.
Trying to make sense of this is at the heart of any “off page
optimisation” campaign. Sifting through links, setting up
reciprocal link campaigns (the site you link to links back to
you) getting links from directories and so on is a time
consuming task, even when using some of the more advanced tools
that take a lot of the manual drudgery out of the job.
Link exchanges are springing up all over the place offering to
bring together people willing to exchange links and the humble
text link is becoming one of the most valuable pieces of
internet property. Costs for placing text links on higher ranked
sites are escalating and it’s becoming ever more important to
network closely with other sites offering useful services to
your visitors.
Throwing up a links page and asking all and sundry to link to it
is not going to work – all that’s going to do is give you an
administrative headache and make your visitors wonder if they
are making the right choice. Choosing quality link partners is a
time consuming and therefore expensive business.
What this all means is that the cost of website promotion is
constantly going up. And those companies with well networked
sites and strategically placed links are in a much better
position to help their customers than those who rely solely on
pay per click campaigns and other expensive forms of advertising.
A website promotion campaign is still the best value for money
form of advertising that there is in my opinion, it’s just that
the costs are rising and will continue to rise. But the rewards
for those that get it right are greater in comparison.
To sum up, search engine optimisation is becoming a more and
more labour intensive exercise. There are more pages to be made
search engine friendly and to gain top spots each page has to be
tuned for a particular search engine. Gone are the days of “one
size fits all”.
In addition there is a large amount of work involved in linking
strategies and building the “popularity” of a website so that it
has a chance of making it into the top 10 results.
It’s this combination of work required that is forcing up the
costs of a search engine optimisation campaign.
About the author:
Tony Cooper is internet marketing manager for:
http://www.keywordmarketing.com Building results driven
websites.
